Handing out Pamphlets
[Adventures in Faith: Japan; the late 1980s] My missionary friend Tom and I made our own Christian pamphlet in Japanese, and then handed them out on the streets.
I had become friends with a fellow missionary named Tom McKerrin. Tom was a missionary with the Wayfinders in Japan.
He served as a teacher at their school in Kansai. Like me, Tom had a degree in Engineering.
Our friendship would last for years. It would spawn countless adventures in faith across several continents.
The recipients of our Wayfinders ministry were the well-to-do. They were bright and enthusiastic and fun.
Their parents could afford to send them to prestigious universities. Some could afford to go to a private language school.
But soon, Tom and I set out on a project. We would read the Bible together. It was our Bible Reading Project.
Specifically, we’d read the New Testament.
We felt a strong drive within us to explore whatever the Scriptures could tell us about the Lord Jesus Christ, and to put our findings into action.
We met regularly to discuss our findings.
The Bible kept pointing Tom and me in different directions than what we were doing with The Wayfinders.
We gradually discovered that the Lord Jesus Christ targeted a different type of person for his ministry than our missionary organization.
Unlike The Wayfinders, the Lord Jesus often targeted the lower echelons of society.
The Bible lumped them together under the title of tax collectors, prostitutes and sinners. (See Matthew 21:31.)
It’s often said that Jesus came to establish a banquet. What people did he want us to invite to his banquet?
He tells his followers to NOT invite family or friends, relatives or well-to-do people. Nor anyone who could repay us. (See Luke 14:12.)
Instead, he commands us to invite to his banquet those people who are poor, crippled, lame or blind. (See Luke 14:13.)
The Bible was slowly changing our whole worldview.
Along with that, it was changing our whole vision for missionary work.
We gradually began to expand our missionary “target.”
We wanted to reach out to the modern-day beggars, outcasts, the poor, the crippled, the lame and blind.
Another issue we were praying over was the nature of Christian evangelization itself.
The evangelistic model lived out by The Wayfinders in Japan might be called “gradual.”
They commonly held that it would take years or decades for a Japanese person to convert to the Christian faith and become baptized.
That vision reflected the experience of the leaders. In their observation, it was almost always true that conversion took decades.
However, to Tom and me, that was the opposite of what we were reading in the Bible.
We were reading in the Bible that miracles would be done for us “according to our faith.” (See Matthew 9:29.)
If the leaders of a missionary organization have low expectations, should it any surprise that no miracles of conversion are taking place?
We wanted more. And in Jesus, we were seeing the possibility of more.
Much more.
Regarding evangelism, we saw that Jesus calls his servants to go to the street corners and invite to his kingdom anyone they find. (See Matthew 22:9.)
His servants are not to hide the light of his message under a bushel basket. (See Matthew 5:15.)
Instead, they’re to let the light of Jesus Christ shine to the ends of the world. (See Matthew 5:16.)
Tom and I felt we needed to do something. We needed to do something concrete.
We needed to do something bold and public and direct, something that would go way beyond the stifling vision of what we experienced in The Wayfinders.
We needed to break through the glass ceiling of their underwhelming vision for gradual evangelization.
So we manufactured a pamphlet.
Together, we wrote a message. We hoped would appeal to the mindset of secular Japanese people.
A friend of Tom’s translated it into Japanese for us. I drew illustrations for it. We pieced it together into a camera-ready original. We took it to a print shop and made a few hundred copies.
Now what?
Previously, we had been wrestling with biblical texts and concepts and ideas and theories.
But now, we had a big stack of pamphlets.
We couldn’t just file them on a shelf somewhere. We needed to do something with them. We needed to go distribute them.
It was time to step out. It was time to do. It was time for Action-Faith. (See Matthew 7:24.)
Neither Tom nor I knew what we were doing. We were not pamphleteers. We were both rather shy and reserved by nature.
And what we were about to do wasn’t, by its very nature, easy for shy and reserved people to do.
We selected a place where we would distribute our pamphlets. I don’t remember where it was.
We scheduled a date and a time that we would do it.
Until then, we prayed for courage.
Finally, the date came. After arriving at the place, we walked around, getting familiar with the area. We said a few prayers for courage.
We picked out a spot for each of us to stand, places where we were right in the flow of pedestrian traffic.
And then we did it.
We started offering a pamphlet to each person who was walking by us.
Some people ignored us. Other people took a pamphlet as they hurried along, then read its cover and threw it on the ground, all without stopping.
Some people took a pamphlet and stuffed it in their backpack or purse.
One or two people walked a little further from us, stopped, and read it.
We had no idea if our message had any impact. But for us, the victory was that we did it.
On our own, without guidance or training, we actually invented and manufactured a pamphlet.
On our own, without guidance or training, we handed them out to hundreds of people.
We had gone out and invited to the banquet anyone we could find!
As we sped away from the area in the train, we were giddy. We had acted in faith. We had acted upon inspiration from the Bible.
We had fresh vision and excitement.
Later, we both felt it was time to step it up yet again.
With considerable effort, we wrote a second message. It was longer and, we hoped, better than our first effort.
We hoped it would connect more fully to those who would read it.
Another friend of Tom’s translated it for us. I drew fresh illustrations. Soon, we had it camera-ready.
In our free time, Tom and I met. We would travel by train to some destination that we selected at random. We would decide where to stand, and then hand out our pamphlets.
Later, another development ensued. Somewhere along the way, we got the idea of going door-to-door with our literature.
We had not done that before. But the Bible kept inspiring us to get the message of Jesus Christ out to as many people as we could.
It seemed right.
So as before, we simply selected a destination, went there, scouted out the area, prayed and started. We knocked on doors. Sometimes, the door would actually open.
We’d gulp, muster our courage, greet the person respectfully, and offer them our pamphlet.
No, we weren’t representing any group. No, we weren’t here from a church. No, we weren’t asking them for anything. No, all we were doing was offering them our own pamphlet, which was about Jesus Christ.
Then the resident of the house, with characteristic respectfulness, would accept our pamphlet, thank us profusely, and apologize for not doing more for us.
That aspect of Japanese society was something we always admired: their respectfulness.
People in Japan have not acquired the trait that is so widespread among professing Christians: rudeness.
I hope they never do.
Tom had progressed a lot further in language acquisition than I had. So he usually took the lead in the conversation.
Our second pamphlet seemed to be going well.
But now, a new idea was percolating within us. From our Bible readings, we were feeling a desire to preach it.
We were feeling led to preach our message, not in meetings or a church, but out there on the streets.
ADVENTURES IN FAITH
NOTE. Names, dates, and locations may have been changed.
Unless otherwise noted, all Bible quotations on this page are from the World English Bible and the World Messianic Edition. These translations have no copyright restrictions. They are in the Public Domain.