Roger W. Lowther's Blog, page 9

キノコ式開拓伝道

「わたしはぶどうの木、あなたがたは枝です。人がわたしにとどまり、わたしもその人にとどまっているなら、その人は多くの実を結びます。わたしを離れては、あなたがたは何もすることができないのです。…あなたがたが多くの実を結び、わたしの弟子となることによって、わたしの父は栄光をお受けになります。」（ヨハネ15:5, 8）

　2020年5月31日のペンテコステの日曜日にグレースシティチャーチ東京は10年記念日を迎えた。世界でも特にクリスチャンが少ない日本で教会開拓ムーブメントを起こすのは不可能なことだと言われていたが、この10年で開拓伝道により新たに10の教会もできた。

　教会開拓の模範はりんごの木を植えることに似ていると言われる。

　りんごの木が元気良く大きく成長して実をつける。そのりんごの種を他の場所に蒔いて、栄養を与えると木が育つ。やがて、その木が成長し実をつける。ここまでには10年かかると言われている。教会もまた、一つの教会ができるまでには日本では10年、20年の年月がかかる。

　もっと早いやり方は枝を接木することだ。成長したりんごの木の一つの枝を切り取って、他のところに移植する。新しい実を結ぶまでの期間は、おそらく3年間とはるかに短くなる。このようにしてできた2つの教会の関係は親子のようなものである。

　神は牧師となる人を次々と私たちグレースシティチャーチ東京のもとに送って、育ててくださった。準備ができた時、教会のリーダーや熱心な数人のメンバーとともにこの牧師を新しい教会ミニストリーへと送り出した。このように枝を分けることで新しい教会を生もうとした。しかしその弱点は、親の木である教会は実を結ぶ枝を失い、再び新しい枝を成長させるのが難しいことだ。

　いくつかの教会が始まったことを喜びながらも、枝分かれするたびにグレースシティの人数は減って、弱っていった。ある年には2つの教会が生まれたが、そのために人数が減ったので2つの礼拝が残念ながら一つになってしまった。

　グレースシティのメンバーは心配して呟き始めた。りんご式の開拓伝道に限界を感じていた。本当にこのように何回も枝を切るやり方がいいのか？とりあえず枝を切り取るのをやめて木を守った方がいいのではないか？

　しかし、一方で、私たちのネットワークは広がっていった。教会のリーダーやメンバーや牧師を新しい教会ミニストリーへと送り出すことは、新しい木を育てるというより、コミュニティの範囲を広げることになった。一つの教会ではできない活動が活発になり、協力のコミュニティが広がった。ある教会のメンバーが他の教会のグループのリーダーになる、オンラインでの礼拝のやり方について複数の教会で話し合う、ある教会の建物で別の教会がイベントを行う、など。一つ一つの教会は大きくならなかったが、ネットワークの広がりはできた。そして、その中から新しい教会も生まれてきた。振り返ってみると、我々のこの10年の活動はりんごの木を植えようとしながら、知らずに別のものを育てていたのではないか。

キノコを育てる

　近所の小さなスーパーにたくさんの種類のキノコがある。しいたけ、えのき、まいたけ、なめこ、エリンギ、マッシュルーム、たもぎ、しめじ、ピオッピーノ、まつたけ、くろあわびたけ、きくらげなど。それぞれのキノコには独特の味、食感、形がある。非常に多くの異なる種類があるが英語ではたいてい「マッシュルーム」としか呼ばれていない。日本の暗く、涼しく、湿度の高い環境ではキノコが豊富に生えるので、日本語ではそれぞれのキノコに名前がある。

　キノコは種を作って繁殖するものではない。また、他のキノコから生まれるわけでもない。キノコは、目に見えない菌糸体（英：mycelium）からできる。その繊維は高速道路のように必要な水分と栄養を運ぶ。キノコはこのネットワークから「子実体」として生まれる。

　キノコは種を蒔いたり接木したりしてできる物ではなく、親子関係にはない。互いに依存しているのではなく、むしろこの菌糸体というネットワークに等しく頼っている兄弟のような関係だ。ネットワークがなければ必要な栄養を得られず、たった一つで生き延びることはできない。

　グレースシティチャーチ東京のこの10年の活動はりんごではなくキノコの栽培のようだ。命に必要な栄養と水を与えてくれる菌糸体ネットワークから新しい教会が芽生える。

ネットワークの力

　都市に新しい教会を生むために必要なのは、神が都市全体で何をなさっているかという幅広い見方ではないだろうか。賛美の参加者数、洗礼者数、献金の額などで一つの教会を測るのではなく、全体のネットワークを見ることが重要だ。

　東京にはこのような菌糸体が育っている。10年前私たちの活動は数人の牧師だけで始まったが、今では50人くらいの牧師やリーダーが協力している。コロナウイルスの感染拡大の中でも、オンラインで毎月集まったり、分かち合ったり、訓練を受けたり、互いに祈り合ったりして、ネットワークは強くなっている。

