The Japanese, the beloved people among whom I live and serve, are the world’s second-largest unreached people group.

The category of “unreached people group” describes peoples where less than 2 percent of the population is evangelical. Unreached peoples are those who need missionary ministry the most. However, while the category is helpful for diagnosing missional need, it never tells the full story of God’s redemptive work among a people. “Unreached” does not necessarily mean there is zero Christian presence, and unreached peoples may indeed have small but faithful churches with their own remarkable histories of God’s sovereign work of salvation. Japan provides an excellent example of an unsung history of redemption that deserves to be remembered.

Psalm 105:1–6 teaches us that making the greatness of God known among the peoples (verse 1) is deeply connected to remembering his wondrous works (verses 2, 5) and responding in thanksgiving (verse 1). As we recall how God has worked mightily in places known for having hard soil, we can be filled with worshipful thanksgiving, which then propels us forward in mission with fresh energy and insight for how to extend the gospel where it seems impossible.

Initial Stirrings

The first Protestant missionaries arrived in Japan in 1859. Japan’s borders had been closed to the West — especially to Christianity — since 1603, when an influential Roman Catholic mission was expelled through extreme persecution. A prohibition against Christianity remained in place when the missionaries arrived in 1859, and it was difficult to even gain a hearing for the gospel. Merely mentioning the name of Jesus could cause Japanese people to slide a finger across their throats to illustrate the danger of the topic. Missionaries nevertheless went to work learning the language and finding creative ways to serve, including through education and medicine.

At the beginning of 1872, missionaries and Christian expatriates hosted a week of prayer in Yokohama, which several non-Christian Japanese students decided to join. Each day, those gathered would read a passage from Acts and pray together. As they prayed, the Spirit began to move in power. The group decided to continue meeting after the week was over. By the end of the second week, the Japanese students, many of them from proud samurai families, were on their knees crying out to God in tears for the Holy Spirit to fall on Japan just as he had done for the early church.

Nine of the students soon professed faith in Christ and were baptized on March 10, 1872, as members of the first Protestant church in Japan. Though two of the nine turned out to be Buddhist spies who quickly fell away, the remaining seven were joined by another wave of newly converted students to form the Yokohama Band, the first of several small movements of Japanese Christians who would help extend the gospel throughout Japan.

Bands of Brothers

Similar stirrings occurred throughout the remainder of the 1870s, most notably in Kumamoto and Sapporo. In Kumamoto, Captain L.L. Janes, a Civil War veteran, was recruited to launch a school for Western learning. Janes did not go with strong missionary intentions. However, after a few years of instruction and bonding with the boys in his school, he began to lead a Bible study, which all the students felt compelled to join. Though Janes preached a gospel mixed with aspirations for Japan’s Westernization, his message still impacted the boys significantly. Several converted to Christianity, and Janes added weekly worship and prayer.

“God has worked in Japan powerfully in the past, and nothing can stop him from doing so again.”

Soon the believing Japanese students were evangelizing their non-Christian classmates, and on January 30, 1876, over thirty of the students gathered on Mount Hanaoka. Together they sang “Jesus Loves Me” — the first hymn translated into Japanese — and made a covenant to proclaim the Christian faith for the enlightenment of the Japanese Empire. They came down from the mountain as the Kumamoto Band, and many went on to become influential politicians, business leaders, and pastors.

Another Civil War veteran, Colonel William S. Clark, helped establish the Sapporo Agricultural College in Hokkaido in 1876. Like Janes, Clark also did not go as a missionary, but during his eight months in Japan, he led students in regular Bible study and experienced personal renewal in his own faith. Many of his students became Christians, and Clark crafted a covenant for all the students to sign that stated their intention to follow Jesus. The students all signed the covenant, some out of zeal for their new faith and others under pressure from fellow students. Unsurprisingly, half of these turned away soon after Clark left. However, the other half were baptized and formed the Sapporo Band, which included notable Japanese Christian thinkers Uchimura Kanzō and Nitobe Inazō.

The formation of these Christian bands was the firstfruits of a larger movement still to come.

‘A Marvelous Work in our Midst’

In 1883, missionaries from across Japan gathered in Osaka with some Japanese Christians for a large missionary conference. This conference emphasized the power of Christian unity and dependent prayer, which inspired some Japanese Christian leaders to host their own conference in Osaka — which then led to similar gatherings in Kyoto and Tokyo. Each of these conferences spawned numerous prayer meetings in their cities that often lasted for weeks at a time and initiated revival. Japanese Christians cried out like the first converts in Yokohama for the Holy Spirit to fall, and God answered their prayers. Numerous revivals began to spring up throughout Japan, leading to repentance and renewal among Japanese Christians and the mission community.

