Put Priorities Back Into Relationships
A full-time housewife is making a cake wearing an apron in the kitchen of her own house looking out onto a large yard. Her husband is enjoying a chat with their children in the big living room. This was the ideal life presented by the media in movies, magazines, and family life TV dramas. Between the postwar period and the period of high growth, this ideal family model was based upon the image of white middle-class suburban residents in the prewar days of America. In addition, commercial messages showed married couples happily drinking coffee together, causing Japanese people to dream of a perfect family that was gradually getting richer economically as well as emotionally (Sodegawa, Hanashima and Morizumi, 2005).
That dream was largely reached until the 1970’s. Most Japanese felt that they were approaching the dream because they could move to a better house, buy electric appliances, and educate their children to have successful academic careers. Once the recession started, however, many people lost the economic foundation of that dream. In the 90’s, most families gave up chasing that dream in the economic sphere, and only a small number of the upper class were able to reach it. However, they still held on to the dream to have quality time with their family members. Being influenced by media like family life TV dramas, a new expectation emerged that the members of a family should feel affection for one another.
In the high-growth period, Husbands’ role was to work hard outside of the home and to earn wages in order to buy electrical appliances, and to be able to make a down payment for a new home, while the wives’ role was to administrate the family budget and to do their best to keep house and take care of the children. In the low-growth period, men’s employment situation became increasingly unstable and they could not expect to have an ever-increasing standard of living. Japanese people realized that their marriage relationships were dependent on the shaky foundation of their divided roles. For that reason, husbands and wives expected more than just divided roles from each other. Now they wanted quality communication. This higher expectation required the Japanese families to step beyond their traditional roles. They needed to travel together, go shopping and do leisure activities together, and enjoy hobbies, conversation and sex together. These new behaviors needed to engage their emotions and cause them to feel that their partner was “likable". If they could not have such an emotion, their relationships got worse and worse. In 1990, the divorce rate climbed rapidly. Now Japanese couples have a series of problems: divorce at a young age, domestic violence, child abuse, and withdrawal from society.
I have a pastor friend, whose name is Keishi. Keishi used to have many problems in his marriage. He often criticized his wife, Kazumi, in front of the church people, and blamed her in a loud voice. When he was a university student, he won first prize in martial arts, so his attitude toward Kazumi was like he treated the former lower ranking members of his martial arts club. He was a typical Japanese husband. He thought that he played enough of a role as a husband by working hard outside of his family setting. He never imagined that he had to do anything more in order to have quality communication with his wife. One day, Keishi’s friend, who had recently been divorced, asked Keishi if his marriage relationship was OK. The friend told him, “You are just like I was with my wife.” Keishi was shocked and began to worry about his marriage. Then he visited me with his wife to ask for help. My wife and I were doing an accountability group for marriage couples, called the “Three Dailies”, and had found it useful for our marriage to become a healthier couple. So, I recommended that Keishi and Kazumi start it.
Christian Counselor Douglas Weiss insists that many marriages have little to no structure to encourage intimacy in their relationship (Weiss, 2001). Passion in marriage is a result of making intimacy a priority for life. Passion is a dividend that comes from making consistent investments in the priorities of a marriage relationship. Many couples try to get the passion back into their relationship, when what they need to do is to get their priorities back. Once you re-establish the priority of the relationship, the passion naturally follows and grows. One way to do this is by using the "three daily exercises". Each couple agrees to perform three simple daily exercises to the best of their abilities as a couple: pray together, clearly express their feelings for one another, and encourage and praise one another. They should attempt to make this a top priority in their schedule.
Weiss likes to share an analogy of broken bone and a cast. When your bone is broken, the doctor applies a structural treatment to your structural problem in the form of cast. “The cast is a structural treatment that allows the bone to heal. The cast itself is just plastic or plaster, and it has no healing properties. But when it is applied to a broken bone to hold the bone in place, surprise; Healing can and does happen. The same thing happens when you place the priorities back into your marriage. No matter how sprained or broken a marriage is, healing can and does take place.” (Weiss, 2001: 154) Attending marriage seminars might provide a clue for their future solution, but it is not enough. A structure is needed where couples can mentally focus their attention to put right insight into right practice in their daily lives.
What happened to Keishi and Kazumi? They faithfully incorporated the three dailies into their lives. They came to understand each other better. Keishi said, “Now I can accept my own wounds and weaknesses, and realize her pains and grief. One day God told me that you were created to bear her pain together. I found my heart filled with a passion for her.” Kazumi said, “I was amazed to feel so many emotions in my daily life, as well as to find many new aspects in Keishi. The more I know him, the closer I feel to him. It is like falling in love the second time.” It was difficult work at first, but it became easier over time, and now it has become a core value for both of them. They experienced not only a restored relationship as a couple, but also as a family. Keishi said, “I woke up at midnight and looked at my wife and our four children sleeping in the same room. I thought that I could die for them. It was the natural flow of my thoughts. However, I could not have said such a thing before our marriage was restored.” Their children also found a new sense of peace in their relationship with their parents and with each other. Blessings overflowed from the restored couple to their children.
Intimate Family Model
If Japanese people really seek to have relational intimacy among family members, they need to give up on trying to be rich, and prioritize building up their spouses with prayer, sharing and accepting of emotions, and affirming their love by giving and receiving praise. When the couple becomes healthier, they can become a good team in helping each other to raise up their children. When their children observe how their parents express intimacy in their daily life, they will have dignity and hope in their own lives. They could potentially form their own families after the ones in which they were raised. If family life TV dramas and commercial messages from a coffee company could imprint the ideal family image for the Japanese, how much more impact they will have when they have a real experience of intimacy in their family life. The DNA of intimacy will be planted in the families of the younger generation.
