World Cup Churches 20. Japan

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Christianity has made very little headway over the years in Japan.  Comparing it with other Eastern cultures like Korea and China make its resistance to the Gospel more surprising.  It is not as if Japan is entirely unable or unwilling to let the outside world in.  Just not Jesus.

The Church has done better than Jesus in one remarkable way.  Among many examples, I offer you St Bath Church in the Centre of Osaka.

At first glance this looks like an English parish church.  This is not entirely surprising because the stained glass windows are indeed from a disused British church or chapel. But on a second look there doesn't seem much between the happy couple and the windows.

Let's step outside  . . .

It kind of looks the part and doesn't look the part somehow.  And St Bath? Who was he or she?  What denomination is this?

The answer is the commercial denomination; it is a wedding chapel built to resemble a Western Protestant Church, squeezed between the outline of its related hotel.  Or as the blurb puts it:

'Reaching out to your heart the minister, choir, organist and violinist play in harmony.  Surrounded by the 18th century stained glass windows passed on to us from the United Kingdom and antique pews we deliver a unique impression and happiness to the bridal couple and guests.'

The point being this is one of many such chapels throughout Japan, a country where Protestant-style weddings are far more popular than Shinto ones, yet where the Christian Church has never made great inroads with the Gospel.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of the old truth that you don't become a Christian by getting married in church.

World Cup Churches 19. Germany

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Germany has a remarkable World Cup record - and also a vast array of remarkable churches. I've visited a few and even spoken in one, but I've decided to go for a church that I have never visited.  Nevertheless, given the opportunity this is a church I would definitely go to see - Thomaskirche in Leipzig.

It may look like any other Germanic city church, but the story of this church is without equal.  It was a church where Martin Luther visited often and preached - this (with many counterparts in the German states) linked to the Reformation, the foundation of Protestantism which revolutionised Europe both ecclesiastically and politically.  It became, therefore, Lutheran - the Reformation in Saxony proclaimed in this church by Luther himself in 1539.

Forward about 175 years and a new cantor arrived.  His name?  Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach's influence on music was and is as profound as Luther's on religion and politics.  It is calculated that it would take decades to physically write down the works of Bach, yet he not only wrote the scores, he composed them.  Weekly a cantata for St Thomas's, larger works for feasts and festivals, other works for the three sister churches, and utterly amazing general music besides. Oh, and he had 20 children . . .

As if this church did not have enough in being at the heart of two great revolutions, Richard Wagner was baptised here, and both Mozart and Mendelssohn played the organ as visiting musicians. Sme churches have history, but this is on another level!

World Cup Churches 18. Costa Rica

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

The Church of the Nazarene, Cabecar Indigenous Region lacks the grandeur of the great Spanish colonial-era cathedrals and municipal churches of Costa Rica.

It is a reminder that 'Church' is many things, and in many parts of the world a dynamic ministry among the poorest of people.  The Cabecar, a large people group forced by colonisation into the southern mountains of Costa Rica, are considered to be the nation's people group with the greatest level of poverty - 94% against a national figure of 20%.

Yet among them Christians have sought to work.  Journeys involving hours of jungle and mountain tracks have been made to run missions and provide welfare and education to improve the lives of the Cabecar people.  Churches have been formed to indigenise the work and in this picture of the baptism of a Cabecar believer as part of the 10-year-old Church of the Nazarene we see the Gospel building churches not with stones but living stones.

World Cup Churches 17. Spain

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Our lodger looked at the placemat we had put underneath her glass.

"That's where I come from!", she said.

And so it was.  A quite worn down picture of a castle on top of a coastal hill overlooking the town of Denia.

Our lodger came from a Baptist Church in Denia.  But we had heard of Denia many years before when visiting Christian friends in that area of Spain.  While it would be surprising for any smallish Spanish town in a Catholic country long ruled by autocratic government to have a Baptist-type church, it would be a 'given' that it would be likely to be a group in a house, or 95% expats in a hotel ballroom or the like.

That's what made - still makes - the Baptist Church in Denia so amazing.

In the oppressive General Franco years (specifically in 1957), Gerald and June McNeely arrived in Spain as Southern Baptist missionaries from Kentucky.  They served in many ways in an environment that, to put it mildly, was not conducive to evangelical Christianity.

However in the Denia area Spanish Baptists owned a patch of land - in those days almost worthless - with a view to holding Christian camps by the seaside.

Its a long story that can be read elsewhere, but the end result was an evangelical Baptist church with hundreds of people.  A patch of Spain that had an evangelical witness that would have been hard to find in some English seaside towns of those days (and most of them today).

It is a Church that defies sociological trends and cultural explanations and which testifies to faithful ministry and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.