Charles F. Warren of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) described “showers of blessing which God has graciously granted this year in different parts of the country” and a revival leading to greater unity and love in the Japanese church (A History of Protestant Missions in Japan, 108). Robert Maclay, who oversaw the American Methodist Episcopal Mission, offered another account: “A spirit of religious revival, bringing seasons of refreshing through the presence of the Lord, is spreading in Japan, both in the community of foreigners and among Japanese Christians. . . . I am sure we are about to become witnesses of visible, divine manifestations of grace in the conversion of souls” (109).

C.S. Long of the CMS likewise described “a glorious work in Nagasaki” — where an atomic bomb would be dropped a little over sixty years later — in which “multitudes are genuinely converted and testify to the truthfulness and power of the new religion. . . . The Lord is certainly doing a marvelous work in our midst. The news is spreading throughout the city, and hundreds are flocking to the church. . . . It is indeed marvelous. I have never seen anything more striking at home” (109).

Japanese Harvest

Japanese pastors shared similar testimonies. Kozaki Hiromichi, who came from the Kumamoto Band and was a major leader in the Kumi-ai (Congregationalist) Church, shared how a great revival began in Yokohama following a week of prayer. Joseph Neesima, founder of Dōshisha University, described a revival that started in the small town of Annaka in Niigata. It began with a congregation in repentance and tears until they became overwhelmed by joy and love.

Reports of revival came from across Japan, including Sendai, Fukushima, Kobe, and Okayama. Missionaries and Japanese evangelists began renting out theatres to host preaching and teaching events for hundreds at a time. In May of 1883, preaching services were held in the Hisamatsu Theatre in Tokyo for several days, with a total attendance of four thousand. Revivals also sprang up in several Christian schools throughout Japan, including Dōshisha University, where two hundred students were baptized during a single prayer meeting in March 1884.

As a result of the revivals of the 1880s, the average church membership in Japan doubled, churches were planted in new regions, local funding for ministry increased, and Japanese Christians began to take the reins of leadership for the church. The season was so fruitful that some missionaries pronounced expectations for Japan to become a Christian nation within the century.

From Memory to Missions

It is sobering to realize that such expectations were never met, and while God has brought other seasons of growth, the number of Japanese Christians remains small. It is also amazing to see how God has worked in the past, and there are several lessons missionary senders and goers can learn from this history.

First, even though Japan may seem persistently cold to the gospel, God has worked here powerfully in the past, and nothing can stop him from doing so again.

Second, like the early church in Acts, the Japanese church was born more out of prayer than any evangelistic method or charismatic leadership. We have reason to hope that God would hear and respond to such fervent prayers again.

Third and finally, these movements all swept over the missionary community as well as the Japanese community. Missionaries cannot create revival in the Japanese church, but we can prayerfully seek it with Japanese brothers and sisters as we together remember how God has worked marvelously in the past.

Even though I am a missionary who depends desperately on prayer as my team and I serve among one of the largest unreached people groups in the world, I often find my personal prayers to be overly self-oriented. Perhaps others can relate.

As fallen humans, we all struggle with the disease of selfishness, which can extend even to our prayer lives. We can struggle to stop and pray at all. And when we finally manage, we can find our hearts and minds immediately filled with concerns about our jobs, our health, our relationships, and our unmet longings. As a result, our prayers can center simply on our own comfort and desires. And in a world filled with threats from sin, sickness, and weakness, our orientation toward self can easily even give way to anxiety and fear.

Many of us know that the Bible teaches us to orient our prayers toward the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom (Matthew 6:9–10). We may not know, however, how much power might come from such praying. This power rescues us from a narrow life and gives us grace to see God’s will accomplished on earth as it is in heaven.

Jesus promises that when we seek God’s kingdom first, our anxieties will fade, and everything we need will be given (Matthew 6:33). We can seek God’s kingdom in many ways, but nothing is more fundamental to this pursuit than simply asking for his kingdom to come in prayer.

‘Your Kingdom Come’

When Jesus offered a pattern of prayer for the church, he taught us to pray for God’s kingdom to come as the second petition of six (Matthew 6:10). There is a sequence and priority to the order he gives; thus, praying for God’s kingdom is extraordinarily important. We are right to pray for our own comfort and happiness and daily bread, but we cannot pray rightly for our own well-being or even for others without giving glory to God and seeking his kingdom in prayer.

It is also true that as we seek God’s kingdom through prayer, we will find the deepest comfort and happiness God made us for. As the Dutch theologian Herman Witsius once wrote, “In this kingdom all our happiness is placed” (Sacred Dissertations on the Lord’s Prayer, 242). We can pray for our happiness and fail to pray for the kingdom, but we cannot pray for the kingdom and fail to pray for our happiness.

When our prayers are oriented toward the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom, true comfort and happiness for ourselves and others will follow. This is because praying for God’s kingdom to come aligns our hearts with God’s glorious intentions for the world and gives us the energy and direction needed to join him in achieving his will, regardless of what difficulties we may face. Such praying enables us to better interpret those difficulties as light momentary afflictions preparing us for an eternal weight of glory (2 Corinthians 4:17), which is to come with his kingdom.