　このネットワークは教派を超えて東京の幾つかの教会に広がっており、そこからビジネスや芸術の分野の活動も生まれている。SALTプロジェクトは教会でのサーバント・リーダー・トレーニングを行う。LIGHTプロジェクトは職場におけるクリスチャンの役割についてビジネスパーソンに教える。コミュニティーアーツ東京は芸術家のリーダーを育てる。このようなネットワークは、礼拝を行うだけの伝統的な開拓伝道では作れない新しい場所やコミュニティーを作っている。

　世界の都市にはこのような有機的なネットワーク、すなわちキノコ式の開拓伝道が益々必要なのではないか。

　キノコ式の開拓伝道は、りんご式とは異なり、計画を立てたり成長を予測したりする物ではない。ある時はそのネットワークから思わぬ形で素晴らしいものが生まれてくるが、その効果が目に見えないこともある。しかし、神の力で高いビルの暗い森の中にあたらしいキノコが生まれる。神は教会が成長し繁栄するために必要な水やすべての栄養素を下さる。神が祝福しているコミュニティからはたくさんのキノコが生まれるはずだ。

　りんごの種まきや接ぎ木だけでなく、都市にキノコのための菌糸体を育てることが今必要なのではないだろうか。

Comparing Apples & Mushrooms

“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. . . . This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.” (John 15:5, 8)

An Alternate Paradigm for Healthy Church Growth

On Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2020, Grace City Church Tokyo celebrates its tenth anniversary. From the beginning, the church planting team attempted the impossible, to encourage a church-planting movement in the most expensive place, in the second largest unreached people group in the world. We did not want to plant just one church. We wanted to encourage the growth of many churches.

The team started thinking that church-planting perhaps best resembles the life cycle of an apple tree. As an apple tree grows big and healthy, it produces apples. When those apples are planted and nourished elsewhere, they grow into saplings. One day, those saplings too grow big enough to bear their own fruit and the life cycle continues. One cycle may take ten years. For churches in Japan, it has often taken more than twenty years for a church to reach a self-sufficient stage of reproduction.

There is a faster way to plant apple trees, through tree grafting. An entire branch of an apple tree bearing good fruit can be cut off and grafted somewhere else. Then there is a much shorter window of time between when the tree is grafted and bears new fruit, perhaps three years. In both cases, there is a mother-daughter relationship between the first apple tree and the new trees producing fruit.

But year after year, God sent pastors to our church or raised them up in our midst. We welcomed them as part of our community, offered what training we could, and helped them grow in leadership. Then when the time had come, we encouraged our best leaders and top givers to join them in starting a church somewhere else in the city. When thinking according to the church-planting model above, an obvious downside is that the “mother” tree loses a whole fruit-producing branch, and it is not easy to grow new branches.

While we rejoiced every time this happened, Grace City Church noticeably diminished in size and became weaker. One year, two churches started within months of each other, and we lost so many people that we had to cut back to just one worship service. We rejoice that we have seen ten churches start in these first ten years, and yet sometimes we feel more like Charlie Brown’s Christmas Tree than a big healthy apple tree.

Grace City members sometimes complained. We felt the limitations of apple tree church planting. Was it really wise to keep cutting off branches every year? Maybe it was better to stop cutting off branches for a while and protect the tree?

I wonder. So many good things have happened. I see how the network has expanded. I see how new church leadership and new church ministries have begun. I see how various ministries not possible by any one church are happening. I see how leaders support one another, discuss together how best to do online worship during COVID-19, share events and facilities, and so much more. Even when individual churches do not show growth in numbers, the network grows steadily, and from that network, new churches are being born. As I look back over the past ten years, I believe we have been unknowingly working under a different paradigm than apple tree church planting. I think we have been growing mushrooms.

Growth of Mushrooms

There is a little supermarket next to my apartment in Tokyo full of more kinds of mushrooms than I can possibly remember—shiitake, enoki, maitake, nameko, eringi, tamogi, shimeji (including hon, buna, bunapi, and hatake shimeji), pioppino, matsutake, kuro awabitake, and kikurage. There is even one Western kind called “mushrooms,” which makes me laugh because in English we call all of them mushrooms! The Japanese language is so much more sensitive to the differences in flavor, texture, and shape because the dark, cool, humid environment of Japan is naturally suited to the growth of mushrooms.

Mushrooms are not planted in the traditional sense and do not come from other mushrooms. They pop up unpredictably as the “fruit” of a mass of long, microscopic fibers, usually invisible to the naked eye known as the mycelium network. These fibers act like superhighways carrying necessary moisture and nutrients.

