On conflict avoidance, gospel courage, and the miracle we are not celebrating in Japanese churches.
Every pastor in Japan knows this moment.
A church member approaches after the service, a little more formal than usual, and says quietly: “Pastor, today is my last Sunday.” The pastor pauses, surprised. “Why? What happened?” And then comes the answer that lands like a slow, heavy weight: “Well, actually, a few years ago something happened that really troubled me...”
A few years ago.
The problem had been sitting there, quietly, for years. Not shared. Not brought to the pastor. Not worked through with the person involved. Just carried, alone, until the weight became too much and leaving felt like the only option. The pastor’s instinct is to ask: “Why didn’t you say something?” But the honest answer to that question goes much deeper than any single relationship or misunderstanding. It goes to the heart of what it means to be shaped by the gospel.
An Avoidance Culture and a Pursuing God
Japanese culture places enormous value on harmony, on not causing disruption, on protecting the face of oneself and others. These are not bad instincts in themselves. But when they are allowed to govern the way we handle conflict in the church, they produce something quietly devastating: communities where problems are never named, wounds are never healed, and people disappear rather than speak.
James 4 names this dynamic with striking directness. “Friendship with the world,” he writes, “is enmity with God.” The word friendship here does not mean simply enjoying culture or engaging society. It means allowing the values, assumptions, and instincts of the world around us to govern our hearts and our choices more than the gospel does. When a Japanese believer avoids confronting a broken relationship because the culture says harmony must be preserved at all costs, they are not simply being Japanese. They are, in James’s terms, being a friend of the world. The cultural value has taken the place that the gospel should occupy. The wisdom driving their response is not, as James says, from above. It is earthly. It is unspiritual. And left unchallenged, it will quietly dismantle the very community it was trying to protect.
The irony is profound. The Bible’s central story is not a story of avoidance. It is a story of pursuit. God does not look away from the broken relationship between himself and humanity. He does not wait for us to come to him and sort things out on our own terms. He crosses every barrier, bears every cost, and moves toward us. The cross is the ultimate act of someone refusing to let a broken relationship stay broken, even when it cost him everything.
This is the gospel. And the gospel calls us to live differently from our culture.
What Avoidance Reveals
James 4 is uncomfortably honest about why we avoid conflict. The problem is not really the other person or the situation. The problem is what is happening in our own hearts. We avoid because we are afraid: afraid of what the other person will say, afraid of being seen as weak, afraid of disrupting the harmony we have worked so hard to maintain. We avoid because we have made an idol of comfort or of approval, and confronting conflict feels like it puts those things at risk.
But avoidance is not neutrality. Avoidance is a choice. And it is a choice that, over time, produces exactly the opposite of what we were hoping for. The harmony we were trying to protect disappears anyway, only now it disappears quietly, behind closed doors, with no opportunity for repair. The member who leaves without a word, the wound that was never addressed, the relationship that slowly went cold: these are not the fruits of wisdom from above. They are the fruits of a heart still more shaped by culture than by the cross.
If the gospel is truly at work in our hearts, it will produce something different. It will produce the courage to go. Not the absence of fear, but the willingness to move toward the other person in spite of it, because the relationship matters more than our comfort, and because restoration matters more than the preservation of a false peace.
The Biggest Miracle We Are Not Celebrating
We need to talk honestly about what we celebrate in our churches.
When someone receives physical healing, we praise God loudly. When a financial burden is suddenly lifted, we stand and give testimony. And rightly so. God is the healer and provider, and there is nothing wrong with rejoicing in those moments. But let us be honest about what our celebrations reveal. If the testimonies we feature most prominently are always about bodies being healed and finances being restored, while we remain silent about the relational miracles happening or failing to happen in our own community, we are showing our hand. We are revealing that our functional understanding of God’s power is still largely shaped by what the world around us also values: health, prosperity, and visible success.
