Power From On High
[Japan; the late 1980s] After a year in Japan, I observed that nobody, including myself, was having much success with evangelism. I became convinced we needed Power From On High.
I had been a full-time missionary with The Wayfinders for perhaps a year. By that point, I had begun to notice some problems.
One problem I noticed was that us Wayfinders were not winning conversions. That was especially shocking for two reasons:
Reason 1. As a missionary organization, evangelism was our stated purpose
Reason 2. As an Evangelical movement, evangelism envisioned as a top priority.
However, unlike the apostles, we were NOT shaking the world upside-down:
Acts 17:6. When they didn’t find them, they dragged Jason and certain brothers before the rulers of the city, crying, “These who have turned the world upside down have come here also,
Our vision for the core ministry of evangelism seemed small and limited.
But that limited vision wasn’t just in The Wayfinders. I noticed it in a lot of places.
Many of the Evangelical churches in Japan were called House Churches. That meant they met in a house.
Usually, the congregation owned the house, and they converted it into a church building. A common expression was this: “25/50.”
That meant that typically, they had 50 official members on the books, and 25 would show up on a given Sunday.
Some churches were, by nature, bigger.
Mainline Protestant churches and Catholics come to mind.
Their tendency was to build large buildings that resembled European churches. But among these, too, there wasn’t much growth. They didn’t seem to be growing their congregations either.
Broadening the search further, the scene wasn’t much different. Neither the Mormons nor the Jehovah’s Witnesses were attracting significant growth in membership.
Looking outside of Christianity, neither Buddhism nor Shintoism were growing. In fact, they had suffered decline for many years.
Just as there are non-practicing Catholics, there are non-practicing Buddhists and Shintoists.
There was one shining light. A Buddhist sect called Soka Gakkai was growing. It was founded in 1930 and had decades of rapid growth.
I was reading in the Bible about the Christian movement being on fire. I was reading about individual Christians who were on fire.
2 Timothy 1:6. For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. (NIV translation)
Here was the question that captivated me every day: for us modern-day Christians in Japan, where was the fire?
How could we get on fire with a compelling new vision for evangelism? How could we get on fire to take the message of Jesus Christ to the secular Japanese person, clearly and convincingly?
What would it take? How could we get there?
I often read this Bible verse:
But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.
– Acts 1:8
In that verse, the Apostles were filled with power. That power signaled the arrival of the Holy Spirit into their lives.
There was an infilling of the Holy Spirit. That infilling made them able to speak the gospel of Jesus Christ, clearly and convincingly.
They became effective in evangelism. They were able to lead other people to a moment of conversion.
They were able to root their new converts in the ways of Christian discipleship.
Finally, having trained their converts, the apostles sent them out so they could join in evangelizing the world and taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth.
My shorthand for all of that was this phrase:
Power From On High
It was clear that I didn’t have that biblical power. In fact, I didn’t know anyone who had it.
But if I were to reach Japanese people with the Good News of Jesus Christ, I needed Power From On High.
How could I receive this Power From On High? It was a gift of God. It was not something we manufacture ourselves.
So maybe the question was more like this: how could I prepare myself, so that I’d be ready, if some day God would give me this Power From On High?
I intuited that prayer was part of that preparation. So I prayed.
At first, I began spending several hours in prayer each day.
This was part of why I never advanced very far in my acquisition of the Japanese language.
Instead of spending hours a day studying Japanese, I was spending hours and hours per day praying.
Then I noticed something that St. Paul hinted of. In 2 Corinthians 6:5, he casually mentions that he spent entire nights in prayer.
Wow!
So I began trying to fast and pray all night long.
In my early attempts at praying all night, I stayed in my apartment. But that didn’t work very well. I needed to be able to move about more freely than I could in a tiny apartment.
A friend from England shared with me a book about a pastor in Korea. His name was Paul Yongi Cho. Cho became a Christian at age 19.
Later, he had experienced what he called the “Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” That filled him with Power From On High.
Cho went on to found several churches. His first grew from just three members to 400 in only three years.
