Foreign Language Worship in Japan

April 29, 2025 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

As I write this article, I am concluding six and a half years serving as Missionary Pastor at Tokyo Lutheran Church in the Okubo neighborhood. Most people know this area as “Koreatown,” though nowadays it has at least 70% Japanese residents, and the foreign population is very mixed. My duty has been to lead worship and offer spiritual care for people who attend Tokyo Lutheran Church in order to worship in English.

My obvious qualification for this ministry is that I’m an American, a native English speaker, and an ordained Lutheran pastor. But I have also had extended experience of English-language international congregations before coming to Tokyo, including in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Strasbourg, France. Congregations that offer worship in a language different from the national language, and attracting worshippers from resident foreigners, tend to have a certain set of characteristics. Ministry in these circumstances requires a special awareness of the strengths and weaknesses that go with international communities.

Let’s start with the weaknesses and dangers of international congregations…

Now on Substack!

October 5, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Since “pick a lane” has never exactly been my forte, I’m now on Substack.

But, for a reason distinct from my other text ventures, as for example Theology & a Recipe, which is the newsletter I send from here.

I’m putting my fiction on Substack, in part because many of you like my theology, and many of you like my fiction, but not all of you like both (or at least not in equal measure). So this way you can sort yourself into your lane of choice—and of course, if you’re a both-laner like me, please subscribe to both! (And now I think I’ll abandon the overtaxed “lane” metaphor.)

First up on Substack is a complete serialization of my novel A-Tumblin’ Down. I actually ran a serial reading of it a couple years ago, before it was published, and it was… SO. MUCH. FUN. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it again, especially now post-publication, and this is it!

Read more about it and, better yet, sign up here. The serial, communal reading begins October 22!

A Book on the Ascension Is Underway!

September 23, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

After the thrilling success of my book Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration on Kickstarter, I’ve decided to tackle the next lesser-festival/homiletical-impossibility, namely the Ascension! ...

What Agatha Ate #11: Autumn

May 21, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

And here we are at last, in the final chapter of Agatha’s autobiography. The chapters do not balance according to the time passed, as she herself acknowledges in the opening sentences: “I am writing this in 1965. And that was in 1945. Twenty years, but it does not seem like twenty years.” Indeed, this period is raced through—perhaps because contentment and steady success do not a fascinating story make, and who knew that better than an author of murder mysteries? …

What Agatha Ate #10: The Second War

May 7, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Just like food references were thin, except by deprivation, in Agatha’s account of the First World War, so they are again in this chapter, on the Second. It’s no surprise, thought, that when references do appear, they are heavily freighted with significance.

Since Agatha was always a great lover of apples, the following anecdote is worth excerpting, from a period when various of Agatha’s houses were occupied by the military and government for the war effort…

What Agatha Ate #9: Life with Max

April 23, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Considering the correlating role of food with romance in Agatha’s autobiography, should we be surprised that this chapter begins with happy food memories? Of course not!

They are on their honeymoon in the Balkans, and at a complete linguistic loss. “We had enormous fun with the menus there. They were written in Yugoslavian [!], and of course we had no idea what they meant. We used to point to some entry and then wait with some anxiety to see what would be delivered. Sometimes it was a colossal dish of chicken, on another occasion poached eggs in a highly seasoned white sauce, another time again a sort of super-goulash.”

Later they took a boat from Yugoslavia to Greece, which surprisingly enough had fabulous eats. “Never have I tasted such food as we had on that boat: delicious lamb, very tender, in little cutlets, succulent vegetables, rice, sumptuous sauce, and savoury things on skewers.”

Unfortunately, the honeymoon ended in alimentary disaster…

What Agatha Ate #8: Second Spring

April 9, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This fittingly titled chapter walks us through the treks to the Near East that gave Agatha a new lease on life—and a new marriage. If her sheer doggedness in recovering from emotional betrayal, or unsurpassed publishing record, is not enough to inspire your respect, then the amount of physical misery she voluntarily endured for the sake of adventure ought to do it.

Accordingly, the discussions of food in the first half of this chapter have largely to do with their uninspiring nature…

What Agatha Ate #7: The Land of Lost Content

March 26, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is the chapter of unhappy, unsettled men. It starts with Monty, Agatha’s ne’er-do-well brother, invalided out from his life of African adventure. Settling down to domestic tranquility in England did not suit him in the slightest. Living again with his mother in Ashfield, he would demand the servants prepare “chops and steaks” for him whenever he felt like eating—even if that happened to be at four in the morning.

Eventually they got him into the care of a widow with thirteen children, Mrs. Taylor, who knew how to handle a man like Monty. She cooked him delicious meals and grew a garden of “peas, new potatoes and French beans.” Monty liked her well enough to stop with the four a.m. calls for steak.

And that is the end of food references in this chapter, which gives way to the crumbling of her marriage to Archie…

What Agatha Ate #6: Round the World

March 13, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In this chapter Agatha details her and Archie’s year-long, round-the-world tour with the quasi-charlatan Belcher. There’s a lot about the landscape and a lot about surfing, though rather less about food than you might expect.

The only thing she recalls of South Arica was “having iced lemonades.” Melbourne’s cuisine is remembered as chiefly “incredibly tough beef or turkey.” New South Wales stands out for “Ripe oranges plucked straight from the trees… the most delicious things you can imagine,” but she was disappointed to see how pineapples grow, like a field of cabbages. Another stop in Australia featured cocoa and coffee.

The most memorable item from New Zealand was not anything on the menu, but how they “fell into the clutches of a man known to us all as ‘The Dehydrator.’” No, not a super-villain who desecrates corpses, but an entrepreneur who wanted to figure out how to dehydrate, package, and sell every kind of food. “We were given dehydrated carrots, plums, everything—all, without exception, tasted of nothing.” Even Belcher had to tame his tantrums and endure “dehydrated carrots and potatoes”…

What Agatha Ate #5: War

February 27, 2024 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This chapter deals with the formative years of Agatha’s adulthood, including her abrupt wartime marriage to Archie after a lot of on-again-off-again, training and working as both nurse and pharmacist, and eventually establishing herself as a housewife and an author.

She vividly describes the shock of learning to nurse wounded and dying soldiers, but also how canny she had to get, and quick. “[I]n a month or so I was quite adept at looking out for their various tricks,” as when a soldier claimed that the doctor had prescribed him a diet prominently featuring port wine!

Though married now, Agatha continued to live at home in Ashfield with her mother while Archie was gone for long tours of duty with the brand-new Air Force. During this time, her elderly Grannie, no longer able to care for herself, came to live with them. Just how unable she was to take care of herself became clear when they undertook the herculean task of emptying out her house at Ealing. The tragic specter of spoiled food pointed not only to Grannie’s growing dementia but also to the desperate search for foodstuffs in wartime. “Jams that had gone mouldy, plums that had fermented, even packets of butter and sugar which had slipped down behind things and been nibbled by mice… vast monuments of waste! I think that is what hurt her so much: the waste.”

Not to worry: some good things did survive. “Here were her home-made liqueurs—they at least, owing to the saving quality of alcohol, were in good condition. Thirty-six demijohns of cherry brandy, cherry gin, damson gin, damson brandy, and the rest of if, went off in the furniture van. On arrival there were only thirty-one. ‘And to think,’ said Grannie, ‘those men said they were all teetotallers!’” They’d have done better if they were in fact teetotallers who resold their absconded goods on the black market—financially, anyway, if not morally…