John White, a coach for house church planters, believes that the “Three Dailies” will be used not only to heal dysfunctional families, but also to bless all the families of the earth through healed families. He insisted that marriage is the basic discipleship group as well as the first and most foundational expression of the church. He encourages many Christian couples to start the “Three Dailies” and share their story with other couples to facilitate and train them to plant a church in their own home. Couples are trained and are accountable to other couples in the small church that meets in their living room. It is called an MTG, or Marriage Transformation Group (White, 2003). This group meets weekly and functions as a kind of house church. The benefits are: 1) each couple gets healthier, 2) each couple comes to the larger house church gatherings with significant needs already met, which results in healthier and more positive meetings, and 3) there is potential for rapid multiplication of churches because it is easy to teach other couples about practicing the basic disciplines and about being church.
This kind of healed community would be highly contagious in Japan because it is what people have been consistently seeking since the time of the last world war. Healed couples will multiply by sparking other couples to do the same thing. There is no need to train teachers or to produce textbooks. When a couple experiences intimacy through doing the “Three Dailies,” it is easy for them to teach a new couple because it is simple, organic and realistic. There is potential to multiply rapidly as a grass-roots movement. Now is the time to present this “Intimate Family Model” to Japanese society with testimonies by ordinary Christian couples. I believe that this model will appeal to many young couples who have little or no hope to maintain the living standard that their parents had. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3) The economic recession is a blessing for Japanese in the spiritual realm because they have an opportunity to see the kingdom of heaven expand through intimate family relationships of Christian couples.
In order to implement this new family model into Japanese society, Christians in Japan need a huge paradigm shift. We have been trained to think that church life is made up of religious programs led by sacred clergy in a holy church building. We thought that evangelism was inviting in evangelists twice a year. However, while we were involved in the religious programs in the church buildings on Sunday as well as possibly on Wednesday night, our family life was largely neglected. The same problems in the secular world are taking place in church, too. We have been suffering with ecclesiological dualism.
Marvin R. Wilson shares many practical teachings of marriage and the family for today’s Christian church from a Hebrew perspective. He asserts “the dinner table of the home became, as it were, the altar of the Temple.” (Wilson, 1989: 215) Eating is a spiritual instrument for religious service. At the table, the family sings while the father served as priest instructing his family in the words of the Scripture. The home reflecting God’s glory through prayer and praise was the original form of Christian community. We have missed the most powerful evangelistic weapon, that is, “a changed family life.” We rarely see couples who express their love toward their spouses in an adequate way. Roger Gehring correctly insists that houses served as bases of operations and meeting places for prayer, table fellowship, and teaching in the missional outreach of Jesus’ disciples (Gehring, 2004:295; cf. White, 2008). We need to renounce this dualism and reunite church with family, in order for the home to function as a house of prayer, as a house of study and as a house of assembly where community needs can be served. May all the couples in Japan experience Jesus among them, and function as the 24/7 Embassy of the Kingdom of God, in order to see the promise fulfilled, that "All the families of the earth will be blessed through you" (Genesis. 12:3).
Applications for Japan
Several couples have already experienced a new season in their marriage relationships through their steady practice of the “three dailies” but they have yet to release the potential of this new movement. Many Japanese couples, once they start the three dailies, taste the joyful fruit of restored relationships, but then stop after a couple of months. The reasons for their leaving off are probably three dimensional. The first dimension is an incomplete motivation to start the three dailies. A healthy relationship with their spouse at all costs is not enough for them. If the couple did not agree to invest the time for this exercise as their top priority for at least 100 days, they will not reap what they sow. The second dimension is a lacking of the vision to see that all the families of the earth would be blessed through restored families. Thus, the husband or wife is not understanding the contagiousness of the simple obedience that comes from loving their neighbour, which would be their spouse in these occasions. The third dimension is an insufficient support system for these couples. They need to be part of a spiritual, extended family where they can see, experience and be encouraged by models of intimate relationships in other couples who are already doing the three dailies regularly. Then they would be able to keep on trying to do the three dailies until these skills become a permanent, positive part of their marriage.
At least three measures should be taken for future development. First, both of the spouses need to have a written agreement to start the three dailies by a certain time over the next one hundred days. If they have an alternative timeframe, then that would be helpful, too. Secondly, the couple should be challenged to pray not only for their relationship but also their entire family. To pray in this way would help them to remind them that others need to be saved also. If the couple gets to know Jesus through seeing the intimate relationships of other couples, it would be easier for them to reproduce the process. They could do the same thing for other couples as they have learned from their mentors. Thirdly, accountability should be employed. The couple should decide together, and write down who their accountability person would be, how they will meet, making phones call and timing, etc. For example, if they agree together to implement an outside source of accountability if they miss more than three days of the three daily exercises, it would increase their motivation.
A longer version of this paper will be published by William Carey Library in early 2010 as a chapter A longer version of this paper will be published by William Carey Library in early 2010 as a chapter for the latest volume in the Buddhist World series, which includes Sharing Jesus in the Buddhist World, Sharing Jesus Holistically with the Buddhist World, Sharing Jesus Effectively in the Buddhist World and Communicating Christ in the Buddhist World (cf. http://missionbooks.org/williamcareylibrary/home.php?cat=38).
Bibliographic List
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White, John, “A New Kind of LTG,” An e-mail letter in a personal E-List, named “House Church Coach”, April 30th, 2003.
White, John, “Gehring: Church Centered in the Home,” LK10.com, 2008 http://lk10.com/practices-and-patterns/simple-church/gehring--church-centered-in-the-home.html
Wilson, Marvin R. Our Father Abraham: Jewish Roots of the Christian Faith, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989.
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