Japan Christian Fellowship Network, since 1990

Nobody should have to come home alone.

Open the 35-year archive Why JCFN exists

Roughly 1,600 Japanese return home each year as new or growing Christians. Around 80% drift from church within a few years of landing. JCFN works in that gap, before the flight and long after it.

Equipper Conference, the annual gathering JCFN has run since 1997. From JCFN's 2024 Annual Report

1990

Founded at the Urbana missions convention

317

Issues published, now searchable in one place

Years of continuous returnee ministry

Offices in Irvine, California and Ochanomizu, Tokyo

Then and now

Same room, twenty-seven years apart.

The first Equipper Conference met in Seattle in December 1997. It has run every year since. Whichever continent they are on, returnees keep coming back to it.

Group photo from the first Equipper Conference, Seattle, December 1997 — **December 1997, Seattle**The first EC. Name tags, a borrowed hall, about 150 people.

Group photo from a recent conference, gathered outdoors in mist — **Twenty-seven years later**Still one room a year, now with a dedicated youth track and 300+ attending.

What JCFN does

Six ways of staying with one person.

Reverse culture shock, a busy re-entry, family who don't share the faith. The reasons returnees drift are ordinary, and so is the work of staying with them.

Follow-up & church connection

Connecting people moving in either direction to local churches, fellowships, and small groups on both ends of the move.

Conferences

Equipper Conference in North America, Global Returnees Conference in Japan, Central Conference in Chicago, and CoCo in Europe.

Regional meetings & small groups

ANRK in Kansai, GiFT in Tokyo, INSPA in Tokai, Konnect in Kanagawa, Re.Okinawa. Ongoing, local, unglamorous.

Publications

The Equipper newsletter and monthly Directors Letters, carrying prayer requests, testimonies and ministry news since 2008.

Networking between churches

Introducing sending churches abroad to receiving churches in Japan, so a returnee isn't handed off into thin air.

Volunteers & staff

A small team across two countries, plus associate staff and volunteers who carry the regional work.

The archive

It started on a typewriter.

The first JCFN newsletter went out on 16 January 1991, handwritten and mailed. Every issue since, 207 newsletters and 110 Directors Letters, is now searchable in one place.

“I understood sin and being set free for the first time, and felt that I was released from my selfish lifestyle.”
EC17 testimony, February 2018 Equipper

“This small group — gathering midweek to study and to pray for one another — has become a tremendous source of encouragement.”
Kanako Suzuki, Kamata Small Group, February 2010 Equipper

“Thirty years have passed since then, and the trajectory of JCFN is purely the work of the Lord.”
Setsu Shimizu, North America Director, 2020 Annual Report

Search all 317 issues

Thirty-five years in photographs

The same gathering, over and over.

Matching t-shirts in the nineties, a hotel ballroom at the foot of Mt. Fuji in 2015, a bilingual session hall last year. Every decade, the same instinct: get everyone in one room.

JCFN gathering in matching t-shirts, 1990s — 1990s, matching shirts

Global Returnees Conference 2015 group photo from above — GRC 2015, Japan

A bilingual conference session in progress — A session, recent

Where it happens

Mostly in rooms like this one.

Not the conference halls. The midweek small groups, the potlucks, the church basements in Kanagawa and Nagoya and Okinawa where a returnee finds out they are not the only one.

Support the work

A JCFN regional gathering meeting in a plain multipurpose room