Japan Evangelistic Band
| Founded | 1903 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Barclay Fowell Buxton and Paget Wilkes |
| Origins | Keswick Convention, England |
|
Area served
|
Japan |
| Website | [1] |
The Japan Evangelistic Band (JEB), or 'Kyodan Nihon Dendo Tai' (日本伝道隊) in Japanese, is an evangelical Christian group founded in England in 1903 with the original aim to "initiate and sustain evangelistic work among Japanese wherever they are found". Within thirty years the organisation grew to 180 workers from many countries, but most of them from Japan. The JEB's primary field was the Kansai region of South West Japan and the island of Shikoku but missionaries worked among Japanese living on the West Coast of Canada and the USA, and in the UK. In 1999 the organisation in the UK adopted the name Japan Christian Link for their operations in the UK, while work in Japan continue under the name of JEB.
The JEB was founded by the Rev. Barclay Fowell Buxton and Paget Wilkes at the Keswick Convention in 1903 as an evangelising agency to assist existing missions and churches and to organise Christian Conventions for Bible Study and Prayer. Buxton had been an independent missionary in Japan with the British Church Missionary Society since 1890 and had invited Wilkes to join him as a lay helper there in 1897. They worked together at Matsue in Western Japan, before returning to England. Buxton and Wilkes were joined by a small group of friends at the Keswick Convention who shared their concern for evangelism. The group included Thomas Hogben, who had founded the One by One Working Band, a group devoted to personal evangelism. Initially the new mission was known as the One by One Band of Japan, being dedicated to personal holiness and aggressive evangelism. Nine months later, the name was changed to Japan Evangelistic Band.
Wilkes imagined "a band of men ... who detaching themselves from the responsibilities and entanglements of ecclesiastical organisation, would give themselves to prayer and ministry of the Word...". The JEB was set up as a non-denominational fellowship of Japanese and expatriate missionaries who came from North America, South Africa and Australia as well as the British Isles.
In October 1903, Wilkes led the first missionary party to Japan, serving briefly in Yokohama and Tokyo, before moving to Kobe, which became the centre of JEB activity. In 1905 the Kobe Mission Hall and the JEB Kansai Bible College were initiated to train an indigenous ministry to carry on the work in the long term. By the 1920s the JEB decided to launch its own forward outreach work since other missions were then finding their own experts in evangelism and making less use of the JEB. Small teams comprising an overseas missionary with a Japanese worker would participate in pioneer evangelism. They did this in many rural areas as well as in some of the larger towns which had not been exposed to Christian work. Churches were started in about 100 centres and full salvation and missionary literature was printed and circulated. The JEB were anxious to avoid creating another denomination, intending that their churches would be linked with existing Japanese denominational churches. However, the JEB churches conferred and decided they would prefer to be linked in their own denomination. In 1938 many of them withdrew from the denominations they had joined and formed a separate denomination called the Nihon Iesu Kirisuto Kyokwai (NIKK) or Japan Church of Christ.
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Wikipedia