By Carson Foushee, CBF field personnel

Eleven years ago this month Laura and I began our journey in Japan as CBF field personnel. Upon arrival at the local airport, a group of seven members of Kanazawa Baptist Church joyfully greeted us with a colorful handmade banner that read “Welcome to Kanazawa, Foushees!” and transported us to our new home to begin ministry together.  

Two months later, the church officially installed us as their field personnel as part of its 60th anniversary celebration. We are now approaching the end of the 70th year of our beloved congregation. Though we have served for five years together over two different periods of time, our connection to the history of the church actually started with a phone call a whole year before we ever touched down in Japan. 
 
I was driving home from work one afternoon in Macon, Georgia, when I received a call from an unknown number. Upon answering, I was met with a rush of enthusiasm from the person on the other end of the line. The woman told me that her name was Harriett Parker and that she had read an article in a CBF publication about our future work in Kanazawa. She tracked down my number to connect because she and her late husband, Calvin, planted Kanazawa Baptist Church alongside a Japanese pastor and his family in 1953. Harriett was calling to see if we would be in our home state of North Carolina during the Christmas holiday because she wanted to invite us to her home in the mountains before we left for Japan.  

Just after Christmas in 2012, we sat in Harriett’s living room with my parents and siblings surrounded by wood carvings, handcrafted dishware and other beautiful items she and Calvin brought back at the end of their 38 years of service in Japan. Harriett excitedly jumped from story to story to share about their 10 years of work in Kanazawa. Some were informative, like the story of how their family and the family of a Japanese pastor founded the church in Ishikawa Prefecture as a part of a 1947 Japan Baptist Convention (JBC) mission to plant a church in every prefecture. Others were hilarious tales of unique cultural interactions, like the time Calvin discovered that his shoes were missing. Harriett shared that Calvin had large feet and found it impossible to purchase shoes his size in Japan. One day he went to the entryway of the church to take off his slippers and retrieve his shoes to return home only to find they were not where he left them. Upon returning home, he shared the story of the missing shoes with Harriett. The couple laughed with compassion for the stranger who must have long suffered in shoes that did not fit and took the chance when it presented itself to get ones that felt right. 
 
We met with Harriett once more before our departure, this time at an assisted living facility she moved into. Amidst downsizing, she graciously held back a few items she thought may be useful for us. These included a yukata (summer kimono) for Laura to wear at traditional festivals and a cultural introduction book titled “We Japanese.” Harriett equipped us with what she had to help continue the work alongside the church she and Calvin started decades before. 
 
The Parkers continue to support us and our congregation many years later as a part of the great cloud of witnesses. Last year, I received a copy of Calvin’s thesis for his Master of Theology from 1957 titled “A History of Christianity in Kanazawa City, Japan.” In it, he provides a wealth of information about the development of the faith in our city. He shares about the arrival of the first Christian to Kanazawa in 1589, severe persecution faced throughout the centuries, the first Protestant missionary in the late 1800s and finally the founding of Kanazawa Baptist. In his closing he writes, “There is hope that a new chapter in the history of Christianity in Kanazawa will tell a story of sweeping revival and phenomenal growth, but this hope is based on faith in the power of Christ and his gospel rather than the history which we have surveyed. Yet what has taken place in the past is quite remarkable, and for it we give thanks.” 

I am not certain that anyone in our church or city would say that there has been a “sweeping revival” or “phenomenal growth” of the Christian faith over the last 70 years. Though there are more churches and Christians in the city now, the population and overall impact remains numerically small. For our church, there have been high points, but also moments where mere survival was uncertain due to deep conflict and pain. Despite the challenges, we enter a new decade of congregational life with hope based not upon what we have experienced and seen, but rooted in the power of Christ. In faith, we give thanks and journey forward in the Spirit as we seek to be the hands and feet of Jesus to our city.