Remembering Bruce Young and the Call to Japan
On Saturday, my wife Becky and I attended the funeral of a dear friend and longtime ministry partner in Japan, Bruce Young, held at my local church, Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church PCA
Before the service, we spent time with Bruce’s wife, Susan, sharing memories from many years of ministry and friendship in Japan. It was a tender and sacred time.
Bruce passed away recently after a long and courageous battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). The service was a beautiful testimony—not only to Bruce and Susan’s decades of faithful missionary service to Japan, but, just as Bruce would have wanted, to the faithfulness of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ whom they served together.
I will always treasure my conversations with Bruce during his final years, especially his deep reflections on the importance of spiritual formation in the lives of missionaries—being formed deeply by Christ before, during, and after being sent.
About seven years ago, Jona Davison, with Mission to the World and Community Arts Tokyo, recorded a powerful 22-minute interview with Bruce and Susan titled "Conflux: A 125-Year Story of Missions in Japan."
The video traces the remarkable work of God that led to the Youngs’ ministry—and ends with the sobering reality that most Japanese people still have not heard the gospel, making Japan the second-largest unreached people group in the world.
And yet the question lingers—one Bruce himself would want us to ask: What might God do in another 70 years? In another 125 years?
Bruce lived a humble, quiet life marked by a deep conviction, captured well in the words of John Keith Falconer: “I have but one candle of life to burn, and I would rather burn it out in a land filled with darkness than in a land flooded with light.”
As you watch this brief video, I invite you to consider—not abstractly, but prayerfully—whether God might be calling you to go.
"How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!” Romans 10:14-15