Mushrooms do not come from seeds and cannot be grafted from one place to another. There is no mother-daughter relationship between mushrooms. Rather, they relate to each other like older and younger brothers and sisters, equally dependent on a common network. Without this network, no mushroom can survive on its own because it cannot receive the necessary nutrients to live and grow.

Grace City Church Tokyo’s 10 years of ministry seems to be more like mushroom cultivation than apple tree planting. Rather than being planted from one church, new churches seem to sprout up from this common mycelial network providing the nutrients and water needed for life.

Strength of a Network

There is something attractive about this mushroom model of church growth. Rather than measuring health in terms of numbers in worship or baptisms or giving in any one church, there is a broader view of what God is doing throughout the city.

We have seen such a mycelium network grow in Tokyo. What started as a handful of pastors has now grown to over 50 pastors and leaders from all over the city. Even during COVID-19, this group met online once a month to share news, receive training, discuss topics, and pray for one another.

The network spreads across the urban jungle to produce fruit not only as different churches but within different denominations as well. We have seen leaders not only grow and develop in the church but in the workplace and the arts as well. We have seen Servant and Leader Training (SALT) grow and develop leaders in church ministries. We have seen the LIGHT project grow and develop leaders in the workplace. We have seen Community Arts Tokyo grow and develop leaders in the arts. And this network continues to spread into locations and communities impossible to reach via traditional church planting methods.

Mushroom church planting is different than apple tree church planting. It requires more emphasis on networking, fertilizing, and sustaining the whole movement, and perhaps less emphasis on individual success. Its results are not quite as predictable. The network produces wonderful things in unexpected, and sometimes invisible, ways. However, through the power of God, new mushrooms are born in the darkness of the urban jungle. God gives all the water and the nutrients needed for our churches to grow and prosper, and many more mushrooms are born from the grace of God in building and sustaining our communities.

Do we not need more mushroom church growth in our cities?

05. The Golden Cracks

One of the joys of living overseas is being able to see the world differently, sometimes in ways I would never expect.

One day when I was in Kyoto, in the Kyoto National Museum, I stumbled upon some clay bowls. Everything about the exhibit screamed, “These things are important!” They were individually encased behind panes of glass. They sat beautifully displayed on felt-covered small boxes. They each had their own special lighting, but the odd thing to me was that they were broken.

I mean, usually when something breaks, we throw it out, right? These were just bowls after all. You don’t have to dig too long or too deep almost anywhere in the world to find fragments of broken pottery. Behind the house where I grew up, next to the old stone fence, lots of broken pottery in the dirt. It’s so common, so easily broken, and so easy to replace. So tell me, why did some Japanese artist take all that time and money to fix these broken bowls, and with gold no less! Who does that? The gold was probably worth more than the bowls themselves, and it certainly did nothing to hide the cracks. If anything, it accentuated them. It was actually highlighting those broken places. The glory of these bowls was found in their cracks! Somehow, those vessels were more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken. One bowl in particular stood out to me for a whole piece was completely missing, filled in and sealed with gold.

This was my introduction to the Japanese art of kintsugi, and as I gazed at it, I thought, this . . . THIS is the gospel!

We are broken in sin. Our world is broken by sin. Yet God does not just throw us out, but rather renews, repairs, restores, redeems, and reforms. God reforms us with the gold of heaven, which never tarnishes or rusts. He is our healer, and he displays the life and death of Jesus in our fragile bodies to reveal his glory. God takes our wound and brokenness to restore us to complete and perfect health.

Kintsugi displays the gospel, where the glory of God can be revealed in fragile and broken vessels. The glory of our lives and bodies, our value and our beauty, comes from Christ displayed in our weakness—in our cracks. Paul wrote,

“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (2 Corinthians 4:7–10)

Ultimately, kintsugi is not about us but about Christ. We carry around in our body both the death of Jesus, through the cracks, and the life of Jesus, through the gold. Our gaps are gold; our cracks are glory. What a completely redemptive view of suffering!

“In [Christ] all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), so we do not need to, nor can we, ‘pull ourselves together.’ And that’s okay, because Christ pulls us together. Christ holds us together with the glorious riches of the golden cracks of heaven.

One book on kintsugi lists eleven types of brokenness that can be found in a bowl. The kintsugi artist not only can distinguish between various kinds of brokenness but can also see how to bring beauty out of them. There are many kinds of brokenness in our lives, but there are so many more ways God can bring beauty out of them. In the garden, the Lord God called to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). There were two people trying to hide their brokenness and shame, but God went directly to their brokenness to begin working there. God crafts our stories in such a way that we will be more beautiful because of our broken pieces.

