Japan Evangelistic Band - Growth

Growth

In October 1903, Wilkes led the first missionary party to Japan, serving briefly in Yokohama and Tokyo, before moving to Kobe, which became the centre of JEB activity. In 1905 the Kobe Mission Hall and the JEB Kansai Bible College were initiated to train an indigenous ministry to carry on the work in the long-term. By the 1920s the JEB decided to launch its own forward outreach work since other missions were then finding their own experts in evangelism and making less use of the JEB. Small teams comprising an overseas missionary with a Japanese worker would participate in pioneer evangelism. They did this in many rural areas as well as in some of the larger towns which had not been exposed to Christian work. Churches were started in about 100 centres and full salvation and missionary literature was printed and circulated. The JEB were anxious to avoid creating another denomination, intending that their churches would be linked with existing Japanese denominational churches. However, the JEB churches conferred and decided they would prefer to be linked in their own denomination. In 1938 many of them withdrew from the denominations they had joined and formed a separate denomination called the Nihon Iesu Kirisuto Kyokwai (NIKK) or Japan Church of Christ.

World War II and other factors held back progress, but some Japanese members were able to continue limited evangelistic activities during the war. A bombing raid in 1945 destroyed both the Mission Hall in Kobe and the Kansai Bible College, although both were later rebuilt. JEB missionaries returned to Japan in late 1947 and started work on the new housing estates that were growing up on the outskirts of cities. Irene Webster Smith opened up a centre for students in Tokyo. In the 1950s new outreach programmes went into Wakayama Prefecture, first to Susami and Kushimoto in the far south, then to Minoshima and Kainan and later to Kozagawa. Other programmes were to Shikoku Island where work began in Tokushima Prefecture at Tachitana then in Hanoura and Naruto. A separate venture was begun in Shido, Kagawa Prefecture and work also started in Wajiki. Churches were established in Tachitana and Naruto. There was another outreach in the 1950s to Northern Hyogo Prefecture and then over the prefectural boundary into Kyoto Fu, where work began in the mountainous districts around Amano Hashidate.

In the UK, JEB members worked among Japanese seamen arriving at the docks in Birkenhead. Conventions were held regularly at the Hayes Conference Centre at Swanwick, Derbyshire in June, and at Southbourne, Dorset in August. From its early days the JEB was actively working with children. There was a Young People's Branch of the JEB called the "Sunrise Band" it was renamed the "Japan Sunrise Fellowship" in 1977.