"When I stopped doing Dendo".

16 October 2011

Dear Phyllis,

I'm having an interesting time at the New Creation Church Bible School teaching a course on evangelism. I told them at the beginning that evangelism is a subject about which I unqualified to teach. Forty years ago I was an authority and could answer any question. Today I have more questions than answers. I doubt that anyone else is getting much out of it, but I find it very refreshing for myself to teach that subject.

I spent four weeks just talking about the introduction of Why to evangelize. I said there are there reason why people evangelize. One is for self –to make OUR church bigger. The second is humanistic. It is because sinners are in bad shape and we don't want to see then go to hell. The third is for the Savior's sake. It is because Jesus shed His Blood to buy humanity back to the Father. We discussed the Lord's prayer and examined how our first and most passionate concern should be for he honor and glory of God. Hollowed be Thy Name. Secondly our goal should be for the extension of His Kingdom. Thy Kingdom come. And thirdly the compass of everything should be that the will of God is being done. Thy will be done. I feel very intense about this subject. If this is not the driving engine for everything we do in life, I wonder if we are actually serving the Lord, or just doing our own thing.

The fifth week I discussed the command to evangelize by reviewing the first five chapters of Acts. We saw that the enemy's primary tact is to silence us; and when the angel of the Lord got the apostles out of the slammer in the middle of the night, his command was “So, stand, speak” (Acts 5:20). This is a command that is incumbent upon all of us. This is the will of God for all of us – go, stand, and speak. I told about JB Friend and his vow to open his mouth to the Lord and verbally share Christ. It was like death to him, but he saw hundreds –perhaps thousands brought into the Kingdom through his ministry.

This last week I told them, “In all likelihood there is nothing I will say to you about evangelism that you don't already know. The problem isn't that we don't know that we should witness, but we just don't do it.” I said, “All that I taught them last week could be summed up in two words consisting of only four letters – DO IT!” The reason that church is not growing is because they aren't doing it.

I told them about churches I have been in in China where you couldn't get in the building because it was packed inside, and they had 50 chairs outside for people who couldn't get inside. I told them about Kichijoji where they have a church that could hold 200 people but there were 400 people jammed inside, and twenty more standing outside in the rain with umbrellas worshiping God. I mean to tell you that place is phenomenon the likes of which is seen in no other place in Japan! Inside that building every Sunday is just like a Tokyo commuter train. People are standing is every square inch. They are sitting on the stairs, the hall is packed, and you can't go the toilet because five people are jammed in there. I told the people that Thailand is no more difficult than Japan. Actually Japan is a harder place to evangelize than Thailand. And they could have the same thing in Mae Jo if they witnessed like they do in Kichijoji.

Gotthold Beck is arguably the finest missionary in post-war Japan. And he may be the best missionary that ever served the Lord in Japan. When he first came to Japan in 1953 he had a brief stop in Hong Kong. While there he was introduced to the work of Watchman Nee's Little Flock. He purposed at that time, when he got to Japan he wold try to let that be his model for evangelism. His first eleven years he was with German Lebenzellor Mission. That was 11 years of a running war. In his first five years he started three churches, baptized over 75 believers, put 11 young men in Bible school, and buried a son. There was no missionary in Lebenzellor that came close to his production, and he was continually at war with the field counsel over missionary tacts and policy.

After 11 years he quit Lebenzellor to go on on his own. He had zero support and everyone said he would starve. He joined himself to the Plymouth Brethren missionaries and got a house in Kichijoji that some missionaries had had for several years, but never got anything going. Gotthold began teaching German and English in a few universities and soon had a handful of young men saved. I was very close to Gotthold in the early years when he first got things going in Kichijoji. There were about 20 young folks who would gather each Sunday to have a Brethren type of worship service. I the late 1970s Gotthold got into high gear and pulled a stunt like I had never heard of. He had a week of special evangelistic meetings every cotton picken month for 36 months straight!

Practically every decent church I knew in Japan would have a week of special dendo (evangelism) at least once a year. This seemed to be something Pastor Bayun of the New Creation Church had never heard of. I said, “You contact the top evangelist in Thailand, mobilize everyone in your church to make a max effort to invite all their friends, neighbors, and relative to come to the church for special meetings.” Every night is a special dendo kai where the top speaker preaches the Gospel and an invitation is given for salvation.

