Word: uchimura
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This was a typical Sunday meeting of Mukyokai, the "nonchurch" Christian movement that has become one of the most important forces in Japanese religion today. Its Japanese founder, Kanzo Uchimura, died only in 1930; today Mukyokai has between 50,000 and 100,000 adherents (there are no membership figures), a large proportion of the estimated 500,000 Christians in Japan. Mukyokai (meaning no church) claims that it is a return to the primitive Christianity of the Gospels. It has no clergy, no liturgy, no sacraments, no buildings, seems to have special appeal for intellectuals and students. Says Tadao Yanaihara, himself...
Ecclesiastics Are Politicians. Founder Uchimura, born to a samurai family in 1861, was introduced to Christianity at twelve, when a Tokyo schoolmate invited him "to a certain place in the foreigners' quarter, where we can hear pretty women sing and a tall, big man with a long beard shout and howl upon an elevated place, flinging his arms and twisting his body in all fantastic manners, to all of which admittance is entirely free." Later, at an American-founded agricultural school...
...Uchimura prayed to his Shinto gods to protect him from becoming a Christian, but to no avail. He was converted, and with six friends he formed a congregation. They met in a dormitory room, preached from a flour barrel, and rotated the office of preacher among them...
After a marriage that soon ended in divorce, Uchimura went to the U.S. At the Quaker-run Elwyn Training School for feeble-minded children in Elwyn, Pa., he learned about the love-centered, noninstitutional Christianity for which he yearned. He graduated from Amherst in 1887 and spent a few months at Hartford Theological Seminary. But American seminary training, he decided, was not suitable for Christian work in Japan, and Uchimura went back home...
...Kenkyu (Study of the Bible). "I dislike ecclesiastics more than anything else in this world." he wrote. "Believers believe in God; ecclesiastics try to control believers. Believers are men of faith; ecclesiastics are politicians . . . None surpass the prophets in serving God and disliking ecclesiastics." At his death in 1930, Uchimura had a huge and devoted following, but he stipulated in his will that neither his Bible class nor his magazine should be continued. Mukyokai, he insisted, had to avoid institutionalism of all kinds...