The Catechist System

The indigenizing genius of the Japanese mission: Nicholas’s strategy of catechizing converts so thoroughly that they could themselves evangelize their countrymen as lay catechists (kateketo), Japanese preaching to Japanese in Japanese; the cluster of schools founded at Surugadai — catechist school, seminary, and women’s school — that trained them; the way the catechists were sent out across the country, gathered believers, and reported back to the general councils; and the place of this method within the wider Orthodox tradition of vernacular mission inherited from St. Innocent of Alaska.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / Japanese (canonized 1970)

The Method

The heart of Nicholas’s missionary strategy was a single, deliberate idea: rather than rely on the handful of foreign clergy a mission could ever supply, he would catechize his converts so thoroughly that they could themselves go out and evangelize their countrymen — as lay catechists, in Japanese kateketo (St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones), OrthoChristian.com; James J. Stamoolis, Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today, Orbis 1986, pp. 35–40, the standard treatment of Nicholas’s catechist-and-translation method). The catechists, in the words of the tradition, “like new apostles, would preach and then, if new believers were willing, would hold services in their homes” (OrthoChristian). By this means, over 250 missions and stations were founded across Japan in Nicholas’s lifetime (OrthoChristian).

The logic was that of enculturation carried to its conclusion. A Russian bishop and a few Russian hieromonks could not, by themselves, convert a nation of millions, and a Church planted only by foreigners would always remain foreign. But a Japanese Christian, formed in the faith and sent back among his own people, could preach where no foreigner could go, in the idiom and manners of the country, without the barrier of strangeness. Japanese evangelizing Japanese, in Japanese — this was the engine of the mission, and it is the chief reason the Orthodox Church in Japan grew as a native body rather than as a colonial transplant (Stamoolis; see An Indigenous Church).

The Schools

For the method to work, the catechists had to be trained, and so the schools came before almost everything else. At Surugadai in Tokyo, Nicholas founded a cluster of institutions to form the workers of the mission: a catechist school, a seminary, a girls’/women’s school, and a clerical school, alongside schools maintained at Hakodate (Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Part 8), mission2nihon; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki). The women’s (girls’) school began at the end of 1875 — a notable commitment for a mission of that era, reflecting Nicholas’s conviction that Christian households, and therefore educated Christian women, were as necessary to a native Church as its preachers (mission2nihon; OrthodoxWiki).

These schools were not adjuncts to the mission; they were the mission’s means of reproduction. Every catechist sent out, every Japanese priest later ordained, and every Christian family raised up came through them. The schooling was conducted in Japanese, using the texts that Nicholas and his collaborators were simultaneously translating, so that the formation of the workers and the creation of a Japanese Orthodox literature went forward together (see The Japanese Scriptures and Liturgy).

The Seminary

The most important of these institutions was the Tokyo Theological Seminary, which grew out of the earlier catechist and language schooling. [Disputed: the founding year is given variously. Catechist and Russian-language schooling begins around 1875; a theological school is described as constituted into a seminary in 1878 (OrthoChristian / Monk Nicodemus and Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki, which say the school was “transformed into a seminary in 1878”); and the Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan (OrthodoxWiki) dates the establishment of the Tokyo Seminary to 1880, by the merging of the mission and language schools. The best statement is that catechist schooling ran from the mid-1870s and was formally constituted as the Tokyo Theological Seminary by 1878–1880.] (OrthoChristian; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki; Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan, OrthodoxWiki.)

The seminary gave the mission what it had until then lacked: a steady, native source of formed clergy and catechists. From it came the small body of Japanese priests who would serve the sacraments across the country, and the larger body of catechists who would do the preaching.

How the System Worked

The mechanism by which the catechists actually multiplied the Church was orderly and, in its way, ingenious. Men were trained in the schools at Surugadai, then sent out across the country — to towns and villages where there was as yet no Christian presence — to preach, to teach inquirers, and to gather the first believers into a community, often meeting in a believer’s home (mission2nihon; Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki). Their work was supported by mission funds, and they did not act in isolation: they reported back at the regular general councils — the sobor of the Japanese Church — where their accounts of the year’s work were heard and where their assignments and their pay were set collectively (mission2nihon; OrthodoxWiki; on the councils see An Indigenous Church).