Once after sharing this illustration with a group of people, a woman came up to me. She had tears in her eyes as she told me, “I’m like that bowl . . . I’m broken. I’m a mess, and there’s a huge chunk of my life missing.” She went on to share how her husband had passed away the previous year, and a piece of her was missing that could never be replaced. And yet, in that moment, she saw how Christ filled her holes and gaps. Christ turned her eyes away from her suffering and toward his own suffering for her.

One day, to learn more about kintsugi, my wife Abi and I went to a kintsugi workshop with a couple we were doing premarital counseling for. I figured, what better way to prepare two people for marriage than to take them to a kintsugi workshop, right? Isn’t that what you would do? Anyway, we went and I brought along a plate that had broken in three pieces when it fell from our dish rack.

You know, after that plate was mended, it became my favorite. During COVID-19 when worship was live-streamed from our living room, we always used that plate for the communion in front of the whole church. Somehow nothing seemed more appropriate to celebrate the broken body of Christ in communion.

Well, the other day, can you guess what happened? A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday evening after communion, that same plate fell again! From that same dish rack! I think it’s time to get a new dish rack. But what surprised me is that the plate didn’t break into the same three pieces as before. It actually broke in three different places. So not only was this plate more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken, but now, clearly, it was stronger as well. It was one of my sons who broke it, you know he wasn’t being careful, but I wasn’t mad. I was thankful for what he taught me. The meaning of kintsugi was even deeper than I thought. Though I guess I now have to schedule another visit to a kintsugi workshop…

Every time I see this broken dish, I think of the slain Lamb of God, in the very center of heaven itself, infinitely valuable and infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong and powerful, for all of creation to gaze upon. In fact, I’m convinced that in the pottery of heaven we will find kintsugi, forever reminding us and leading us in the eternal praise of God.

05 – The Golden Cracks

One of the joys of living overseas is being able to see the world differently, sometimes in ways I would never expect.

One day when I was in Kyoto, in the Kyoto National Museum, I stumbled upon some clay bowls. Everything about the exhibit screamed, “These things are important!” They were individually encased behind panes of glass. They sat beautifully displayed on felt-covered small boxes. They each had their own special lighting, but the odd thing to me was that they were broken.

I mean, usually when something breaks, we throw it out, right? These were just bowls after all. You don’t have to dig too long or too deep almost anywhere in the world to find fragments of broken pottery. Behind the house where I grew up, next to the old stone fence, lots of broken pottery in the dirt. It’s so common, so easily broken, and so easy to replace. So tell me, why did some Japanese artist take all that time and money to fix these broken bowls, and with gold no less! Who does that? The gold was probably worth more than the bowls themselves, and it certainly did nothing to hide the cracks. If anything, it accentuated them. It was actually highlighting those broken places. The glory of these bowls was found in their cracks! Somehow, those vessels were more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken. One bowl in particular stood out to me for a whole piece was completely missing, filled in and sealed with gold.

This was my introduction to the Japanese art of kintsugi, and as I gazed at it, I thought, this . . . THIS is the gospel!

We are broken in sin. Our world is broken by sin. Yet God does not just throw us out, but rather renews, repairs, restores, redeems, and reforms. God reforms us with the gold of heaven, which never tarnishes or rusts. He is our healer, and he displays the life and death of Jesus in our fragile bodies to reveal his glory. God takes our wound and brokenness to restore us to complete and perfect health.

Kintsugi displays the gospel, where the glory of God can be revealed in fragile and broken vessels. The glory of our lives and bodies, our value and our beauty, comes from Christ displayed in our weakness—in our cracks. Paul wrote,

“We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (2 Corinthians 4:7–10)

Ultimately, kintsugi is not about us but about Christ. We carry around in our body both the death of Jesus, through the cracks, and the life of Jesus, through the gold. Our gaps are gold; our cracks are glory. What a completely redemptive view of suffering!

“In [Christ] all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), so we do not need to, nor can we, ‘pull ourselves together.’ And that’s okay, because Christ pulls us together. Christ holds us together with the glorious riches of the golden cracks of heaven.

One book on kintsugi lists eleven types of brokenness that can be found in a bowl. The kintsugi artist not only can distinguish between various kinds of brokenness but can also see how to bring beauty out of them. There are many kinds of brokenness in our lives, but there are so many more ways God can bring beauty out of them. In the garden, the Lord God called to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). There were two people trying to hide their brokenness and shame, but God went directly to their brokenness to begin working there. God crafts our stories in such a way that we will be more beautiful because of our broken pieces.

Once after sharing this illustration with a group of people, a woman came up to me. She had tears in her eyes as she told me, “I’m like that bowl . . . I’m broken. I’m a mess, and there’s a huge chunk of my life missing.” She went on to share how her husband had passed away the previous year, and a piece of her was missing that could never be replaced. And yet, in that moment, she saw how Christ filled her holes and gaps. Christ turned her eyes away from her suffering and toward his own suffering for her.