In the 70s we had a terrific combination going in Karuizawa. Dick Dennis was there going wide out working with high school and university students. He had Japanese kids coming out his ears'. Poor Millie, when she went to bed at night, she never knew how many would be there for breakfast. They would come in in the middle of the night, and sleep on the floor. His car made so many trips to the eki (train station), all he had to do was hit the ignition, and the car could drive by itself to the eki. Pastor Takahashi was a very good pastor at the Fukuin Kyokai (Gospel Church). Dick would take all his kids over there for church on Sunday. And once a years Brother Takahashi would have Takimoto sensei come for special meetings. He was excellent in drawing the net. One night I was having an all night prayer meeting with about 30 people. I asked each one to give a brief testimony on how they got saved. Two thirds of the people there had been saved through Takimoto.

Gotthold Beck did this only he did it every month for three years! When Gotthold told me what he was doing I was shocked. I said, “You will kill everybody! No one can stand that kind of pressure”. Gotthold replied that his purpose was to keep the people so busy doing dendo that they wouldn't have time to fight.

For a few years I drifted out of contact with Gotthold, but in the mid 1980s got back in fellowship. Kichijoji had exploded! It was then that they had grown to over 400 each Sunday with people standing outside who physically couldn't get in the building. Not only there, but the Kichijoji movement had gone nation wide, and was running in the thousands

I was personally involved in the phenomenon of what happened in Kobe. Sister Koyama had been saved 14 years previously in Tokyo. When her husband went to be with the Lord, she returned to her home in Kobe. She went to a few traditional Japanese churches but wasn't satisfied. She called Gotthold asking his advice. He said, “Why don't you start your own meeting there in Kobe?” Sister Koyama lived in one small apartment and rented another one beside hers. Brethren policy is that there are no pastors, and the Bible teaches that women should be silent. Sister Koyama got a couple of ordinary brothers to come to her apartment to have meetings for her. We were there in the early days when there were only about 10 people sitting on the floor. Man howdy, you never saw anything like it in your life. The women were silent. The men could do only one of three things. Someone could say a prayer, read a verse from the Bible, or ask for a hymn out of the seika (hymnal). There was no leader, no piano, no structure; but – oh my goodness –the presence e of the Lord was overwhelming! For one year I was never at a meeting that you couldn't look around the room and see tears pouring down the faces of Christians as they read and sang about Jesus. That place exploded from five or six to over one hundred in a year. Those were some of the best services I was ever in. I have never been in a fellowship of Christians who were more on fire for the Lord.

A Pentecostal pastor called me one night and said, “Cook san, I understand you know something about Kichijoji. Could I see you to talk about it?” I was living by myself in those days, and asked Miyuki Hirota to have Pastor Ijima for supper. Without telling me, she also invited another Kichijoji brother to come to share that night. I held my breath. Kichijoji is adamantly opposed to Pentecostalism. Anything Pentecostal is of the devil. How these brothers were going to handle a Pentecostal pastor staggered my imagination But I sat there in silence for three hours with tears running down my face watching something that I never thought I would see outside of heaven. Those three men had fellowship in Christ of the highest order. At 10:00 o'clock Pastor Ijima took the breath away from me. He is the finest Pentecostal pastor I have ever met. I mean he is truly outstanding. That huge man of God said to Hirota and Yamashina san, “I acknowledge what you all have is the Holy Spirit. Could you tell me how I could have more of Christ?” Crash! I never heard a remark like that in my life.

It has been years since I have had any contact with Kichijoji. I have no idea how they are doing. But in their golden moment, when they went from a handful to thousands, I asked Gotthold, “What is the secrete of your success?” He said, “When I stopped doing dendo.” He said for 36 months he had ONE evangelist come for a week of special meetings. But when he quit EVERYONEbecame an evangelist. That is true. Everyone in Kichijoji was an evangelist. Everyone was wining souls.

If that happened in the New Creation church, maybe they would have people standing outside who couldn't get in the building. But realistically it isn't that easy. There is no question in my mind what happened at Kichijoji was not a sincere missionary doing evangelism a certain way. It could only be described as a moving of the Holy Spirit. I told the believers in that day, “Don't think the secrete of your success is because you are worshiping the Lord in a certain way.” This is not“yarikata” (way of doing things) .This is the Holy Spirit moving in your midst.”

I told the folks last Tuesday of a couple of other places that I personally knew that experienced phenomenal growth and then completely disintegrated. Leo Kaylor's work in Kyushu went to from 800 to 12 believers in a short time. Jim Norton's church in Osaka went from 100 to 5 in three weeks when Jim got sick and had to leave Japan. In 53 years of serving the Lord in the Orient I have seen a lot of evangelism. Psalm 127:1 is correct. “Except the Lord build the house they labor in vain that build it.” The folks at New Creation Church have asked me to come to teach them HOW to do evangelism. I won't teach them HOW, but if I can get them more in touch with Jesus, maybe He can do something through them.

Tonikaku (anyway) this is a good time for me. Praise God.

bill