by Haruo » Mon Jan 14, 2019 10:56 pm
What Timothy said kind of reminds me of a study of Jesus Christ in Japanese culture that a visiting preacher mentioned in a sermon at Fremont some years back. It's a well known fact that the Japanese are not prone to churchgoing Christianity, by and large. Christianity has had a presence (mostly hidden) in the archipelago at least since the Jesuit mission to southern Kyushu in the 1600s, and perhaps even back to the origins of the tea ceremony, and there has been open, sustained mission work there since the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s, but most surveys indicate that fewer than 1% of the Japanese population is affiliated with any church. Most Japanese are nominally both Shinto and Buddhist, or were when I was a kid anyway, and the number whose Buddhism or Shintoism goes beyond the nominal is certainly more than 1%. So Japan is generally regarded as a rather unchristianized nation, ripe for or immune to evangelism, depending on how you look at it.
But this study the preacher cited, from Pew or some place of that sort, indicated that while fewer than 1% of the respondents had any affiliation with a church, fully 10% of them self-identified as followers of Jesus.
Haruo = Leland Bryant Ross
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