One day, to learn more about kintsugi, my wife Abi and I went to a kintsugi workshop with a couple we were doing premarital counseling for. I figured, what better way to prepare two people for marriage than to take them to a kintsugi workshop, right? Isn’t that what you would do? Anyway, we went and I brought along a plate that had broken in three pieces when it fell from our dish rack.

You know, after that plate was mended, it became my favorite. During COVID-19 when worship was live-streamed from our living room, we always used that plate for the communion in front of the whole church. Somehow nothing seemed more appropriate to celebrate the broken body of Christ in communion.

Well, the other day, can you guess what happened? A couple of weeks ago, on a Sunday evening after communion, that same plate fell again! From that same dish rack! I think it’s time to get a new dish rack. But what surprised me is that the plate didn’t break into the same three pieces as before. It actually broke in three different places. So not only was this plate more beautiful and more valuable for having been broken, but now, clearly, it was stronger as well. It was one of my sons who broke it, you know he wasn’t being careful, but I wasn’t mad. I was thankful for what he taught me. The meaning of kintsugi was even deeper than I thought. Though I guess I now have to schedule another visit to a kintsugi workshop…

Every time I see this broken dish, I think of the slain Lamb of God, in the very center of heaven itself, infinitely valuable and infinitely beautiful and infinitely strong and powerful, for all of creation to gaze upon. In fact, I’m convinced that in the pottery of heaven we will find kintsugi, forever reminding us and leading us in the eternal praise of God.

04. Simmering in the Gospel

One of the joys of living overseas is being able to experience different parts of the world. There are times when I think, “Wow, that’s exotic.” Sometimes it’s a smell in the air. Sometimes it’s a sound that I hear. Sometimes it’s the feel of the atmosphere.

When we first moved to Tokyo, I had such an experience every single morning as I took my kids to school. We had to pass by some traditional wooden houses that always had an interesting smell coming out of them. My kids asked me, “Daddy, what is that smell?” but I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know.

So one day, I decided to find out. The door was open as passed by, and I popped my head in. An older woman behind the counter beckoned me to step inside.

“What does this store sell?” I asked, feeling pretty dumb because I could see the objects right there in front of me. Various small brown things were lined up in neat rows behind the glass counter.

“Let me show you,” she said and gave me one of the little brown things to try. I popped what looked like a small fish in my mouth, and was surprised by its strong but pleasant taste. It was a little bit salty and a little bit sweet. I still had no idea what this food was even called, so I asked. And she told me that it was called tsukudani and that it had a very long history in the neighborhood.

Clearly, I needed to learn more about this food, if for no other reason than the fact that I live in Tsukuda, the area after which the food is named. It is a very small part of Tokyo at the mouth of the Sumida River, where it pours into Tokyo Bay. It only takes 5 minutes or so to walk across Tsukuda.

Apparently in the 17th century, there were some fishermen in a small part of Osaka called Tsukuda. When Ieyasu Tokugawa, the famous general who gathered all the areas of Japan into one country, was escaping another army, these fishermen gave him and his men some boats and preserved fish. As a reward, Tokugawa invited these men and their families to move to Tokyo to provide food and fish for his castle. The island in Tokyo was renamed Tsukuda after Tsukuda, Osaka, and the connection between these two cities continues today. My children at Tsukuda Elementary had already met students from Tsukuda Elementary in Osaka from field trips and other fun activities.

These fisherman invented a food called tsukudani (literally “simmering Tsukuda”). In order to preserve fish and other seafood from going bad, they simmered it in salt, sugar, and soy sauce. Food in Japan quickly rots because of the high heat and humidity, but tsukudani can preserve this food without refrigeration for over a month. It was a creative act deliberately designed to bring beauty to a world where everything is falling apart. As I thought about it, I began to think about the wider implications of this. Our bodies are always falling apart. Our relationships are always falling apart. We’re always so tired and so stressed. Is there a process that can preserve us from the rot and stench of death?

“We will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:53)

I continue to pass by this shop every morning. Looking up at the storefront, I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani written right there. The Japanese character Tsukuda (佃) is made up of a person standing next to a rice field. But the way the rice field is portrayed, I can easily imagine the shape of a cross in a box. When I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani, I think of the cross. Amidst all the threats, accusations, curses, and brokenness of this world, we can stand next to the cross. Just as the process of tsukudani preserves the fish, we can be preserved and changed from the inside out. This is the gospel.

To be preserved in this world, to be “clothed with the imperishable,” we need to be simmered. We need to be simmered in the gospel. We need to be simmered by the cross. And by the grace of God, it protects us from the rot and stench of death.

God is our nourishment. God is our sustenance. I believe we can know something about God through the food we eat, that it shows us in deeper ways what his sustenance is really like. And in heaven, we will enjoy God forever. On earth we cannot possibly know all the different smells and tastes of this world, and in heaven we cannot possibly know the depths of God’s goodness to us.

