Caroline and I first came to Japan in the summer of 2008 to see if this is where God might be calling us to serve. After spending the summer here and teaching two courses at Christ Bible Seminary, we felt the Lord directing us to live and minister here. At the end of that summer I entered a PhD program in order to prepare for this ministry, and after returning to teach at CBS in the summers of 2010 and 2012, we were excited at the prospect of returning to live and serve here long-term.

In November of 2012, the founder and first president of CBS, Michael Oh, asked if I would succeed him as president. At the time I was shocked that he was leaving, and perhaps even more so, that he was asking me to take his place. In God’s providence, that was just two months before we boarded a plane to Brisbane, Australia, where I was headed to serve as a one-year visiting lecturer at Queensland Theological College.

I told Michael that I wanted to think and pray about this prospect, and when we arrived in Australia I asked my boss, Gary Millar, the principal of QTC, if I could shadow him during my time there. Gary kindly agreed, and so my time in Brisbane ended up being not simply a visiting teaching post but also an apprenticeship of sorts in which I was able to observe the ups and downs of leading a seminary community.

During that year we ended up deciding that I would accept Michael’s offer to succeed him, though we were still several years away from moving to Nagoya. After returning from Australia I taught for two semesters at my alma mater, RTS, which I had agreed to do two years prior. We then went through MTW’s evaluation and assessment process and spent a year and a half raising support before moving to Japan in March 2016.

Upon coming to Japan, we did not move directly to Nagoya but to a city called Okazaki, about an hour south of Nagoya. We came to Okazaki in order to focus our first two years on Japanese language acquisition. Then after two years of Japanese study we announced to the seminary community that I would assume the presidency during our convocation ceremony of 2019. 

This past Friday, April 5, we experienced the culmination of these many years of preparation as I was installed as the second president of Christ Bible Seminary. 

For the past six years my colleague Craig Chapin has served as the interim president of CBS. He has been invaluable for the seminary and a true friend to me as I’ve prepared to step into this role. Here he is presenting me with a Bible that our first president donated to the seminary.

For my inaugural address I preached in Japanese from Hos 4:1-6 (“my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge”), entitling the sermon, “Why Theological Education?”

All the MTW team leaders from throughout Japan were kind enough to attend the installation ceremony and laid hands on me to commission me for this service.

Here’s a group photo of everyone who attended. We were thankful to have past, present, and incoming students, faculty, staff, pastors and friends all in attendance. To God be the glory!

When theological students first begin to learn the biblical languages, previously untraversed trails of exegesis suddenly present themselves, leading to a vast new world of interpretation that was formerly unavailable. Having received the basic tools necessary to enter this new world, many a young theologian packs up his gear and enters it with confidence, believing he is fully equipped to explore this exciting terrain after only a couple semesters of elementary grammar and perhaps an exegesis class or two.

Problems arise, however, when this young linguistic explorer finishes his basic seminary requirements, believes that by memorizing verb conjugations and vocabulary glosses he now “knows” Greek and Hebrew, and does not continue with the painstaking but necessary work of continuing to learn these languages by actually reading the biblical text in them.

Over the years I’ve become persuaded that the only way truly to “know” any language–Greek and Hebrew included–is not simply by understanding the mechanics of its grammar or learning its translational glosses, but by immersing oneself in its use. Grammar and vocabulary are necessary for becoming familiar with a language’s use, of course, but it’s the latter that actually enables us to “know” any language in a meaningful and responsible way. For a spoken language, the best way to acquire such knowledge is to spend time with native speakers; for written languages–like Biblical Greek and Hebrew–this means we must read, and read a lot.

When we do not become familiar with a language’s use, particularly its syntax and idioms, it is very easy to draw incorrect interpretative conclusions that seem patently correct to us. The reason for this is our natural inclination to assume that other languages operate similarly to our own at a syntactic level.

However, the more languages one learns, especially if those languages are diverse, the more clearly one realizes the need to be circumspect when interpreting speech or writing in a foreign language. Approaching a foreign language with the syntactic assumptions of one’s own language will inevitably result in misinterpretation. Having grown up learning Spanish and then studying Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic in seminary, French and German in grad school, and Japanese on the mission field, this reality has been reinforced in my own experience time and time again

The Great Commission: “As you go”?