Consider this: when was the last time a Japanese church stood together and celebrated the fact that a member who was ready to leave decided, by God’s grace, to stay and face the conflict instead? That a relationship that was on the verge of breaking was restored through honest confession and costly forgiveness? That someone chose to go toward the difficulty rather than away from it? These moments are quiet and unremarkable from the outside. But they may represent a deeper and rarer work of God’s Spirit than many of the miracles we are more comfortable celebrating. It takes no less than a miracle of grace for a person shaped by a culture of avoidance to choose the harder, more gospel-shaped path of reconciliation. In fact it may take more, because it cuts directly against everything their upbringing, their instincts, and their culture are telling them to do. What we celebrate in our churches reveals what gospel we actually believe. And if relational restoration never makes it into our testimonies, we may be telling a smaller and less complete story of God’s power than the one Scripture calls us to tell.
The Church’s Calling: Cultivating a Culture of Reconciliation
One of the most important and most neglected missions of the church in Japan today is the intentional cultivation of a culture of forgiveness, honest communication, and gospel-shaped conflict resolution. This does not happen automatically. It requires deliberate leadership, patient teaching, and the willingness of pastors and leaders to model it themselves.
Japanese Christians today, and particularly Japanese church leaders, need to take this work seriously. Not because conflict is desirable, but because the alternative is communities that look harmonious on the surface while quietly fracturing beneath it. The “last Sunday” conversation is not an occasional pastoral anomaly. For many Japanese pastors, it is a familiar pattern. And the only way to change the pattern is to change the culture, one honest conversation at a time.
This means teaching our congregations that conflict is not the enemy of community. It is one of the primary arenas in which gospel community is formed and tested. It means creating enough safety that people feel they can bring their struggles to their pastor and their brothers and sisters before those struggles become reasons to leave. It means preaching on Matthew 18 not as an abstract church discipline procedure but as a living, pastoral pathway for pursuing the people we love. It means modeling confession and repentance from the front, so that the congregation learns that these are not signs of weakness but of gospel maturity.
The Gospel Demands Courage: What the Process Actually Looks Like
Jesus in Matthew 18 and Matthew 5 places the responsibility for initiating reconciliation on both sides of the conflict. Whether you are the one who was wronged or the one who caused the wrong, the call is the same: go first. In Matthew 5, Jesus says that if you remember your brother or sister has something against you, leave your offering at the altar and go. In Matthew 18, he says that if your brother or sister sins against you, go to them. The direction of the initiative is different in each passage, but the command is identical. Go. Whether you are the offender or the offended, the gospel compels you to move toward the other person.
And Jesus is specific about how. Go privately first, between the two of you alone. This protects the dignity of the other person and keeps the circle of conflict as small as possible. The goal, as Jesus says explicitly, is not to win the argument or to be vindicated. The goal is to gain your brother or sister. That single phrase reframes the entire process. We are not going to prove a point. We are going because we want the relationship restored, and because we believe the other person is worth pursuing.
If that first conversation does not bring resolution, Jesus says to bring one or two others, not to build a case against the person, but as trusted, pastoral presences who can help both parties hear and be heard more clearly. And if even that does not bring resolution, the matter is brought to the church. Even at this final stage, the goal remains the same: not punishment, not exclusion, but restoration.
This process is not complicated. But in a culture shaped by avoidance, it is costly. It requires us to value the relationship more than our comfort, and to trust that the discomfort of honest engagement is far less damaging than the slow death of unaddressed conflict.
Ken Sande, in his book The Peacemaker, offers a practical guide for what that first conversation looks like when we finally find the courage to have it. He calls it the Seven A’s of Confession: addressing everyone affected, avoiding the words if, but, and maybe that quietly shift blame, admitting specifically what was done wrong, acknowledging the hurt caused to the other person, accepting the consequences, altering our behavior with a concrete plan, and asking for forgiveness rather than simply announcing an apology. These seven steps are not a formula. They are the practical shape of what it looks like to go well, to pursue the other person not just with courage but with genuine humility and gospel-shaped honesty.
