Following God to Japan - Mark Jeong

In 2013, Esther and I attended a missions conference that was focused on missions to unreached people groups. An unreached people group is a group of people that share the same culture and language and lacks enough followers of Christ and resources to evangelize their own people (usually less than 2% evangelical Christian). On the final night of the conference, the speaker asked anyone in the room who felt called to be a missionary to one of these groups to stand, and we stood up.

But that was almost ten years ago. A lot of life has happened since then—lots of good things, lots of hard things, and lots of wrestling with God in prayer, but we’re here now to share with you that with the support of the Session and the approval of Mission to the World, our denomination’s mission organization, we hope to go overseas as missionaries to Japan sometime in 2024!

How we got to this point is a long story, but much of it involves our time here at Trinity Park. We first moved to Durham in 2018 so I could pursue a doctorate in New Testament at Duke. Since my time in seminary, I had been interested in helping train pastors and ministry workers on the mission field, which led me to pursue further studies. When we moved here, we got connected to the president of a seminary in Nagoya, Japan, who happens to be from Raleigh. Over the years, he’s shared with us more about the ministry and about the needs in Japan, and now Esther and I are excited to join them in the work they are doing to train leaders for the church in Japan. Esther has always had a heart for mercy ministry, and she hopes to use her background as a pediatrician to share the gospel with young moms and their children. And yet this journey has not been without its challenges. Indeed, all along the way (and even now!) we’ve been pushed to walk with faith into the unknown. For Esther, she’s wrestled with the pain of leaving our TPC community, leaving her medical career, and saying goodbye to her patients’ families.

For me, I’ve wrestled with how to love the Japanese people. Esther and I are Korean American, and there is a lot of difficult history between Korea and Japan. We were raised to view the Japanese as the oppressors who colonized Korea, so while I knew the statistics which show that less than 0.5% of Japan’s population is Christian, my heart struggled to love them. And yet God slowly showed me through exposure to Japanese people that they are people made in God’s image with their own stories, needs, struggles, and dreams, and like all of us they need the gospel.

As we move forward, please pray that God would continue to be with us and our family. We’d love to share more with you, so be on the lookout for news about a missions meet-and-greet in March!