I provide this rather long introduction in order to discuss an oft-repeated misinterpretation of a well-known and important passage of Scripture: the so-called “Great Commission” of Matt 28:18-20. The ESV translates these famous verses as follows:

¹⁸ And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’

In virtually every major English translation, the “commission” proper of this passage contains two imperative verbs: “go” and “make disciples” (e.g., KJV, NASB, RSV, NRSV, ESV, NIV [1984 & 2011], TNIV, HCSB, CSB, et al). For this reason, most readers understandably view Jesus’ commission here as comprising two major foci: going and discipling. Jesus’ followers are to go to “all nations” and disciple “all nations,” the latter command receiving further explanation by the modifying participial phrases “baptizing them” and “teaching them.”

However, any reader of the Greek text of verse 19 can plainly see that the word translated “go” is not an imperative, but a participle. The only morphological imperative in the verse is matheteusate, “make disciples.” For this reason, occasionally one hears an interpretation that suggests that, contrary to virtually every major English translation available, the verb “go” should not be understood as a command.

For example, Anthony Bradley has recently written the following:

Although the phrase “The Great Commission” is found nowhere in the Bible, it has been defended by evangelicals as the core imperative of Christian mission. The problem exegetically, however, is that the word “go” in Matthew 28:16–20 is not an imperative. It’s a participle. According to Robert Culver, the Greek grammar simply does not support “go” as an imperative command unless you are reading a revivalist agenda into the exegesis of the text. Properly translated, the verse should read, “having gone,” or, “as you go.” The aorist participle is not functioning as an imperative in this text and, therefore, the call to “go” is not a particular action by individuals to physically go anywhere in particular.

At first glance this reasoning appears sound. After all, in New Testament Greek, aorist participles most often indicate action that precedes the action of the main verb, and when an aorist participle relates to an aorist main verb, the participial action is often concurrent with that of the main verb. Since participles in English (“-ing” verbs) do not carry imperatival force, it makes sense why Bradley and others before him have argued that, rather than indicating an imperatival “go,” the first participle of verse 19 is better translated as “having gone” (preceding action) or “as you go” (concurrent action).

On this interpretation, as Bradley says, “the call to ‘go’ is not a particular action by individuals to physically go anywhere in particular.” Rather, according to this interpretation, the idea in this initial participle is, “As you’re going along in your life,” make disciples (see, e.g., here). Of course, this reading suggests that (1) basically every major English translation has mistranslated this clause, and (2) the “Great Commission” doesn’t actually require us to go anywhere; we can fulfill it wherever we happen to be.

The Participle of Attendant Circumstance

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it is taking the predominant function of the aorist participle and presuming that it applies in this particular situation without accounting for all the pertinent syntactic data. Although aorist participles typically refer to preceding or concurrent action in an indicative fashion, they do not always function this way. In his well-known textbook on biblical Greek syntax, Daniel Wallace outlines multiple functions of Greek participles, one of which is known as the “participle of attendant circumstance” (Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, 640).

In short, the participle of attendant circumstance has the following characteristics:

• It communicates action that is coordinate with the main verb
• It is dependent semantically on the main verb
• It is translated as a finite verb (i.e., not as an English participle)
• It receives its mood from the main verb
• It is often misunderstood (!)

Wallace provides Matt 2:13 as an example of this use:

Now when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, “Rise (egertheis), take (paralabe) the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

In this verse the angel first uses an aorist participle (“rise” [egertheis]), followed by an aorist imperative (“take” [paralabe]). Based on the context, the angel is clearly not telling Joseph to take Jesus and Mary to safety in Egypt “as he rises up.” Rather, the angel is commanding Joseph to do two things: (1) rise, and (2) take Jesus and Mary to safety in Egypt.

For one more example, consider Acts 10:13:

Then a voice told him, “Get up (anastas), Peter. Kill (thyson) and eat (phage).”

In this text, anastas (“Get up”) is an aorist participle, followed by two aorist imperatives: thyson (“kill”) and phage (“eat”). The voice speaking to Peter here is obviously not advising him to kill and eat “as he gets up” from where he is sitting. Rather, the voice is giving Peter a three-part imperative that includes the action of “getting up.”

Not “As you go,” but “Go!”

Similarly, in Matt 28:19 an aorist participle (“Go” [poreuthentes]) is in construction with an aorist imperative (“make disciples” [matheteusate]), and therefore like Matt 2:13 and Acts 10:13 (and others!) it is best understood as a participle of attendant circumstance. According to Wallace, virtually all aorist participle + aorist imperative constructions in New Testament narrative function this way (ibid., 642 n. 71). In other words, this was a normal way of expressing a compound imperative, especially when a verb of motion (e.g., “rise,” “get up,” “go”) is involved.

Consequently, we need not worry that the majority of our English translations have mistakenly rendered this participle in the Great Commission as a command. In this commission Jesus is indeed commanding his followers both to “go” and “make disciples” of all nations. This is not describing an action that Jesus’ followers are to engage in as they happen to go about their lives wherever they may be, but rather a strategic effort that the church as a whole is to pursue in order to represent Jesus’ kingly authority across creation.