This produced a clear division of labor that suited a mission with many converts and few priests. The catechist was the engine of growth, planting and tending communities across a wide territory; the few ordained Japanese priests served the sacraments, traveling among the many stations that the catechists had founded, to baptize, to commune, and to ordain the rhythm of the Church’s sacramental life. A single priest could thus stand behind a great many catechist-gathered communities — which is precisely how a Church with only a few dozen clergy came to maintain more than two hundred and fifty stations.

The Numbers

The scale of the catechist body should be stated carefully, because it is easy to exaggerate. By the 1911 jubilee report, the Church counted 116 catechists; at Nicholas’s death the following year (1912) there were roughly 100 catechists, alongside about 35 priests and 6 deacons (Nicholas of Japan, OrthodoxWiki, giving the “116 catechists” of the 1911 figures; OrthoChristian, for the “over 250 missions”). [Disputed/careful: the catechist count is variously reported in this range; the documented peak is about 116, not “hundreds.”] What grew into the hundreds was not the number of catechists but the number of missions and stations they founded — over 250 (OrthoChristian). The catechist corps was always a lay order of a hundred-odd workers; its reach was multiplied by its mobility and by the network of home communities it sustained.

The Catechists’ Character

The men who took up this work were, in many cases, former samurai (shizoku) — members of the displaced warrior class who, in the upheavals of the early Meiji period, found in the Church both a faith and a vocation. The catechist’s life was poor, itinerant, and demanding: a man might be sent far from home on a meager support, to live among strangers and build a community from nothing. Yet it was this lay order of evangelists, more than any other single thing, that formed the backbone of Japanese Orthodoxy (mission2nihon; Stamoolis).

The pattern had in fact been set at the very beginning, before the catechist system existed as such. The first model catechists were Sawabe and Sakai, the Hakodate converts who preached among their countrymen for years before their own ordination to the priesthood (see Sawabe the Samurai). What Nicholas did was to take that spontaneous pattern — a convert becoming an apostle to his own people — and make it the deliberate, schooled, organized method of the whole mission. The catechists carried with them the translated texts that Nicholas was producing, so that the same Japanese in which they preached was the Japanese in which the community then prayed (see The Japanese Scriptures and Liturgy).

In the Orthodox Tradition of Mission

Nicholas did not invent this approach in isolation. As Stamoolis sets out, his method belongs to a recognizable Orthodox tradition of vernacular mission: the conviction that the Gospel is to be given to a people in its own language, through Scripture and services translated into that tongue, and through clergy and evangelists raised up from among the people themselves (Stamoolis, pp. 35–40). The immediate line of descent ran through St. Innocent (Veniaminov), the apostle to Alaska and Siberia, whom Nicholas had met on the road to Japan and from whom he received the translation-and-native-clergy program almost verbatim — and behind Innocent stood the broader Russian missionary practice associated with the Kazan and Ilminsky vernacular method. The catechist system is the Japanese realization of that inheritance (Stamoolis; on Innocent and the Alaskan precedent see St. Herman of Alaska).

What Nicholas added was the rigor and the scale: a network of schools to form the catechists, a council to direct them, a body of translated texts to put in their hands, and the patience to let a Japanese Church grow at its own pace from Japanese roots. The result was a mission whose growth did not depend on its founder’s presence — a Church that was Japanese before he died.

References

St. Nicholas of Japan, Apostle to Japan (Monk Nicodemus Jones). OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/51599.html), from the St. Herman Calendar 2011. (The catechist method; “like new apostles… services in their homes”; “over 250 missions”; the seminary “transformed… in 1878”.)
James J. Stamoolis. Eastern Orthodox Mission Theology Today. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1986, pp. 35–40. (The standard treatment of Nicholas’s catechist-and-translation method, and its place in the Orthodox vernacular-mission tradition descending from St. Innocent.)
Saint Nicholas of Japan, Equal-to-the-Apostles (Part 8). mission2nihon (mission2nihon.substack.com). (The cluster of schools at Surugadai; the women’s school begun at the end of 1875; how catechists were sent out, supported, and assigned at the councils.)
Nicholas of Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Nicholas_of_Japan). (The schools and seminary; the seminary “transformed into a seminary in 1878”; the “116 catechists” of the 1911 figures; priests and deacons at his death.)
Timeline of Orthodoxy in Japan. OrthodoxWiki (orthodoxwiki.org/Timeline_of_Orthodoxy_in_Japan). (The Tokyo Seminary established in 1880 by merging the mission and language schools.)