Several month ago a very bright 11 year-old wrote us some interesting questions about missionaries. Here are our answers.
1. Overall- What do you do? What is your typical day to day routine or schedule? Does it vary or are you doing one or many specific tasks right now?
Our overall thrust and vision is: Advancing church planting and gospel renewal movements. We are working to help Japanese start, develop, and multiply churches which are gospel-centered and gospel empowered. This leads to live change, community change and national change. That is the big picture and gets me up every day.
Now specifically what I do is:
1. Head leadership for the Japan Church Planting Institute (CPI) which is a leadership development organization to foster vision and equipping for multiplying churches in Japan (and around the world)
2. Field missionary for the Converge Worldwide (used to be Baptist General Conference) Japan Team. This means working with our field staff and our national Japanese partner denomination and leaders.
3. Train, coach and serve various Church planting and pastor leaders inside and outside my denomination (the Rengo). I also preach, teach, train, and coordinate ministry in local churches and regions.
4. Just finished my doctoral research project on Characteristics of Leaders Reproducing Churches in Japan. This was a national research project helping the above three. (You can now call me Dr. John.)
I would wish I had a routine day, week, or month but each day is full of a variety of ministries, administration, planning, researching, coaching, training, preparation and the like. Lately I have been working and completing #4. Now I move on to help plan and prepare to train at a Church Planter’s Bootcamp next month. I try to keep my work week limited to 50-60 hours but often it exceeds that and sometimes 80-100 hours per week.
2. What is the biggest challange you face being a missionary?
There are many challenges. I guess the biggest challenge is only being one person. I could do so much more with more time. The point is not just to keep busy but to do something that invests in people and in the future. We need more people but the “workers are few” and many of us have several jobs. I struggle everyday with priorities. I have so much time and so many ways to invest it in seeing the church in Japan furthered along in their ministries.