Stay with EFCC ServeBeyond? - Mar 2025
22 Mar 2025Asia Serve Beyond | TMC
In light of the EFC of Canada’s mid-January decision to lay off all salaried Canadian ServeBeyond missionaries, we had hoped to transfer our church planting project, Tokyo Multicultural Church, from EFCC ServeBeyond to EFC America ReachGlobal. This would mean transferring TMC ServeBeyond missionaries (3 households, soon to be 4). We were thinking it would be good to belong to a mission agency that continues to send salaried missionaries. However, on March 14 when we were finally able to dialogue with the Asia Division leaders of ReachGlobal it became clear that ReachGlobal could not become our landing place.
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To move to ReachGlobal (RG), TMC would need to disband our current leadership team including having Dale step down from leadership; no longer rent the first floor of a business building; stop gathering for weekly Sunday worship services and other Sunday ministries including children’s ministries (as well as midweek gatherings); and discard our vision of becoming an EFC of Japan church. Instead, TMC would need to be subsumed under RG's Tokyo City Team “small church” with its weekly home meetings and monthly larger gatherings, serving under its leadership structure. TMC would become multiple home meetings within RG’s Tokyo City Team.
RG is not open to the idea of two kinds of ministries in Tokyo. RG's one ministry in Tokyo is Tokyo City Team’s “small church.” By contrast, our vision is to see TMC established as an EFC of Japan church even though it is taking some time because we are uniquely multicultural. And we hope to launch a second TMC. Our desire is to come alongside the other EFCJ churches in Tokyo trying to reach the world’s largest megacity of 37 million people.
So we have decided not to deconstruct TMC in order to fit into an incompatible paradigm.
This is a possibility because TMC missionaries, including ourselves, are not Canada tax payers. That is, we at TMC are all exceptions to the EFCC decision to lay off Canadian salaried SB missionaries. We are learning to give EFCC SB the benefit of the doubt for the sake of moving TMC along toward becoming established. But rather than focussing on where TMC has come from (a sending missionary agency or country) we will focus more on where we are going (becoming an EFCJ church that does not depend on financial subsidy).We are now looking into the feasibility of staying with ServeBeyond (SB)—both TMC as a project and its current SB missionaries.
In this decision making process, which is not yet complete, we have been reminded that ultimately Jesus Christ is the primary Church Planter at TMC. He is the one who has sent us and the other missionaries at TMC, rather than any particular mission agency. We have seen God’s consistent faithfulness to TMC and we can trust that he will continue to be faithful.