Grace Christian Fellowship was planted in Ome, Tokyo in 2001. Through the service of Pastor Jonathan and Rie Wilson it started with a bank account of ¥1,000 and six members, built a sanctuary in an empty warehouse, and rapidly grew to fill the building with multiple services.
GCF went on to host the Grace Christian International School which ministered to students and their families for 18 years both from within the church and without. GCIS students were able to study in English, have daily chapels, and be part of special projects to bless children across Japan.
By 2005 the church was firmly established and the Lord called Grace towards compassion ministry, establishing CRASH to equip churches in Japan for disaster response, Manna to distribute food to needy people through local churches, and the OperationSAFE trauma program to help children affected by disaster or war.
Since 2020, the church has been transitioning into a new season of ministry preparing the way for the Wilson’s retirement and new leadership by Pastor Tom Cotton.
The founding pastor of Grace Christian Fellowship was Jonathan Wilson who grew up in Oregon and met his wife Rie there in 1986. They were married in 1988 and then moved to Rie’s hometown of Ome as missionaries in 1989. Jonathan graduated with an advanced degree in missiology from Fuller Theological Seminary and began pastoring the international congregations of Tokyo Horizon Chapel shortly thereafter.
In early 2000, after frustrations searching for suitable locations for growing Horizon congregations, Jonathan saw an empty warehouse in Ome and mentioned that that would be just the kind of place that God could use for a church. This started Jonathan and Rie praying about planting a new church in Ome.
Jonathan and Rie Wilson started Grace Christian Fellowship with their two young children Keita and Gracie, and two members of Horizon Chapel, Yasuko and Yoshiko, who moved to Ome to be part of the new church planting team.
The first steps of planting the new church was a year long series of prayer meetings where the team would borrow a local church building and pray together with the YWAM base that existed at that time in Ome. They prayed systematically through the city and every aspect its life seeking to make a spiritual impact.
As they prayed they also started sharing the vision for building a new international church in an empty warehouse in Ome that would be bilingual, teach through the Bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and be a blessing to the community.
Then they had to step out in faith to take the initial steps to open the church. They found an available warehouse and received permission from the owner. During a visit to the Horizon Chapel in San Diego in January, 2001 Pastor Jonathan met the Cornerstone Construction Ministry who offered to come to Japan and help build the church. Over the next few months through prayer and sharing the vision God raised up funds to rent the warehouse and purchase and ship over construction materials from the U.S.
God was faithful to supply all of the needs and the first worship service in the empty warehouse was held on April 1st, 2001.
During the construction of the church inside the warehouse in May, 23 volunteers came from four different churches in the U.S. to help. Cornerstone from Horizon in San Diego, California and Calvary Chapel St. Petersburg, Florida, Gateway Friends Church in Diamond Bar, California and the First Presbyterian Church of Jacksonville, Oregon where Jonathan grew up.
While the volunteers worked on building the church there were few places where they could sleep so Kanto Plains Baptist Church in Fussa allowed them to borrow their parsonage, and many of their members brought over food to feed the volunteers or loaned vehicles for transportation.
YWAM volunteers helped unload shipping containers filled with construction materials and helped Yasuko move into her new place in Ome, including Graham Fleming who would later on marry her in the first wedding held at Grace Christian Fellowship.
In just a few weeks the warehouse had been transformed into a church where people could gather to worship. However, after the dedication, the reality was that there were only six team members in a very empty space.
During the first few years Grace Christian Fellowship was very dependent on outside support. Much of the funding came from Jonathan and Rie’s missionary support leaving them little left over for their own family needs. However the church was blessed to have a constant stream of visitors. One American family from the nearby Yokota Air Force base asked on their second or third visit, “Who are your regular members?” Because each time they came the people were different.
The presence of the Americans was a vital help to the new church as many of them were like having extra missionaries. They helped with construction, worship, children’s ministries, discipleship and tithed regularly. Since many of the Japanese were new Christians they became an important influence on the development of their faith.
