earticle

영어

The Japanese Non-church movement was found in 1901 by Uchimura Kanzo, and since then has spread count for at one 20% of the Japanese Protestants, and is now also seen in Korea and Taiwan. This paper looks into the development of the Non-church movement, and its theology. Uchimura argued that people must stay pure to the two J’s of their lives, Japan and Jesus, and therefore wanted to create a Japan-style Christianity. Uchimura refused to accept the separation of professional and formal characteristics of Western Christianity and saw this institutional character as something useless to the Japanese people. He argued that the original core of Christianity must be applied to oneself. At the time, Uchimura understood the core of Christianity to be proving the existence of Jesus Christ in our everyday lives by becoming one with Christ. For such faith, one would have to practice the words of God every day by reading the bible and interacting with God face to face. Uchimura thought Church as such free and responsible actions of faith to be of a volunteered formation of a society. Therefore, the church was a secondary issue to Uchimura. He argued against the structuralized churches, sacrament-ism and holy orders-hierachy. He didn't want Non-church to be a church of no baptism, no Holy communions, or no clergies, or no theologies. Such arguments of Uchimura for Non-church was based on the belief that people could stand as free individuals within their correspondence with God. The Non-church movement was able to block the formation of institutionalism and maintain a non-institutional characteristic based on their frequent evocation and inspiration of the individual members’ sprituality. In today Japanese society, the idea of Non-church destructs rather than maintain Churches and fulfills Christianity through biblical studies about objectivity and self determination, and daily life that practices such ideas. This provides a possibility of Christianity standing as a ideological movement that does not need institutionalized organization or structure.