04 – Simmering in the Gospel

One of the joys of living overseas is being able to experience different parts of the world. There are times when I think, “Wow, that’s exotic.” Sometimes it’s a smell in the air. Sometimes it’s a sound that I hear. Sometimes it’s the feel of the atmosphere.

When we first moved to Tokyo, I had such an experience every single morning as I took my kids to school. We had to pass by some traditional wooden houses that always had an interesting smell coming out of them. My kids asked me, “Daddy, what is that smell?” but I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know.

So one day, I decided to find out. The door was open as passed by, and I popped my head in. An older woman behind the counter beckoned me to step inside.

“What does this store sell?” I asked, feeling pretty dumb because I could see the objects right there in front of me. Various small brown things were lined up in neat rows behind the glass counter.

“Let me show you,” she said and gave me one of the little brown things to try. I popped what looked like a small fish in my mouth, and was surprised by its strong but pleasant taste. It was a little bit salty and a little bit sweet. I still had no idea what this food was even called, so I asked. And she told me that it was called tsukudani and that it had a very long history in the neighborhood.

Clearly, I needed to learn more about this food, if for no other reason than the fact that I live in Tsukuda, the area after which the food is named. It is a very small part of Tokyo at the mouth of the Sumida River, where it pours into Tokyo Bay. It only takes 5 minutes or so to walk across Tsukuda.

Apparently in the 17th century, there were some fishermen in a small part of Osaka called Tsukuda. When Ieyasu Tokugawa, the famous general who gathered all the areas of Japan into one country, was escaping another army, these fishermen gave him and his men some boats and preserved fish. As a reward, Tokugawa invited these men and their families to move to Tokyo to provide food and fish for his castle. The island in Tokyo was renamed Tsukuda after Tsukuda, Osaka, and the connection between these two cities continues today. My children at Tsukuda Elementary had already met students from Tsukuda Elementary in Osaka from field trips and other fun activities.

These fisherman invented a food called tsukudani (literally “simmering Tsukuda”). In order to preserve fish and other seafood from going bad, they simmered it in salt, sugar, and soy sauce. Food in Japan quickly rots because of the high heat and humidity, but tsukudani can preserve this food without refrigeration for over a month. It was a creative act deliberately designed to bring beauty to a world where everything is falling apart. As I thought about it, I began to think about the wider implications of this. Our bodies are always falling apart. Our relationships are always falling apart. We’re always so tired and so stressed. Is there a process that can preserve us from the rot and stench of death?

“We will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:53)

I continue to pass by this shop every morning. Looking up at the storefront, I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani written right there. The Japanese character Tsukuda (佃) is made up of a person standing next to a rice field. But the way the rice field is portrayed, I can easily imagine the shape of a cross in a box. When I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani, I think of the cross. Amidst all the threats, accusations, curses, and brokenness of this world, we can stand next to the cross. Just as the process of tsukudani preserves the fish, we can be preserved and changed from the inside out. This is the gospel.

To be preserved in this world, to be “clothed with the imperishable,” we need to be simmered. We need to be simmered in the gospel. We need to be simmered by the cross. And by the grace of God, it protects us from the rot and stench of death.

God is our nourishment. God is our sustenance. I believe we can know something about God through the food we eat, that it shows us in deeper ways what his sustenance is really like. And in heaven, we will enjoy God forever. On earth we cannot possibly know all the different smells and tastes of this world, and in heaven we cannot possibly know the depths of God’s goodness to us.

04-Simmering in the Gospel

One of the joys of living overseas is being able to experience different parts of the world. There are times when I think, “Wow, that’s exotic.” Sometimes it’s a smell in the air. Sometimes it’s a sound that I hear. Sometimes it’s the feel of the atmosphere.

When we first moved to Tokyo, I had such an experience every single morning as I took my kids to school. We had to pass by some traditional wooden houses that always had an interesting smell coming out of them. My kids asked me, “Daddy, what is that smell?” but I couldn’t tell them. I didn’t know.

So one day, I decided to find out. The door was open as passed by, and I popped my head in. An older woman behind the counter beckoned me to step inside.

“What does this store sell?” I asked, feeling pretty dumb because I could see the objects right there in front of me. Various small brown things were lined up in neat rows behind the glass counter.

“Let me show you,” she said and gave me one of the little brown things to try. I popped what looked like a small fish in my mouth, and was surprised by its strong but pleasant taste. It was a little bit salty and a little bit sweet. I still had no idea what this food was even called, so I asked. And she told me that it was called tsukudani and that it had a very long history in the neighborhood.

Clearly, I needed to learn more about this food, if for no other reason than the fact that I live in Tsukuda, the area after which the food is named. It is a very small part of Tokyo at the mouth of the Sumida River, where it pours into Tokyo Bay. It only takes 5 minutes or so to walk across Tsukuda.

