Preaching in the Open Air at Shinsaibashi
[Adventures in Faith: Japan; the late 1980s] Tom and I began our ministry of open-air preaching in a popular location called Shinsaibashi.
As Tom and I read the Bible, we kept realizing that our biblical heroes didn’t own buildings.
They didn’t ask people to travel to their building, to sit on pews and to listen to them talk.
No, our biblical heroes preached in the open air. They spoke on the streets and in public places.
Think of the prophets. Think of the Lord Jesus Christ. Think of the early apostles.
They did not own church buildings. Instead, they went out into the streets.
We wondered: should we go out into the streets and preach our message in the open air?
Neither Tom nor I were preachers. We didn’t have any training in it.
But during our time together in Japan, we had been learning a valuable lesson. It was that a lack of knowledge or experience is no deterrent to moving forward.
The only thing that can hold us back is an unwillingness to try. An unwillingness to take chances. A resistance to action-faith.
Inspiration from the Bible had brought us to this point. All we needed to do was try.
We believed that in going, we’d get what we needed (see Luke 17:14).
In our mainstream missionary work, we did indeed stand in front of people and give talks about the Lord Jesus Christ and the Bible.
But those were indoors. People had traveled to our location. And deliberately gathered to hear us.
It was not what we saw in the Bible. So my friend Tom and I felt led to try to preach on the streets.
We faced two significant challenges:
- Neither of us had ever preached in the open air before.
- Neither of us had enough fluency in Japanese.
After wrestling with those challenges for some weeks, we came up with a solution. We would write and memorize an evangelistic message.
Fortunately, we’d already written an evangelistic message. It was the text of our second pamphlet.
So we set out to memorize it, verbatim, in Japanese.
That was no small effort. It took weeks and weeks of spare time and concentrated effort. We rehearsed it together. Many times.
Finally, the day arrived.
For our first outings as street preachers, we had two destinations in mind: Shinsaibashi and Tsuruhashi.
Shinsaibashi was a very popular shopping district. It was located in roughly the geographic center of Osaka.
The word Shinsaibashi is a combination of two words:
- Shinsai
- bashi
Regarding the word “Shinsai,” way back in the 1600s, a man named Shinsai Okada built a wooden bridge there. It was named for him.
Regarding the word “bashi,” it means “bridge.”
So the bridge built by Shinsai is called Shinsai’s Bridge, or Shinsaibashi.
Obviously, that ancient wooden bridge has been replaced. But the name continues.
And his name is how the whole shopping district takes its name, even today, four centuries later.
Shinsaibashi is a long street that evolved into a covered pedestrian walkway. Buildings line both sides of the walkway, forming a wall on each side. There is a roof overhead, spanning from one side to the other.
The effect was like an indoor mall. Or a covered shopping street.
But it was linear, it was very long, and it was outdoors. I liked it a lot.
You might have seen Shinsaibashi. It was the setting for one of the scenes in Ridley Scott’s 1989 film, Black Rain.
For me, it was really exciting to see Michael Douglas stomping around on the same turf where we had preached. If you’ve seen Black Rain, you’ve seen where we preached.
I also liked the culture that formed at Shinsaibashi. It was a center for Osaka’s youth culture.
There were all sorts of funky young people there. There were old people there. There were tourists from everywhere. There were salarymen and housewives, students and foreigners.
There was a perpetual flow of people.
Once, I’d even spotted a homeless man in a back alley, sifting through garbage bins. That was the first homeless person I had ever glimpsed in Japan.
How odd, that for us to find homeless people, we needed to go to one of the most upscale places in all of Japan.
This is where it began. Here, we’d begin our ministry of street preaching.
The day arrived.
We traveled together together by train. We walked around Shinsaibashi to get our bearings. We silently prayed for courage.
We picked a spot right near the bridge.
We couldn’t be right on the bridge itself, as there was far too much pedestrian traffic.
And then we started. We preached our message in the open-air.
Tom went first. He had done a much better job of memorizing the message than I did. Plus his Japanese language skills were far better than mine.
We stayed near each other. That way, if the preaching person forgot his lines, the other could provide a hint.
We found that we had to shout. That was due to two reasons:
- The area was very noisy
- The natural acoustics didn’t work to our advantage
Anything less than shouting and we wouldn’t have been heard. Not at all.
What we were doing seemed exotic. It was stressful and fun, angst-producing and exhilarating. And biblical.
It felt like we were re-inventing the wheel, even if it was a wheel that had been re-invented in every land and time for two millennia.
Even if we messed it all up, the victory was that we stepped out by faith. We acted upon what we read in the Bible. We took a big chance, and did something quite unusual.
People mostly just streamed past us without even noticing us.
A few people actually approached us.
One was a funky young woman. She was all style and coolness. She stood nearby and listened to us. She took a pamphlet. She read it. After a while, she left.
That was a mighty victory. We were able to touch a complete stranger, someone we would never ever have encountered otherwise.
Hopefully she had a favorable experience.
Another person who approached us was a homeless man. He was dressed in filthy rags.
He hung around with us for quite a while, listening intently. He accepted a pamphlet and read it.
Afterwards, we walked back to the Shinsaibashi subway station. We were exhausted yet filled with adrenaline.
We didn’t have the necessary Japanese language skills nor the training. But somehow we had stepped out in faith and did a very biblical thing.
That was our experience at Shinsaibashi. Our next destination was Tsuruhashi.
RESOURCES
At Wikipedia
Black Rain (1989 American film)
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.