The sacked minister, Jiro Kitamura of the United Church of Christ in Japan, is appealing the decision because he says he cannot accept it. The pastor has campaigned for some time to give the Eucharist, another name for Holy Communion, to those who have not been baptized. During Holy Communion services, in Protestant churches, people receive bread and wine as symbols of the body and blood of Jesus.
“It [the decision to dismiss him] is unfair and wrong,” Kitamura told Ecumenical News International. “The one-sided punishment is strongly exclusive in its logic.”
The dismissed pastor does not believe that in order to receive Holy Communion people need to undergo baptism — a ritual with water used to admit a person to the Christian Church. Kitamura has appealed against his dismissal to the denomination’s moderator, Nobuhisa Yamakita. On February 15, the UCCJ elected five adjudicators to rule finally on the issue.
Kitamura showed a written notice dated January 26 and signed by Mutsumi Matsui, chairperson of a church commission that oversees admission criteria for UCCJ ministers. The note explained the decision to give Kitamura a “disciplinary punishment to dismiss.” The denomination’s bi-weekly newspaper, Kyodan Shinpo, reproduced the notice on February 13.
Kitamura said Matsui and another church official who investigated his case handed him the notice at his local church in Yokohama, near Tokyo, on January 27, following the circulation of a petition critical of the pastor and about which he says he had not been consulted.
The notice said, “The commission accepted this [petition] and set up an investigators’ group [in September] to implement an investigation on the facts regarding the content of the petition. As a result, because the church’s by-laws stipulate that unbaptized persons cannot receive Holy Communion, we came to the conclusion that the Holy Communion that is provided by the Minister Kitamura to unbaptized persons violates Article 1 of the Church Constitution.”
Yamakita commented in his church’s newspaper, “I feel pain that things have come this far. The development of circumstances arising from this is beyond my imagination, but I think that I will respond to them faithfully, trusting the Lord’s guidance.”
A group of Kitamura’s supporters has launched its own petition campaign on its Japanese Web site, and have asked people to send Matsui postcards of protest against the punishment, and to urge the commission to withdraw it.
In February 2009, Kitamura released a book in Japanese entitled, “The Church as a Place for Autonomy and Living Together,” published by Shinkyo, a Protestant publisher in Tokyo. In his book, Kitamura says that his stand is not just a matter of Holy Communion but about, “the way that the Church should be.”