When one spends time reading the New Testament in Greek and observing the variety of uses that participles have, one is able to guard against importing English-based syntactic assumptions into Greek participial constructions and thereby avoid misinterpreting the text at this exegetical level.

In one sense, I’m not especially qualified to write a post giving advice on writing sermons in another language. After all, I have a whopping one sermon in Japanese under my belt. But the process that has led up to this single sermon has taught me something about writing a sermon in another language that I believe is helpful to share.

The First Try

Last winter, the pastor of our church asked me to preach the following summer. I was grateful for the opportunity, and because I had nearly six months of lead time, I thought, “I think I can pull off a sermon in Japanese!” So I chose a sermon I had in my files and a bilingual friend very kindly offered to translate it for me. I had heard that this is what other foreign missionaries do to preach in Japanese, so I didn’t really consider doing anything differently.

When I received the translated sermon back, however, I encountered two major difficulties as I tried to prepare to preach it.

The first difficulty is one that is perhaps unique to Japanese, or at least to languages like Japanese that employ multiple scripts. Because my translator didn’t know what kanji (i.e., complicated-looking Chinese characters that are incorporated into Japanese) I knew, she wrote the Japanese manuscript completely in hiragana (one of two phonetic Japanese scripts). On the one hand, this made it possible for me to sound out the words that I didn’t previously know—which is impossible to do with kanji—but on the other hand it made the manuscript more difficult to read, since it was harder to differentiate between one word and the next. If you know Japanese, you know what I’m talking about; if you don’t know Japanese, don’t worry, this won’t really affect your life in any way. So that was problem #1: difficulty reading the manuscript because of the script.

The second difficulty was my inability to preach the sermon well because of a lack of familiarity with the Japanese terms, and in some cases, the grammar used. My translator’s work, of course, was fantastic Japanese, but the problem was that I’m not as fantastic at Japanese as my translator. Even though I could sound out the syllables, because I didn’t understand the meaning of each and every term, I wasn’t able to speak the words with any kind of fluidity. I’ve realized that in order to say something with conviction and fluency, I don’t simply need to know the sound of the script, I need to know the meaning of the words I’m saying.

I began to look up words I didn’t know, but the process of looking up so many words, writing them down, and then memorizing them became too much to manage. There were a lot of words I didn’t know, so eventually I gave up, realizing that I didn’t have the time required to learn that sermon. Since I didn’t want to get up in the pulpit and awkwardly struggle through reading Japanese that I didn’t understand, when the time came to preach I did it in English and a Japanese friend interpreted for me.

The Second Try

This past fall, a friend at this same church was involved in organizing the church’s Christmas concert. She asked me if I would be willing to preach a sermon at this concert. Once again, I wanted to preach in Japanese, but after my experience in the spring I knew that the first process wouldn’t work.

So I tried a different approach: I wrote the sermon completely in Japanese. That is, there was no English version of the sermon; I composed it in Japanese myself with terms and grammar that I already knew. Occasionally I would have to look up and learn a new word that I wanted to use, but there were only a handful of those. Each week I met with my Japanese tutor, who went over what I had written that week and helped me iron out the various infelicities that arose in my composition. From the very beginning this was a sermon that I understood in Japanese. For me, this was the key to preaching it.

The fact that I composed the Japanese sermon myself solved the two difficulties I mentioned above. From the beginning I was able to incorporate kanji that I knew, which helped to distinguish the words in the manuscript. But beyond that, I was even able to use kanji that I didn’t previously know because I knew the content of what I wanted to say. That is, I knew all the Japanese terms that I used, so even if I didn’t know the kanji characters beforehand, this broader context of understanding enabled me to read the text anyways. This meant that not only was I able to read the text much more easily, I actually learned new kanji throughout the process.

This self-composition also solved the problem of my not wanting to be restricted to reading the Japanese manuscript in an awkward, clunky fashion. Because I understood every single word in the sermon, I was able to preach it with conviction. Of course, when the time came to preach, the execution was much more difficult than when I preach in English. I was more tied to the manuscript than usual and my speech suffered from the usual effects of speaking a second language. However, the difference between my preaching in Japanese vs. English became a matter of degree rather than a being a different sort of activity altogether. I wasn’t simply reading a sermon, I was actually preaching it.

In Conclusion

So for any of you entering the world of preaching in a foreign language, perhaps my experience may be of some help. I realize that what works for me may not work for everyone, but I expect that for some, composing your foreign language sermon directly in that foreign language will help you communicate the Gospel message more clearly and naturally.

