The 2000s: the transfer of initiative.

If the 1990s taught Japan's missionary community patience, the 2000s taught it partnership. Across sixty issues, one through-line dominates these pages: the slow, deliberate, often uncomfortable transfer of initiative from foreign missionaries to Japanese believers — and the self-examination that transfer demanded. The decade opened with a movement gathering speed and closed with a movement counting its costs, and Japan Harvest recorded both without flinching.

The early years brimmed with momentum. The Church Planting Institute, born of a single 1993 fax, grew from 40 attendees to 260 by 1999 and past 400 by 2001, with Japanese participation climbing from a handful to nearly fifty in two years. "The whole movement is obviously of God," Steve Childers wrote in Spring 2000. "The wind of God's Spirit is blowing now in Japan, and we are simply putting up our sail and holding on for dear life!" That July, 2,300 Japanese church leaders and some fifty missionaries gathered in Okinawa for the 4th Japan Congress on Evangelism under the theme "Living Together in the Gospel of Reconciliation" — a Japanese-led, Japanese-organized coming of age, where women held Congress leadership for the first time and Okinawan pastors gave wrenching wartime testimony. JEMA marked its own Golden Jubilee in 2001 by mining its archives and honoring its veterans.

Then the mood turned searching. Ken Reddington wrote in detail about handing a church to a Japanese pastor — the attempt that failed and the one that worked. Chuck Burwell reported losing two national pastors in three years and named the causes plainly: vision mismatch, evangelism that stayed "the missionary's thing," loyalty tilted toward missionaries over pastors. An anonymous writer confessed to paternalism, pride, and power. The Japan Missionary Language Institute closed after 35 years. Donnell McLean offered a blunt ten-point account of why fifty postwar years had not produced revival. Even success was reframed: "I am presently a failure at church planting. I have no results," Gary Fujino told a CPI conference in Japanese. "But knowing that God is my 'Daddy' and accepts me despite my present failure helped me to say this."

The middle years reached outward. Black Gospel choirs, the World Cup, the Aichi Expo, The Passion of the Christ, Manga Messiah, prayerwalks through Nikko and the Diet — the community learned to meet Japan where its attention already was. It also learned to grieve with it: the Niigata earthquake birthed CRASH; hikikomori, suicide, and collapsing marriages moved from footnotes to cover features. And it turned a hard eye inward, publishing frankly on spiritual abuse and pastoral authoritarianism in its own churches.

The decade ended in commemoration and argument at once — 150 years of Protestant mission in Japan, marked alongside Scott Parrish's sober reading of the numbers: "The overall picture is of a kingdom that is growing quite slowly and actually declining in many parts of the country."

What the 2000s gave this community was honesty. These pages record a body willing to publish its failures beside its jubilees, to hand over authority before it felt ready, and to keep sowing anyway — trusting, as Kenny and Lila Joseph put it, that "God never orders a great seed-sowing unless he plans a great Japan Harvest."