Why a blog about the church in rural Japan

Being the first blog post, I felt the need to give some background as to why we started this blog.
Many people are aware of the urban sprawl in Japan withut being aware that there is a rural population. Japan is divided into 47 prefectures with a total population of 126.5 million people. Each prefecture is divided into cities with 99.5 million people and districts with 27 million people. The cities have an urban 82% and a non-urban 18% division. Therefore the total of the non-urban and the district populations end up with a whopping 40 million people- one third of the population.
Why do we find this challenging? The reason is that most rural areas have no church that preaches Jesus. On top of this, most established churches in the cites and most mission organizations do not have the rural population on their radar.
So by informing peple of need, we are hoping that many will commit to prayer, and that of those some will get involved in short term or career mission so that people will meet Jesus and churches will be established.

We have been involved in church planting in rural Japan for 20 years. It has been the most challenging and thrilling thing we could have ever committed our lives to. For more info check out our website.