As the time comes for us to move to Japan (flying out March 1!), we thought we’d share some photos of our new home with you. This house has been a huge provision; it’s only 3 blocks from our language school and 3 blocks from Lydia’s kindergarten. We are very excited about being able to walk most places we need to go!

This is a shot of the outside of the house (the front door is on the left behind the wall). It’s on a corner lot, with mostly other homes surrounding it. Behind this camera shot is a small apartment complex, so we’ll have lots of neighbors!

This is a view of the back of the house. We have space to park two cars, though we’ll probably only own one. On the second story you can see the nice, large deck that connects to both upstairs bedrooms.

To the left is the front door and to the right is the entrance hall. People don’t wear shoes indoors in Japan, so the entrance hall is where everyone will remove their shoes before coming in.

This is one of two bedrooms downstairs, known as a tatami room. Tatami refers to the type of flooring in the room. The house has two bedrooms downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs.

This is the dining room, which is right next to the tatami room in the picture above. Easy access to breakfast for whoever ends up with that room!

Last but not least, here is a pic of the bathroom. On top of the toilet you can see a little sink. In Japan, when you flush the toilet, this little sink runs water, which you then use to wash your hands as you straddle the swirling toilet bowl!

It’s an interesting experience the first time you do it, though it certainly is space efficient!

We are very thankful for God’s providence in this and look forward to making this house our home!

Many thanks to Yasuyo Kawai, who has done a ton of work for us to get this house and very kindly took all these pictures.

 

We in the Newkirk clan are nearing our departure for Japan, and as we stand here toward the end of this preparation journey, I thought I’d say a word about missions and (grand)parents. I say (grand)parents here to refer to the parents of missionaries and, more significantly, the grandparents of missionary kids.

As we have gone through this season of support raising, it has become very clear that this whole missions thing is not something we have gotten only ourselves into. It is something that substantially affects our larger families, and our parents in particular.

We currently live about 15 minutes from my (Matt’s) parents, and over this last year and a half they have played a critical role in helping us get ready for the mission field. There has been practical support, such as the multitudinous times they have taken care of our kids so we could travel to an agency training event or attend to something in town that we both needed to go to. But equally as important, they have provided consistent emotional support as we have traversed the peaks and valleys of gathering a support team.

All of this has been enormously significant, not only because of pragmatic needs on our part, but because my parents are essentially helping us take their grandchildren away from them. They are serving us in order to sacrifice proximity to every empty nester’s dream: grandbabies. Of course, they have other grandchildren in town, which I’m thankful for, but it is no small thing to bless and assist the removal of one’s grandkids, period.

In contrast to this, I’ve heard multiple stories over the years of would-be missionaries who were discouraged and sometimes even dissuaded from moving overseas because of pressure from their parents and guilt over “taking the grandkids away.” While this type of sentiment is understandable from a worldly standpoint, ultimately it does not rightly prioritize God over family. In Matt 10:37 Jesus says,

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

I think we can safely extend this principle to include, “whoever loves grandson or granddaughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

If you are the (grand)parent of a missionary or potential missionary, you are in a unique position either to supremely bless or deeply discourage your children as they respond to God’s call to the mission field. For those who are inclined to try and retain proximity to your children and grandchildren, think about what Jesus will say to you when you face Him beyond this life. Could it be said that you loved Him more than son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter? Will you joyfully bless and assist your children in taking your grandchildren away from you for the sake of the gospel and the glory of God?

I hope you will, and I am forever grateful that my parents have modeled this kind of sacrifice for us.

It was most poignantly on a flimsy folding chair in the middle of a dirt “field” in Juarez, Mexico that I (Caroline) began to grasp the concept that the church is far more than a building. It was a Sunday morning, and I was 18, on a short-term mission trip. As our church’s mission team gathered for worship with our Mexican brothers and sisters, I marveled at the bond we shared in Christ that transcended linguistic, cultural and economic barriers. Somehow, too, this experience of Sunday worship felt especially appropriate under a beautiful blue sky–a vaulted ceiling of the most majestic and awe-inspiring kind, created by the One whom we worshiped.

My subsequent college years were ones of concentrated spiritual growth. I was full of insecurities and felt my perpetual singleness (and the sudden loss of my father as an early teenager) acutely, and God met me in the pain, sin, and unfulfilled longings of my heart. A huge introvert, I filled volumes of journals with soul-searching reflections, struggles, and prayers. Although I had been a Christian since middle school, I began reading my Bible almost for the first time. Through my doubts and insecurities, God spoke to me afresh with the soothing balm of the Gospel.

