Samaritans Purse and Churches Helping Churches have joined with many Japan-based evangelical mission teams, including Mission to the World and Presbyterian Mission International, to provide relief throughout the affected area of Japan.

As we previously reported on The Aqulia Report, CRASH (an acronym for Christian, Relief, Assistance, Support, & Hope is the disaster relief arm of many Japanese churches, as well as JEMA (The Japan Evangelical Missionary Association – with whom MTW and PMI work). CRASH has worked in recent disasters in Haiti, China, Indonesia, and many others and is clearly the best known and most effective agency in the county.

This effectiveness is demonstrated by the fact that both Samaritan’s Purse and Churches Helping Churches are channeling all of their support through CRASH.

As we reported last night, Samaritan’s Purse sent a 747 loaded with relief supplies to Japan and landed at the U. S. Air Force Base at Yokota. From there the 93 tons of supplies were moved to the CRASH base camp established at the MeySen Academy, a large private school started and operated by Christians located on a large campus in Sendai, at the northern end of the destruction area.

Sendai is at the top of the area needing relief; Tokyo is at the bottom. Clearly there is less traffic congestion at the northern end so it will be easier to move materials down those roads. Our readers will understand that the MTW Chiba and MTW Nagoya are both at the southern end and have been working in the regions best reached by the roads north out of Tokyo. But they, too, are working through church associations connected to the CRASH effort.

The latest major American evangelical effort to decide to work with CRASH is Churches Helping Churches. This is a relatively new disaster relief effort. It was founded by Pastor James MacDonald of Harvest Bible Chapel, a multi-site mega church with six campuses in the Elgin/North Chicago area of Illinois, and Mark Driscoll of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle. This effort began following the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince, Haiti on January 12, after the two pastors went to Haiti together within the week of the event.

CHC has since become a global partnership of church communities who seek to rebuild other churches in the wake of a catastrophic natural disaster. They are church communities from all over the world who have partnered through CHC with other church communities of brothers and sisters who are suffering. Their efforts are intended to provide spiritual support and development aid to the pastors and their churches who are often the de facto leaders in these affected communities, as a complement to the initial waves of humanitarian aid that pour into a country in the wake of a disaster.

Here is a report from their ministry director, who is on the ground in Japan, about making the decision to work with CRASH in the Japan crisis:

We’re doing this by getting behind a local organization called CRASH Japan, which comprises Japanese missionaries and churches who know each other and know Japan. They are one of the most centralized efforts in the country, and they are getting the job done. No matter whom I speak with in Japan, it always ends up coming back to CRASH.

We have had the privilege of sponsoring the four church assessment teams that went out earlier this week, whose reports we’ll be able to share with you this Sunday. Right now, a team of 20 is leaving from CRASH headquarters as I write this to establish a base camp near Sendai, four days ahead of schedule, to distribute relief supplies to the community.

You can read more about the work of CRASH in a second story we have posted this morning here.

Needless to say, the providence of God has been active through this association of many small evangelical churches and mission groups in Japan for a number of years, almost as though they were being prepared for this moment. (Perhaps we could boldly could leave out the ‘almost’, couldn’t we?)

I don’t want to get ahead of God in this matter, but there is certainly the possibility that most of the people living in the affected areas – who already are seeing that their government has not been well enough organized to bring relief to the area, but these folks who love Jesus instead of the Buddha seem to really care – that many of these people and their descendants will come to know the reality of Jesus and through faith become his disciples.