Apparently in the 17th century, there were some fishermen in a small part of Osaka called Tsukuda. When Ieyasu Tokugawa, the famous general who gathered all the areas of Japan into one country, was escaping another army, these fishermen gave him and his men some boats and preserved fish. As a reward, Tokugawa invited these men and their families to move to Tokyo to provide food and fish for his castle. The island in Tokyo was renamed Tsukuda after Tsukuda, Osaka, and the connection between these two cities continues today. My children at Tsukuda Elementary had already met students from Tsukuda Elementary in Osaka from field trips and other fun activities.

These fisherman invented a food called tsukudani (literally “simmering Tsukuda”). In order to preserve fish and other seafood from going bad, they simmered it in salt, sugar, and soy sauce. Food in Japan quickly rots because of the high heat and humidity, but tsukudani can preserve this food without refrigeration for over a month. It was a creative act deliberately designed to bring beauty to a world where everything is falling apart. As I thought about it, I began to think about the wider implications of this. Our bodies are always falling apart. Our relationships are always falling apart. We’re always so tired and so stressed. Is there a process that can preserve us from the rot and stench of death?

“We will be changed. For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:53)

I continue to pass by this shop every morning. Looking up at the storefront, I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani written right there. The Japanese character Tsukuda (佃) is made up of a person standing next to a rice field. But the way the rice field is portrayed, I can easily imagine the shape of a cross in a box. When I see the Japanese characters for tsukudani, I think of the cross. Amidst all the threats, accusations, curses, and brokenness of this world, we can stand next to the cross. Just as the process of tsukudani preserves the fish, we can be preserved and changed from the inside out. This is the gospel.

To be preserved in this world, to be “clothed with the imperishable,” we need to be simmered. We need to be simmered in the gospel. We need to be simmered by the cross. And by the grace of God, it protects us from the rot and stench of death.

God is our nourishment. God is our sustenance. I believe we can know something about God through the food we eat, that it shows us in deeper ways what his sustenance is really like. And in heaven, we will enjoy God forever. On earth we cannot possibly know all the different smells and tastes of this world, and in heaven we cannot possibly know the depths of God’s goodness to us.

03. The Hospital

Summary: A concert in a hospital near the broken nuclear power plants of Fukushima shortly after the 2011 earthquake in Japan brought us together. In that terrible time, music brought healing and helped us mourn and cry for what was lost. Excerpts from my forthcoming book Aroma of Beauty .

We had a pretty big earthquake the other day. The alarm on my phone went off as part of the early warning system for coming earthquakes. I heard the sirens out on the street, and all through the neighborhood. It was actually pretty scary. It sounded like the end of the world!

My mind immediately went back to 2011 and that 9.0 earthquake. Here in Japan we’ve been talking about that again, and how terrible it would be for an earthquake to happen now, during the spread of COVID-19, for everyone to be forced into the small confines of gymnasiums and other shelters. You can’t social distance when you’re sheltering from an earthquake.

When I watch the news about the spread of the corona virus around the globe, they always have a story about the people fighting on the front lines in hospitals. The people on the front lines, facing the worst of this disaster, at incredible risk to their own lives, helping as many people as possible.

It makes me think about a hospital in Minami Soma, just after the earthquake. Not far away, seawater spilled over the concrete walls and took out the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. The tsunami knocked out the power all up and down the coast. It went over their backup generators, flooding them, making them useless. The radioactive cores no longer had water running through them to keep them cool, and they began to overheat and melt through layer after layer of protection, becoming ticking time bombs.

One reactor blew, and then another, and then another!

Radioactivity shot into the air and flooded into the sea. It was a disaster of global proportions, comparable only to Chernobyl.

Words cannot describe the fear we felt during that time. In Tokyo, we were told not to drink the tap water, but there was no bottled water anywhere. And we had small children. And blackouts rolled through the city. And rain supposedly showered us with radioactivity from the sky. And rumors spread that all 38 million residents would have to be evacuated, basically the whole middle third of Japan, the most populous part. We would all have to move down as far as Osaka or even further south.

Looking back, of course none of that happened, but at the time we didn’t know that. We didn’t know what the future held. People were actually whispering, “Is Japan finished? Is this the end?”

It was during that time that we heard about an urgent need at a hospital through a doctor in our neighborhood. In Minami Soma, a city just 15 miles north of the broken power plants, there was a hospital full of patients and refugees that needed food and supplies. They were just outside the evacuation zone, and so they couldn’t get the help they needed to move somewhere safe. Trains and buses weren’t moving. Most of the people left behind were older, and so they didn’t have the money to move anywhere else, and they really had anywhere to go. Professional truck drivers refused to go with supplies because of fears of radiation, and it was the only shelter for miles around. Because of all this, our group of volunteers made many trips to this hospital in those early days after the earthquake.

