Welcome to the collected works of the Hayama Missionary Seminar.
The Hayama Seminar was a three day, two night gathering of missionaries and invited guests. Held in the first week of January, the first seminar was in 1960, the last one in 2002. The intent of the early organizers of the seminar was to discuss in a scholarly fashion the issues of the day. Papers were written, responses were written and animated discussions were engaged in. The papers and responses were made into books that found their way around the world into seminary and college libraries. These books are an amazing anthology, a kind of storehouse of Japanese culture, Christian theology, Bible teaching, missions theory, sociology, philosophy, Church history and many other subjects deemed worthy of discussion.
Some of the early Hayama presenters preached the Gospel in the age of rickshaws. Some presenters were interned in camps during WW II. Those early missionaries and guest presenters departed from this world years ago. Not many years from now those of us who were present in the final decade of Hayama will have gone on to our spiritual reward. My hope is the product of the Hayama gatherings will not be lost and forgotten, but become an enduring symbol of the sacrificial and faithful labor of generations of missionaries and Japanese Christians who never gave up on reaching out to the Japanese people with the word of Jesus Christ.
When my wife and I became part of the Hayama Seminar we had a recently purchased 486 running Windows 3.1. Most missionaries did not have PCs or the type of skill my wife had with Microsoft Word; she was asked to become an editor. The advent of the Pentium, Windows 95, CD writers and scanners gave me an idea: I could scan and release on CD the entire series of Hayama books! Task accomplished, a CD was released with low image JPG files of each page of each book. Then along came really good and affordable OCR software; I rescanned the books and converted them to Word documents and eventually JPG files for uploading to the Internet. Remember those who labored long and faithfully in service to God’s kingdom in Japan!
Rev. Lonnie Dufty
Hayama Seminar Archivest
August 26, 2017
Contact Hayama Archivest:
[contact-form to=”ldufty@horao2020.net” subject=”Hayama Seminar Inquiry”][contact-field label=”Name” type=”name” required=”1″][contact-field label=”Email” type=”email” required=”1″][contact-field label=”Website” type=”url”][contact-field label=”Message” type=”textarea”][/contact-form]