A network built around one long problem.

Currently many Japanese are living abroad for various reasons: ongoing studies, business ventures, international marriages. Under these circumstances, God's work of salvation in the lives of Japanese people is clearly seen as it extends to many different countries. The Gospel touches these people often while living overseas, and many of them become believers there, later returning to Japan.

They can be greatly used after returning to Japan to witness to their families and friends and spread the Gospel message as they get connected to local churches. But in reality, many of these returnees suffer what is often called “reverse-culture shock” beyond the level they expected, affecting even their Christian lives, and as a result, regrettably, many Christians depart from their churches within a few years of returning home.

JCFN exists to close that gap.

JCFN was founded in 1990–91, at the intersection of the U.S. international-student mission movement and the growing recognition that returnees needed dedicated follow-up. According to founder Leiton Chinn, the idea came out of a late-1980s brainstorming conversation with Ned Hale, then head of IVCF USA's international student ministry: hold a conference specifically for returning students, right after the Urbana Missions Convention.

That idea became JCFN. A handful of Japanese students who had recently become Christians started keeping in touch by mail, handwriting articles, keeping the member list, printing and posting. They called themselves the “Urbana-kai.” In the summer of 1991 they renamed it JCFN.

The wheat in JCFN's logo carries two verses. The first names the problem the organisation was formed around:

“The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”

Matthew 9:37b to 38

The second explains the single grain in the mark:

“Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

John 12:24b

The logo was redrawn in 2020, replacing the mark used since 1993. As the report put it: the calling given to JCFN has not changed, and they continue to serve while praying for the day of harvest in Japan.

• We believe the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.
• We believe that there is one God, eternally existent in three persons: Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
• We believe in the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ: His virgin birth, sinless life, miracles, atoning death, bodily resurrection, ascension, and His personal return in power and glory.
• We believe that every human being is born a sinner and can only be saved by the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
• We believe that salvation is a grace of God received only by faith, and that the saved are born again and made clean by the Holy Spirit.
• We believe that those who are saved belong to one body, the body of Christ.