What We Are Really Praying For
Evangelism and growth are at the heart of our calling as church planters, and we must keep praying and working toward them with all we have. But perhaps one of the most urgent and neglected prayers we can add alongside those is this: Lord, give us the courage to face one another honestly. Give us communities where people stay and work through the hard things rather than quietly disappearing. Give us the grace to go first, to confess fully, to forgive genuinely, and to pursue restoration even when it costs us.
Because a church where people face conflicts and choose to stay is a church where the gospel is visibly, powerfully at work. It is a community that the watching world around it, including the watching world of Japan, has almost never seen before. And it may be one of the most compelling witnesses to the reconciling power of Jesus Christ that we can offer.
Praying for evangelism and church growth is not only important but urgent, and we should never stop. But alongside those prayers, perhaps the most powerful and neglected key to effective evangelism is the cultivation of a community that is visibly, strikingly different from the world around it. Jesus calls his disciples the light of the world and a city on a hill. A community where people face conflicts honestly, forgive courageously, and pursue one another rather than quietly disappearing is exactly that kind of community. It is a community the watching world of Japan, shaped by its own culture of surface harmony and quiet withdrawal, has almost never seen before. When a church demonstrates that genuine reconciliation is possible, that broken relationships can be restored, that people can stay and work through the hardest things together, it becomes a witness that no program or outreach strategy can manufacture. The gospel on display in our relationships may be the most compelling apologetic we have.
God pursued us at the cost of his own Son. To truly experience that love, to know that he crossed every barrier and bore every cost to restore what was broken between us and him, is to have the deepest root of our fear pulled out. The fear of rejection, the fear of disruption, the fear of what honesty might cost us: all of it begins to lose its power when we know that we are already fully known and fully loved. And if that love could compel God himself to move toward us in our brokenness, surely it can give us the courage to move toward our brother or sister in theirs.
For further reflection:
Takuya felt a strong sense of unease regarding a certain policy decided upon by the church leaders. In the past, he would have told himself that avoiding causing a stir was the ‘mature thing to do’ and remained silent. However, he struggled with the thought that keeping silent and distancing himself would mean suppressing the ‘experiences and insights’ that made him who he was, and that this might ultimately lead to a ‘cold war’ that would benefit neither himself nor the church. Consequently, he decided to take the plunge and speak to the leaders.
Just before the meeting, he told himself: ‘The leaders, too, love the Lord Jesus with all their hearts, and they must have their own experiences and insights cultivated through their own journey. Just as my own feelings are important, perhaps theirs are equally valuable.’ He also endeavoured to recognise that his own sense of unease and his notion of ‘what is right’ were, after all, merely perspectives born of a limited viewpoint.
When the dialogue actually began, conveying his experiences and unease frankly without becoming emotional proved far more nerve-wracking and labour-intensive than he had anticipated. There were counterarguments from the other side, and as a result, the policy did not change immediately, leaving Takuya with a sense of inadequacy. Given this outcome, he was left with such a feeling of futility that he wondered, ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone to the trouble of having this dialogue at all.’
However, what was important was that Takuya chose neither ‘escape’ nor ‘attack’. Nor did he attempt to resolve the issue immediately and bring it to a close. Instead, his decision to first try to view the divide between himself and the other person objectively represented a new perspective for him, one that had its roots in the Gospel. At first glance, there appear to be no particularly dramatic changes in his daily life or church life. Yet if this unassuming—and at times even unpleasant—process can foster a previously unseen perspective within him, then the possibility of Gospel-based reconciliation may well lie ahead.
Author: CTCJ Collaborative Writing Team
In 2025, CTCJ set out a new vision to become a thought leader in the field of urban church planting in Japan. The Collaborative Writing Team (Co-writing Team) is one of the ways we are working towards this goal. The team is made up of a core group of staff members, as well as a number of writers and editors from diverse backgrounds, who work together to produce articles on topics that are useful for church planters, with the gospel as the foundation and focus.