TWR Reaches Out to a Major Unreached Group: the Japanese
Recording Women of Hope in Japanese are, from left, Sayaka Sugii, Mana Mukaiyachi and Ari Takaoka. [ Image by TWR Japan ]
Reaching the third of the world’s population who are yet unreached for Christ starts with prayer, Jon Fugler said – one person at a time.
“It would really excite me if people would just center on the one,” said Fugler, who is chief content officer for TWR (also known as Trans World Radio). “Is there one person I can be praying for that’s unreached, someone that I don’t even know from an unreached nation?”
Fugler is the founder of International Day for the Unreached, an event being observed this year on Sunday, May 28. Affiliated with the Alliance for the Unreached, it calls attention to the more than 3 billion people worldwide who haven’t received the gospel of Christ.
Among them are many of the world’s 120 million Japanese people.
“There’s a spiritual darkness there,” Fugler said. “It’s interesting, because in Japan there’s not persecution like there is in some other countries, and yet Japan is the second-highest unreached people group in the world.”
However, the 2011 Tōhoku tsunami and earthquake seemed to mark at least some softening of Japan’s hard soil, said Pastor Park Sang Bum, TWR Asia’s Japan ministry director. Before then, few secular FM stations in Japan showed any interest in broadcasting TWR’s Christian programs. Now, 29 stations are broadcasting as many as four programs, including Power of the Gospel, Every Man A Warrior and Women of Hope, which are all produced by TWR Japan.
Since 2014, TWR has partnered with local Japanese churches on short-term Donkey Tracting missions, an allusion to Zechariah 9:9. (“Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt; the foal of a donkey.”) The groups saturate an area with gospel tracts, radio program fliers and information about local churches so that seekers and those who respond to the programs can be connected with their local church.
After one such expedition earlier this year, a church reported that a young woman who had seen one of the fliers had attended their Easter service and said she would come again. “It feels like a large stone in front of us has been moved,” the writer stated. “The Lord is alive and is listening to our prayers!”
Three more Donkey Tracting missions are planned this year: a youth-focused mission in Tokyo on July 17-24 led by Jonathan Chen, and missions from Aug. 14-21 in Nagoya and Nov. 27-Dec. 4 in the Kyushu region led by Pastor Park. They can be contacted at jchen@twr.org and at sbpark@twr.org, respectively. You can also contact Pastor Park to learn about an online monthly prayer meeting for Japan.
Meanwhile, the Alliance for the Unreached will have four online prayer gatherings on Sunday, at 1:11 p.m. in each of the four U.S. time zones. The time was chosen because the movement’s symbol (l l l) is three vertical lines, with the first standing slightly apart to reflect the one-third of the world’s people who haven’t heard the gospel. You can join in on the A Third of Us Facebook page.
