Foundation
The JEB was founded by the Rev. Barclay Fowell Buxton and Paget Wilkes at the Keswick Convention in 1903 as an evangelising agency to assist existing missions and churches and to organise Christian Conventions for Bible Study and Prayer. Buxton had been an independent missionary in Japan with the British Church Missionary Society since 1890 and had invited Wilkes to join him as a lay helper there in 1897. They worked together at Matsue in Western Japan, before returning to England. Buxton and Wilkes were joined by a small group of friends at the Keswick Convention who shared their concern for evangelism. The group included Thomas Hogben, who had founded the One by One Working Band, a group devoted to personal evangelism. Initially the new mission was known as the One by One Band of Japan, being dedicated to personal holiness and aggressive evangelism. Nine months later, the name was changed to Japan Evangelistic Band.
Wilkes imagined "a band of men ... who detaching themselves from the responsibilities and entanglements of ecclesiastical organisation, would give themselves to prayer and ministry of the Word...". The JEB was set up as a non-denominational fellowship of Japanese and expatriate missionaries who came from North America, South Africa and Australia as well as the British Isles.
Read more about this topic: Japan Evangelistic Band
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)