As the church was being established Pastor Jonathan limited all of his activity to Ome, refusing outside speaking engagements or trips to focus on the church plant. Together with the nearby YWAM base there was constant evangelism and over the first three years of the church many Japanese became Christians and the church grew with the addition of a second morning worship service and an evening worship service.
With the growth of the church, regular ministries also formed and grew. There was translation into Japanese and Spanish, multiple worship teams leading different services, weekly curry to encourage fellowship, and construction of rooms on the second floor to accommodate ever increasing numbers of children.
The church went from a small team that did everything in the beginning to a large team including church members and missionaries and was able to provide continuous options for the church to grow its members and its witness to the community. The calendar was filled with special events for Christmas and Holy Week, Winter and Summer retreats, outreach events like the Ome Festival, children’s events such as VBS, the Harvest Party, and Living Christmas, as well as cultural events like the Yukata Party and Fiesta!
Even with all of the events that were happening on weekends and in the evenings, most of the week the church was empty. In 2004, Grace Christian International School was opened to provide Christian education in English in Ome. It started out as a homeschool co-op and quickly became a school with missionaries as teaching staff.
The school allowed the church to be a greater blessing to the community providing education to children who did not fit into other educational options. Because it was small compared to other schools there was a lot of flexibility in what the school could do. Along with English, Math, History and Science, the students were also able to learn Japanese and take part in the arts like theatrical plays, animations, traveling to LA to record a Japanese children’s worship DVD and filming the 26 episode Japanese children’s television show, BibleKids.
At the end of 2022, the school was closed down after ministering for eighteen years to over 60 students and their families.
In 2005, with the church stabilized and thriving, the Lord gave Pastor Jonathan a burden to prepare the larger church in Japan to reach out in their communities with compassion. The church started a “Year of Compassion” praying for the hurting in Japan, the students at GCIS started each day’s chapel praying for needs in Japan. This developed into a commitment of Grace Christian Fellowship to reach out to those in need. Later that year, the church responded to an earthquake in Niigata by bringing truckloads of food to the survivors.
Following that first response, Pastor Jonathan received training in disaster response and chaplaincy and set about contextualizing it for Japan where chaplaincy does not exist. This led to a series of trainings and disaster responses over the next five years to disasters in Japan and overseas. The ministry was called Christian Relief, Assistance, Support, and Hope or CRASH. When the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck on March 11, Grace Christian Fellowship staff and members served to start and coordinate the full-scale mobilization of thousands of volunteers from throughout Japan and around the world bringing help and hope to communities all along the tsunami coastline. Today CRASH Japan is an independent ministry serving the church in Japan in times of disaster.
In 2008 a financial crisis around the world led Grace Christian Fellowship to respond by coordinating a food bank with donations from Costco and the local farmer’s association. Manna has been distributing food weekly ever since to churches in Ome and the surrounding communities to help people in need.
Also in 2010, a team from Grace Christian Fellowship went to help with the response to the Great Sichuan Earthquake and seeing the need of children traumatized by the disaster, Pastor Jonathan worked with artists Graham Fleming and Yayoi Inoue to develop a 5-day VBS-like camp to address trauma and help children recover. During the 2011 tsunami, Rie Wilson worked with a team from Grace to translate everything into Japanese and improve each station. Later follow-up camps for Christmas and Easter were developed as well. Since then over 50,000 children after mass trauma like disaster or war have attended an OperationSAFE camp. It has spread to thirteen countries most recently helping refugee children from the war in Ukraine and has become the independent ministry OpSAFE International.
Since 2016, Pastor Jonathan worked with Pastor Tom Cotton to transition the church into a new season. Especially in the last five years many of the long running events and programs held at Grace Christian Fellowship have been phased out to make way for new Pastor Tom’s leadership.
From 2025, Pastor Jonathan and Rie officially retired from Grace Christian Fellowship and passed the baton to the next generation. Their prayer is that the Lord would continue to bless Grace as He has up until now and that Grace would continue to be a blessing to its community and to the nation of Japan.