03 — Building the Mission

From hidden community to organized Church: the move from Hakodate to Tokyo and the establishment of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission; the lifting of the anti-Christian ban in 1873; and the indigenous catechist system by which Japanese laymen, not Russian clergy, carried the Gospel across the country.

This section covers the institutional building of the mission in the 1870s and 1880s — its center, its legal footing, and above all the native-catechist method that made it grow.

Files

File Description
the-move-to-tokyo.md The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission (1870) and Nicholas as archimandrite; the move to Tokyo/Surugadai (1872); the lifting of the ban (1873); consecration as bishop (1880) and archbishop (1906).
the-catechist-system.md The indigenous lay-catechist (kateketo) method; the seminary and schools; the traveling evangelists and the annual reporting; the numbers and how the system worked.

See Also