To say that following God’s call to a Christian international school in Tokyo, Japan, was daunting would be an understatement. I grew up just outside of Lynden, WA, a town of roughly 12,000. By contrast, with more than 37 million people, Tokyo’s greater metropolitan area is the most populous in the world, well over 3,000 times the size of Lynden, and the Christian Academy in Japan, where I teach, has more than twenty countries represented by its student body.
Christian Academy in Japan
I came to the Christian Academy in Japan (CAJ) in January of 2009, only three weeks after finishing my student teaching at Dordt College in Sioux Center, IA. At CAJ I serve as the social studies department chair, teach several sections of eleventh grade humanities, and coach the school’s debate team with a fellow teacher.
In some ways, CAJ is not so different from the Christian schools I attended: the community is close knit; we strive to teach from a Biblical perspective; parents invest in their children’s education; students participate in a variety of activities.
I need look no further than my classroom, however, to see striking differences. My students’ passports form a diverse mosaic: Japan, Korea, the US, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, India, Nepal, and more. Some students have grown up in Japan, and some have only just arrived. Some are bilingual or even trilingual; some need the support of an EAL (English as an Additional Language) class. Many of the students are from Christian homes, though there are also students from non-Christian homes. Students from Christian homes represent various backgrounds and denominations, and some are children of missionaries. This rich diversity creates a deeply global perspective within each class. Our students cannot help but think beyond the borders of whatever country they consider home because the average day of school—class discussions, group projects, extracurricular activities—inevitably means collaborating with classmates whose backgrounds may be radically different from their own.
The mission of our school embodies this: to equip students to serve Japan and the world for Christ. We desire for our students to think globally while learning to serve where they are right now. Our curriculum culminates in the Senior Comprehensives, a year-long process undertaken by our twelfth graders in which they select a global issue they are interested in or passionate about. The students spend a good portion of time in their social studies class researching the issue and analyzing the economic, political, and cultural implications. In English class, they connect their topic to deeper questions about the nature of good and evil, and they reflect on the person they are becoming as they consider how they can stand against injustice. In Bible class, they study ethical systems and ultimately complete an ethical analysis of their topic in order to find and address the core issue. In the spring, students tie these pieces together, planning and executing a large-scale project to raise awareness and act, synthesizing their research and analysis into a final essay, and sharing what they learned with the community in public presentations days before graduation.
Service is part of the ethos at CAJ, and many students seek out opportunities to serve before their senior year. Mixed-grade community groups plan local service projects every spring, students occasionally collaborate to hold class charity events, and this year student-organized groups are raising funds for causes like the education of children in Cambodia, and the research of a rare blood disorder, which claimed the life of a student’s friend. As a teacher, it is exciting to see students from so many different backgrounds working together to make the world a better place.
Declining Biblical Literacy
We are not without challenges, though. While declining biblical literacy is not unique to our student population, our demographics amplify it. The student turnover common to international schools makes it a more pressing issue for us than it may be for other Christian schools. The missionary population waxes and wanes, and the past decade has seen it waning. CAJ was formed as a school for missionary children, and for many years most of the student body were children of missionaries. Although most students still come from Christian homes, missionary families are a minority. The decline in biblical literacy cannot be solely attributed to students from non-Christian homes, as we find this trend even among Christian families: fewer students come into school with substantial biblical knowledge. With each passing year, more teachers notice unexpected gaps in students’ familiarity with biblical stories and figures, their grasp of Scripture’s overall narrative, and their awareness of context as they cite the Bible in projects or essays for class.
Steeped in theologian Abraham Kuyper’s notions of sphere-sovereignty as I am, this raises questions in my mind about what my role as a teacher, and our role as a school, ought to be. When I started teaching, I took for granted that students received Biblical instruction and spiritual formation at home and at church and that we complemented that by teaching each subject from a Biblical perspective. However, not all students attend church, and not all families agree on the proper relationship between home, church, and school. At an international school, not only the students learn to work with others who have different backgrounds and values!
As a school, we try to face the decline in biblical literacy head-on: our K–8 Bible courses provide a systematic survey of the Bible and reflect a thoughtful, intentional scope and sequence. We provide new elementary school parents with storybook Bibles and encourage families to read together at home. We are increasingly making our mission and focus on biblical integration clear in promotional materials and brochures, which are translated into Japanese and Korean.
At the high school level, we are trying a new approach this year. While the ninth and twelfth graders have required classes, we are offering a variety of electives to tenth and eleventh graders, including semester-long courses on apologetics, Wisdom Literature, understanding the Gospels, and The Screwtape Letters. This is only the first semester we have offered electives, but there seems to be power in fostering individual choice and targeting the needs of specific groups of students.
The challenge of declining biblical literacy grows when new students enter CAJ in middle school or high school, having missed some or all of the Bible survey offered in our elementary and middle school curriculum. This is not uncommon. International schools are known for their transient populations, and even though CAJ is comparatively stable, a number of students join the high school each year. New students take an introductory Bible course online over the summer, but due to various family circumstances and the reality of mid-year admissions or transfers, there is no guarantee that students will give this online course their full time or attention. The question of how to help new students build their biblical literacy is one that CAJ continues to think about.
Changing Demographics
Another challenge we face comes with a recent and significant shift in our demographics. Our school’s business manager, himself a CAJ alumnus, recently accompanied the tenth grade class on a field trip and observed that they, with only a handful of North American students, were the inverse of his own graduating class in the 1970s, which only had a handful of students who were not North American. The number of Japanese students who opt to attend Japanese universities, and who plan to live and work in Japan, is growing. A Japanese proverb says, “The nail that sticks up will get hammered down.” Attending international school provides students unique opportunities and benefits, but it undeniably makes them into nails that stick up in a culture that values conformity. What’s more, the opportunity our Japanese students have to become fluent in English often comes at the expense of their proficiency in Japanese, a language with thousands of kanji—complex Chinese characters memorized over the course of a typical school career—and the expectation of using slightly different grammar and vocabulary when interacting with authority figures, such as professors, supervisors, and bosses.
We cannot take away our students’ international, biblically-informed perspective, and to do so would run counter to our mission. To some extent, our students will always “stick up” in Japan, and Japanese parents acknowledge that when they choose to enroll their children at CAJ. However, what we can do is provide greater opportunities for deepening native speakers’ Japanese abilities and understanding of cultural norms and mores. Several years ago, we began to offer a Japanese literature course designed for native-level speakers, a course conducted entirely in Japanese, in which students read and discuss novels and debate contemporary issues.
Equipping students to serve Japan and the world for Christ is a lofty task and certainly not always easy. However, it is an exciting mission, and one I believe in wholeheartedly. Tokyo and CAJ may be a world away from Lynden, WA, but I could not be prouder to call both places my home.
Nate Gibson is a Dordt College graduate who serves as a social studies teacher and debate team coach at the Christian Academy in Japan (Tokyo).