About two months after the earthquake, I personally made my first trip to the hospital. They no longer needed supplies, but now they needed encouragement. And so, I was sent to give an organ concert.

I experienced firsthand the isolation and hopelessness of that situation. But man, was that hospital hard to get to! The tsunami had destroyed most of the bridges and roads along the coast, and there were these huge lakes of water because the land had sunk a little and the drainage system no longer worked. So the Japanese Self-Defense Force constructed temporary floating bridges and roads to make travel possible, but it was frustratingly slow for travel. And these bridges were open only for certain hours of the day.

We finally arrived at the hospital and unloaded my digital pipe organ. As I entered the lobby, I saw pictures by children in our community. It was like a little art gallery. Every time we sent boxes of supplies up north, children in Tokyo drew pictures to tape to those boxes. The hospital staff had apparently carefully taken off those pictures and saved them, and hung them in the lobby of the hospital and in the hallways. I even saw a few by my own children. It was actually kind of moving to see them there, to see this visual connection between our two communities.

During the concert people were pretty quiet. The audience was almost completely devoid of emotion or any kind of response. I played my usual repertoire: Bach, French Romantic music, and some pieces that I wrote. Then I played a pretty long improvisation on Moon Over the Ruined Castle, and the atmosphere of the room completely changed.People engaged with the music. They began to hum along. Some even began to sing softly.

This song, Moon Over the Ruined Castle, is very famous here in Japan. It’s about an old but deserted castle in Fukushima. The lyrics describe a beautiful moon rising over the castle but the area is completely deserted. No one is around to see it. “Where has everyone gone?” the song asks. “Only vines remain on the walls. Only storms still sing in the forests.” The scene was eerily similar to the situation we found ourselves in so close to those broken power plants.

As soon as I finished the piece, the hospital director stood up and spoke.

“We’re ruined by earthquake and tsunami. We’re reduced to nothing, a mere ghost town by radiation. We’re cut off from the world by ocean to the east, mountains to the west, broken power plants to the south, and impassable roads to the north. All the while, we’re bombarded with invisible radiation, but what can we do? What choice do we have?”

As you can imagine, the room was full of tears. I saw so many wiping their faces and their eyes. And then, people came up and spoke with me. A young nurse, probably in her early 20s, confessed that she wanted to leave the hospital but couldn’t. There was no one else to take her place to care for the hundreds sheltering there. The hospital had sent requests for new people to come, but no one did.

An old man confessed to me that he wanted to leave but couldn’t. He had nowhere to go and no money to do it.

After the concert, the hospital staff treated me to dinner at a nearby restaurant of yaki niku. You may know this food from the movie Lost in Translation with Bill Murray. We were served these thin strips of raw meat, which we had to cook ourselves at our table. I will never forget that meal for the rest of my life. It was so good being with these people. Even though I was personally meeting them for the very first time, it was like we were old friends.

And the meat at this restaurant was amazing. I wish I could share some with you. I’ve never had anything like it. It was really the best meat I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’ve had yaki niku many times, but never anything remotely like this. I couldn’t help but think that the meat came from cattle nearby that couldn’t be sold anywhere else because of fears of radiation. It didn’t matter whether the meat was radioactive or not. It couldn’t be sold because now Fukushima had stigma attached to it. No one in Tokyo, or any other part of the world for that matter, was going to eat meat from Fukushima. So I think this restaurant was just able to get the best, the kind of cuts that were always sent away before, the kind of cuts that were always unaffordable to people like me.

And there was just something about this whole experience. To be with these people, in the midst of this urgency and this fear, and to be sharing a meal together. And to be talking about the people that were at the concert. And to be talking about the past two months.

In that moment, we experienced community. In that terrible time, music brought healing. It helped people mourn and cry for what they had lost. The hospital no longer needed supplies, but music enabled the relationship between our two communities to continue. And I was so thankful for that point of connection.

Because of music, and because of the art of the children, hearts were opened to us, and they were opened to each other, to share their stories and their lives and their food. And the experience changed me as a person.

03 – The Hospital

A concert in a hospital near the broken nuclear power plants of Fukushima shortly after the 2011 earthquake in Japan brought us together. In that terrible time, music brought healing and helped us to mourn and cry for what was lost.

Excerpt from my upcoming book Aroma of Beauty.

02. The Scarf

My friend, Shannon Johnston, started The Scarf back in 2011 as a direct response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster here in Japan. It was a way for people to knit their hopes, thoughts, and prayers together for the people of Japan. Scarves are something you wear around your neck like a hug. The Scarf was a way people could give hugs without actually being physically present in Japan. …

Learn more about Shannon Johnston and The Scarf, including how you can participate in this project, here.