Shige Nakazawa: A Missionary Brought Me to Christ

I was born and raised in a non-Christian Japanese family in Japan. I had no Christian exposure until college when an American missionary reached out to me. I wasn't seeking, but the missionary invited me for English conversation practice. English is my second language, and I really didn't have native friends to practice my English, so I jumped on it. 

His testimony was so strong and impressive. It blew me away. We read the Gospel of John in English and talked about it in English. That was my English practice. Ultimately, the Word of God persuaded me about my sinfulness and slavery to those sins, and five months later, I surrendered my life to Christ. 

A couple months after that, I met my wife. She was teaching English in Tokyo. I was her student, and one day, we were talking about my missionary friend in the classroom, and so she asked me, “Are you Christian?” At that point, I was in a confused state of my faith journey. God really used her to bring me back to Jesus and become passionate about sharing my faith.

My first job was in the Sultanate of Oman in the Arabian Peninsula, but I didn't think it was the kind of work that I would do for the rest of my life. So I prayed, and God led me to study the Bible at Biola University. While attending Biola, my wife and I got married in Iowa, where she’s from.

As a Bible college student, I got connected to Nova Community Church (EFCA). That was my first connection to a Free Church. My wife and I were thinking about going back to Japan to serve as missionaries full-time. One night, God showed up. I couldn't sleep, and He clearly talked to me that I was supposed to go to an unreached part of the world. Japan today is an unreached country—if you go by the Joshua Project’s 2 percent threshold—but I felt like God was leading us somewhere else.

About a month later, I met an American missionary at a Biola missions conference who'd been serving in another unreached country. I learned there were way less believers there than in Japan. We prayed for about six months, and God opened the door. We joined ReachGlobal in 2001 to help plant churches there. Several years into ministry there, people were coming to Christ, but back in my own country, most people did not know the Lord or have eternal life. I started questioning, “What am I doing here?” I prayed for God to open the door to Japan, but it wouldn't open. Then, during a home assignment in 2010, the whole year shifted our hearts' burden, everything converged, and God gave us a clear sense that now was the time to go to Japan. Every door flung open.

In November 2011, we moved to Japan and decided to put prayer at the center of everything we do. As we were praying, it exposed us to the reality of Tokyo—its speed, its immensity, its density. Tokyo is the largest metropolis in the world, with 38 million people, and the cultural epicenter. That led to the birth of what we call the Tokyo Small Church Network. It’s a network of house churches that meet in homes of Tokyo. Tokyo is expensive to build a large church building, but there are a lot of small spaces, either homes or cafes or karaoke boxes, that can be filled with the life of Christ. 

It’s like a sponge. If you try to put a marble in it, there’s no space to fill the sponge, but when you look a little closer, there's a whole bunch of small holes. Each one of the holes can be filled with the life of Christ. Eventually, the whole sponge can be saturated. So, we started meeting in a living room, and today we’re a network of four small churches.

Our vision statement is for God to transform Tokyo through an ever-increasing presence and influence of people who treasure Jesus above all else. So, please pray that we can love Christ above all things. May Christ be our greatest treasure.