In October 2015, Pastor Takashi Funatogawa, or Pastor Tak as he is known to his Singaporean friends, was installed as the senior pastor of Sapporo Minami Evangelical Christ Church.

He was only 34 at that time, very young for a country where 90% of pastors are over the age of 50. As such, Pastor Tak stood out from the start among the local church leaders in Hokkaido, where he is currently based.

In Japan, only 6% of church goers are below the age of 30. It is this troubling ministry landscape that challenged Pastor Tak to serve full-time as a pastor and lead the next generation.

Tak has a keen heart for young people, partly because his own experience growing up was full of hard knocks.

Growing up in a typical non-Christian Japanese family, his father had high expectations for his children to do well in school. Encouragement was rare, and criticism was more common.

“My desire then was always to please my father. And since he was an engineer, I thought it would please him if I too pursued my career in engineering.”

“What was I made for?”

That belief was how Pastor Tak found himself studying mechanical engineering in the US, where he soon discovered that, unlike him, his peers all had a dream and a strong passion for what they wanted to do in life.

Because he had neither ambition nor purpose, his grades started to drop drastically and he was eventually left with no other choice but to drop out of school.

Things kept going downhill from there. He soon turned to alcohol in a bid to numb himself from the reality of being a “failure” and the disappointment he felt towards himself. 

Nevertheless, at the height of his alcoholism at age 20, Pastor Tak somehow encountered Christ and accepted Him as his personal Lord and Saviour.

Determined to turn his life around, he stopped drinking: “My desire for drinking miraculously died. However, the comparison and envy of how my peers around me felt more superior than I am drove me in my desire to prove my worth.”

He then took up a job teaching English to international students in Santa Barbara, California.

There he found himself diving headlong into work and becoming a workaholic at the expense of his physical and mental wellbeing. Though he was already a Christian then, Pastor Tak’s values were still very much tied to the life of striving that he knew in the past.

“Dropping out of university was kind of like a shame for me,” he revealed. “When I began working, everyone around me had already graduated university. I didn’t want to be looked down upon so I worked my socks off.”

The prodigal son returns home

In pursuit of worldly success and recognition, Pastor Tak worked so hard that he eventually woke up with the right side of his face paralysed. He was diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy.

“I was concerned that my situation would worsen if I returned to work, so I decided to leave my job and return to Japan.”

Pastor Tak returned to Japan, choosing to lie to his parents about why he was back. He was fearful and afraid of how his father would respond if he knew the truth.

But what he didn’t know was that while he was away in university, his father had accepted Christ through his mother, who became a Christian while they were living in the UK.

“During one of the prayer meetings in church, the Holy Spirit prompted me to confess my sins to my parents, to tell them the truth about why I came back,” shared Pastor Tak.

So, as he was fearful, Pastor Tak decided to write to his parents to let them know the truth. He was mentally prepared to be kicked out of the house, because he knew since young that his father hated lies.

But he would never have anticipated his father’s response: “Son, thank you for telling me the truth. Your mother and I always felt something was going on, so we continued to pray for you in our own time.

“We are grateful that God spoke to you and that you were able to share this with us.”

Words like these were unheard of in Pastor Tak’s childhood years, so it was difficult for him to believe this dramatic transformation in his father that he was witnessing.

“He would pray for me, affirm me and comfort me. It was the Lord working through my father and healing my wounds and the emptiness I was carrying within me.”

Pastor Tak’s time spent at home in Japan brought about an unexpected reconciliation, which in turn brought healing to all the previous hurts that he had been carrying since childhood.

It was also then that he was finally able to see God as a Heavenly Father who loves him unconditionally, rather than as someone who would only accept him based on his abilities or accomplishments.

“Son, you see what I have done for you. Now, will you go and do for others what I have done for you?”

While God did an inner work in him, Pastor Tak also began to delve deep into Scripture and started attending the dawn prayer meetings in Atsugi Evangelical Free Church in Kanagawa Prefecture, near Tokyo.

That was where God asked him one day, “Son, you see what I have done for you. Now, will you go and do for others what I have done for you?”

“Lord, use me”

It was during this time that the Lord called him to reach out to the next generation of Japanese.

“A lot of youths are going through the same things I went through, be it workaholism or alcoholism. That’s when I said, ‘Lord, use me as your vessel to reach out to the next generation.’”

He ended up pursuing his theological studies in Singapore’s East Asia School of Theology (EAST), where he was introduced to Pastor Yasuji Honda.

Pastor Yasuji was looking for someone young to take over his church in Sapporo and got to know of Pastor Tak from a mutual acquaintance.

He flew to Singapore to meet Pastor Tak and their meeting confirmed what God had sown in both their hearts. In October 2015, Pastor Tak was installed as the senior pastor of Sapporo Minami Evangelical Christ Church.

All in for the church

As our team took a walk with Pastor Tak around a quiet park near his church in Minami-ku, he mused at how refreshing it is to see young people working in full-time ministry.

For Singaporeans, seeing young ministers serving full-time is nothing much to be amazed at. But to the Japanese Christian, it is almost unheard of.

The average age of Japanese pastors lies between 60 and 70 years old, and the average church member is 64 years old. In most churches, the senior pastor is the only staff in the church – if they are even able to pay their pastors.

“Japan is not a poor nation but most Christian workers are very poor,” shared Pastor Tak.

“Because churches are small, the funding each church has is very limited. Even the senior pastors don’t get paid much. Most pastors have to take on an additional part-time job outside to make ends meet.”

To the regular Singaporean church member, the idea of having their senior pastor working a part-time job is unimaginable, much less a church with no staff.

In the case of Pastor Tak’s church, services and programmes run smoothly week after week thanks to the church members who devote their time and skills freely. They also help to run a co-living space and a café in hopes of making meaningful connections with locals.

When we visited his church on a weekday morning, a group of young people were rehearsing for their weekend worship service. At their church café, a handful of young adults were busy serving up coffee for customers.

This picture was quite unlike what we had heard about the typical Japanese church, which was supposed to be aging and struggling. This church was, in fact, very much alive.

“In Japan, the spiritual climate is getting harder,” lamented Pastor Tak. He acknowledged that the emergence of new cult groups, together with the prevalence of individualism and materialism, has made the work more challenging in Japan.

But he remains faithfully undeterred: “People are seeking belonging and community within them, and some are seeking the truth in today’s world.

“My heart is to see this new generation seeking the truth in Jesus, where true hope, peace and reconciliation can be found.”

With additional reporting by Salt&Light.

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