Slowly but steadily, a deepening sense of peace, joy, and purpose in my identity in Him began to quiet my tumultuous heart and mind. He gave me believing friends and roommates who challenged and encouraged me in my faith. Once I realized weakness was an acceptable (even healthy) posture for ministry, I felt free to become involved in a number of ministries in my local church. I learned that I was not gifted in all of them, but I enjoyed each opportunity to serve Jesus through loving the people around me. I grew to deeply appreciate the older men and women, both church staff and lay people, who modeled Christian maturity to me through their words and actions.

In fact, many of these people had been there all along; I had just taken them for granted. In my own family there are generations of believers as far back as I am aware. I was raised in the southeastern U.S. and had grown up going to church. Sunday School, smiles, sermons, singing. Yet now (for a variety of reasons), I was seeing the church with new eyes. As I viewed it through the lens of the Bible and further life experience, it was like a budding flower whose beauty was slowly unfolding. I saw, and rejoiced at the privilege of participating in, the beautiful mess of sinners saved by grace, ministering to others out of their own weakness and God’s strength. I saw a body with many parts, people uniquely gifted and serving in dramatically different ways. I saw a foretaste of God’s coming kingdom on earth as Jesus brought truth, forgiveness, restoration, and hope to people, through His people. And I saw it all over the world.

Every time I traveled, which seemed to be frequently (an interest in missions, a French/Spanish major, and a brother who lived in Singapore contributed to my passport stamps), I rejoiced in the unity of believers in Jesus that transcends all cultural barriers. My favorite part about visiting a foreign country quickly became going to church on Sunday. What did church look like in a Senegalese village suffering from famine? In a tiny farming town in the Swiss Alps? In the thriving metropolis of Nagoya, Japan?

The answer to this last question surprised me. It came in 2008, several years after my college graduation, when I found myself on a “vision trip” to Japan with my husband of three years. Although I had felt God’s nudging toward missions for many years by this point, I was rather shocked that He seemed to be calling Matt & me to Japan, of all places. I had always pictured myself doing some kind of mercy ministry in a developing country. I could speak French (so, Haiti or West Africa seemed reasonable) and some Spanish (hello, Central and South America!). This new sense of call, however, was destroying my missions paradigm. Not only did I not know a lick of Japanese, what I did know about Japan didn’t attract me, given my previous ministry experience and desires. Japan is economically prosperous. The Japanese are very well educated. They’re technologically advanced. They have excellent health care.  They’re quiet. They’re impeccably clean. They’re polite. The whole country runs on time, if not early.  (In dramatic contrast, I will likely be late to my own funeral.) What could I have to offer them?

As I learned some of the statistics on Christianity (and the lack thereof) in Japan, then began to put faces with those statistics, God began working in my heart to show me that the Japanese are among the neediest people on earth when it comes to the life and death matter of knowing Jesus Christ. The spiritual darkness in the country is palpable. There are over 150,000 cults registered with the Japanese government. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Voluntary teenage prostitution is common, not to mention the country’s history of human trafficking and child pornography. Did you know there is a large and influential Japanese mafia? There are many wonderful things about Japan, but beneath the country’s veneer of perfection there is a depth of depravity that is only explicable in light of Scripture. Like Americans, the Japanese need Jesus; they’re desperate for Him.  Yet unlike most Americans, most Japanese have no idea who He is.

The evangelical church in Japan is tiny. It has a long history, but has perpetually struggled in the face of spiritual opposition. It is this church our family wants to serve. Humbly, realizing we have so much to learn from our Japanese brothers and sisters along the way. Our primary role of service will be helping to build the Japanese church via the indirect avenue of theological education. Yet, we also desire to simply be present, members of Jesus’ global church, serving in our new local church environment however we can, perhaps sometimes simply by sharing our Christian heritage. Such a heritage probably won’t be taken for granted in an environment where Christian families (in which both spouses know Jesus), much less generations of believers, are rare.

We’ve been told that simply living life as a Christian family, seeking to raise our children in the Lord, and inviting Japanese friends and neighbors into our home will be a huge ministry in itself. As I think of the multitude of believers God has used to influence me spiritually from childhood onward, I can’t imagine where I would be without them. He provided Christian teachers and mentors, friends’ parents and my own, and many other believers, to love, instruct, and encourage me over the years. They showed me (often unknowingly) what walking with God looks like on a daily basis. Countless brothers and sisters in Christ demonstrated His love to my family in a myriad of practical ways following the tragic deaths of each of my parents. What if I had been born into a typical Japanese family and these types of people simply hadn’t existed?

Will you pray for Japan?  Will you consider helping us serve there?