Three Requests for the Kingdom

What exactly are we asking for when we pray for God’s kingdom to come? The answer to question 102 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism provides an excellent summary:

[We] pray that Satan’s kingdom may be destroyed; and that the kingdom of grace may be advanced, ourselves and others brought into it, and kept in it; and the kingdom of glory may be hastened.

Each of these elements deserves further reflection.

1. Destroy the kingdom of darkness.

First, we pray that Satan’s kingdom may be destroyed. Here we are acknowledging that we live in the already–not yet kingdom. Christ has won the decisive victory over sin and Satan, and Jesus reigns over all things in heaven. However, Satan remains the active prince of the power of the air (Ephesians 2:2), a roaring lion seeking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). He has “blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4). His kingdom must fall in order for the kingdom of Christ to be fully established. Praying, “Your kingdom come,” then, is an act of faithful allegiance to the rightful rule of Christ and an act of courageous rebellion against the tyranny of Satan.

Consider the implications of God’s kingdom coming and Satan’s kingdom toppling for missions among unreached people groups. The remaining unreached parts of the world remain unreached because they are, spiritually speaking, strongholds of Satan. They are strongholds not because the people in these places are worse sinners than we are, but because there is powerful and persistent spiritual resistance to gospel proclamation in various forms. These are places where “the demons are deep” (to borrow an expression from my pastor back home), and it seems impossible for God’s church to grow. These are often places where faithful messengers have proclaimed the gospel seemingly to no avail.

In Mark 9:14–29, we see Jesus encounter a situation where the demons were deep, and his apostles failed to cast them out. Jesus gently exhorts his apostles, saying, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.” The remaining unreached parts of the world are filled with “this kind.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones expounds upon what Jesus is saying in this passage: “You failed there . . . because you did not have sufficient power. . . . You will never be able to deal with ‘this kind’ unless you have applied to God for the power which he alone can give you” (Revival, 18–19).

“If we want to see unreached peoples reached, we need to pray with impudent persistence.”

If we want to see unreached peoples reached, we need to pray with impudent persistence (Luke 11:5–13; 18:1–8) for Satan’s kingdom to be destroyed and for the kingdom of God to be established.

2. Advance the kingdom of grace.

Second, we pray that the kingdom of grace may be advanced. The kingdom of grace is the kingdom of Christ that we enjoy already in the church. It is the kingdom Christ rules that is not of this world (John 18:36), the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 10:7). As the Dutch theologian Wilhelmus à Brakel describes, this kingdom “redounds to the glorification of God” because it is the place and the people wherein God makes his glory known (The Christian’s Reasonable Service, 3:512). This kingdom shines because its subjects are being transformed from one degree of glory to the next by the Spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18; 4:6). Praying, “Your kingdom come,” then, means asking God to cause the church to thrive in every nation, and especially through the ministry of a multitude of local churches.

We pray for the church to be holy and shine brightly in a dark world. We pray for reformation in doctrine and unity in love. We ask for renewal of the saints and conversions of the lost by the Holy Spirit. We pray for churches to grow and multiply. We do not simply pray for the success of our own local churches and ministries. Rather, we pray that every nation would be transformed through the power of the gospel, proclaimed by the entire church, so that the gates of hell would not triumph against this kingdom of grace (Matthew 16:18). We pray for our family, our neighbors, ourselves, and our enemies. And we do so with reference to the kingdom of grace to which we belong by the mercy of Christ.

3. Hasten the kingdom of glory.

Finally, we pray that the kingdom of glory may be hastened. The English Puritan Thomas Watson explains that the kingdoms of grace and glory “differ not in nature, but degree only.” The kingdom of grace grows into the kingdom of glory. The kingdom of glory is the full and final eschatological kingdom of Christ. It is more than a heavenly kingdom; it is the kingdom of heaven come to an earth made new (Revelation 11:15; 21:1–3).

“Orienting our prayers toward the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom rescues us from the kingdom of self.”

Here, we pray for our Lord, King Jesus, to come quickly (Revelation 22:20). We ask for God’s glory to be enjoyed without the marring of sin and suffering. We ask for a kingdom of peace and righteousness to flourish (Hebrews 7:2). We ask for justice to be faithfully brought forth (Isaiah 42:1–4). We ask for the full experience of these blessings, and that God would allow us to enjoy them even now in part through the kingdom of grace.

Zacharias Ursinus, one of the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism, describes the kingdom of glory like this: “There will be no enemies to subdue; but the church will reign gloriously with Christ and God shall be all in all; that is, he will manifest and communicate himself immediately to the blessed” (Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, 634). We pray for that day to come when we will see our Lord face to face in glorious love (1 Corinthians 13:12).

In God’s mysterious providence, we are invited to take a real part in ushering in this kingdom through prayer. Orienting our prayers toward the glory of God and the coming of his kingdom rescues us from the kingdom of self and all our inward spirals, and it sends our hearts and imaginations soaring into the foretastes of eternal glory. “Lord, let your kingdom come!”