His second church began with 1,500 members and grew to 8,000 in a mere seven years.
His third church began with 10,000 members. In less than 20 years, it had grown to 700,000 members.
One thing that inspired me about Cho was his emphasis on prayer. He had a retreat center called Prayer Mountain. I read that it had hundreds of individual rooms for Christians to go there to fast and pray all night long.
I was so inspired by such a grand vision for prayer. I was so inspired by the fruit of all that prayer: over 700,000 people brought into faith in Christ.
I needed a Prayer Mountain of my own!
In the coming weeks and months, I scouted out the land, searching for a Prayer Mountain of my own.
I had three criteria:
- I needed to be able to go there without anyone knowing about it
- It needed to be open all night long
- It needed to be big enough that people wouldn’t notice me and want to strike up a conversation
After some months of searching, I finally found my Prayer Mountain! It was a beautiful place called Hattori Ryokuchi Koen. That means Hattori Ryokuchi Park.
It would be my place to fast and pray through the night.
It was located in north Osaka. It was so beautiful. It has ponds. It had actual hills, unlike most of Osaka, which is quite flat. And it was huge.
There were tennis courts and ancient farm houses. There was enough real estate to never get bored.
Sometimes funky youth would gather there. They’d listen to rock music, dance, eat box lunches, and ride wheelies on their scooters.
Having found this Garden of Eden, I needed to try it out. One night, I slipped away. I rode my bike 15 minutes to the Midosuji train station, then took the last train north. I got out at Ryokuchi-Kōen station, and walked to the park.
I was there.
It was quiet. It was beautiful. It was well lit, just like everywhere in Japan. In the late hours, there was hardly anybody in sight.
This was my Prayer Mountain! This was where it would all go down. This was where I would walk with God. This was where I would spend whole nights in prayer.
For the rest of my time with The Wayfinders, I slipped away to Ryokuchi Park about once a week. There, I spent the whole night in prayer. There, I sought the face of God. There, I sought Power From On High.
Without my being aware of it, I had begun to speak in a new language. I was using biblical phrases such as “Power From On High” and the “filling with the Holy Spirit.”
My speaking with these phrases led me to new friends, friends for whom such phrases were a native tongue.
One such friend was Latoya Briggs.
I met her at the International Baptist Church. That church held an English-speaking church service on Sunday nights. It was a way to fellowship and praise God in English.
On Sunday mornings, I went to a Japanese church. I went there to be with my Japanese community.
But on Sunday nights, I went to the International Baptist Church. I went there to be spiritually fed in my native tongue. I went there to fellowship with fellow missionaries and English teachers.
Many of the people at International Baptist Church were teachers of English as a Second Language (TESL). They were in Japan on a one- or two-year contract. Then they would return to their country of origin.
My friend Latoya Briggs wasn’t an ESL teacher. She wasn’t a missionary.
She was a model. And somehow, we hit it off.
Latoya was from Chicago. She was from a small church there. She called it a “storefront” church, in inner city Chicago.
It was a Pentecostal church!
Latoya said that they actually received the Power From On High. She said they were baptized in the Holy Spirit.
She said they saw God answer prayer and do real miracles. They spoke in tongues, drove out demons, prophesied, interpreted and much more.
What Latoya described to me was the fulfillment of everything I’d been seeing in the Bible. I needed to get to a Pentecostal church!
SEE ALSO
The Power of our Lord Jesus Christ. If the LORD God gives us power, what are we empowered to do?
Power From On High. [Japan; the late 1980s] After a year in Japan, I observed that nobody, including myself, was having much success with evangelism. I became convinced we needed Power From On High.
The Holy Spirit and FIRE. When the Holy Spirit is in your life, you will have FIRE. Are you on fire for the LORD God? If not, how can you get on fire?
Is the Holy Spirit in your life? How can you tell if the Holy Spirit is in your life? How can you tell if your church is filled with the Holy Spirit? Here is how.
RESOURCES
At Wikipedia:
David Yonggi Cho (Paul Yongi Cho)
Teaching English as a second or foreign language
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.