Christianity Made in Japan: A Study of Indigenous Movements

Chapter 3. Charisma, Minor Founders, and Indigenous Movements

CHAPTER THREE Charisma, Minor Founders, and Indigenous Movements T HOSE OF US familiar only with the world of established churches, denominational bureaucracies, and large Christian institutions tend to forget that Christianity began as a new religious movement with a leader who was known as a healer and exorcist. In Jesus: A New Vision, Marcus J. Borg draws attention to the charismatic nature of the early Jesus movement and maintains that it is necessary for us to give serious attention to the “world of Spirit” in order to accurately understand the place of Jesus in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The world of Spirit, he explains, refers to another dimension or layer or level of reality in addition to the visible world of our ordinary experience. This notion of “another world,” understood as actual even though nonmaterial, is quite alien to the modern way of thinking. The 31 CHRISTIANITY MADE IN JAPAN 32 modern worldview or “picture of reality” sees reality as having essentially one dimension, the visible and material realm.… But the notion of another reality, a world of Spirit, was the common property of virtually every culture before ours, constituting what has been called the “primordial tradition.” According to Borg’s analysis, Jesus belonged to the charismatic stream of Judaism that took this worldview for granted, and he served as a mediator between the world of everyday reality and the world of spirit.1 It is widely recognized that early Christianity continued to develop as a part of this charismatic stream. The Acts of the Apostles and various New Testament letters indicate that the disciples of Jesus and many leaders in the early Christian church were also deeply rooted in the world of Spirit.2 Prophetic messages from God, speaking in tongues, healing, and exorcism were important features of Christianity as it spread through the Roman empire.3 In time, however, charismatic gifts declined, and the rituals of healing and exorcism were institutionalized in the priesthood and became incorporated into the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church. The renewed interest in the Scriptures that characterized the Protestant Reformation, we should note, did not extend to the New Testament materials on charismatic gifts and healing. It has only been in the last century that these “spiritual gifts” have again become a prominent feature of Christianity in various regions of the world. The reappearance of charismatic Christianity is due in part to the indigenous responses to transplanted Protestant mission churches from Europe and North America. Over the course of the past century scores of Protestant mission organizations have established churches throughout Asia and Africa. For the most part these missionary efforts have been by churches that no longer recognize the use of charismatic gifts or healing rituals. One particularly interesting and persistent pattern of response to this missionary movement has been the development of independent and indigenous Christian movements in various regions of the non-Western world. These movements are generally founded by charismatic individuals who accept the Christian faith but reject the missionary carriers and their “Western” and “doctrinal” understanding of religion. In many cases the size of these indigenous movements has surpassed that of the mission churches (whose sponsoring denominations in North America and Europe are struggling with serious declines in membership). A decade ago, according to D. B. Barrett, there were already some 332 million Pentecostal-charismatic Christians worldwide. Most of these individuals belonged to one of the 11,000 Pentecostal or 3,000 independent charismatic denominations, though some were involved in the charismatic renewal movement within one of the old estab- CHARISMA, MINOR FOUNDERS, AND INDIGENOUS MOVEMENTS 33 lished churches. Barrett emphasizes that the growth of Pentecostal-charismatic forms of Christianity is truly multicultural, with members “found in 8,000 ethnolinguistic cultures and speaking 7,000 languages.”4 Christianity in Japan certainly reµects this global pattern of development (though the growth ³gures are on a much smaller scale than in South Korea and various African countries). In approaching the study of Christianity in Japan, it is important to recognize that in some respects it is a “New Religion” in this context and cannot be viewed as an established religion, as in many Western countries. In referring to Christianity as a New Religion, I am not simply drawing attention to the fact that it is a foreign-born tradition that only arrived in Japan relatively recently. Rather, “newness” is related primarily to the fact that...