ABOUT PRESBY
JAPANESE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
シアトル日本長老教会
“So others will know the life found in Jesus Christ.”
イエス・キリストの内にある命を他の人々が知るために。
Dedicated June 1, 1907.
Who Are We?
Japanese Presbyterian Church of Seattle (“Presby”) is an expression of the Body of Christ, founded in 1907 as an outreach to immigrants from Japan by Seattle’s First Presbyterian Church. The small congregation grew and matured through the decades, surviving incarceration during World War II, and returned and rebuilt its community after the war ended. Today, Presby is a vibrant multigenerational and multicultural ohana of faith, where all are welcome to worship, learn, and serve together.
The building we currently worship in was built in 1963 and expanded in two phases in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2024, the congregation embarked on a capital campaign with the vision and title of “Building Belonging.” View the story of our congregation and the vision for the campaign. This annotated map from 2024 shows the church and its neighborhood, which has seen tremendous development and change in the last decade, and offers the potential for many new relationships and opportunities for others to come to know the life found in Jesus Christ.
We worship in English and Japanese and have offered online Zoom participation for our services since 2020. We offer church school classes for all ages from fall to spring, in addition to many other opportunities and groups for fellowship, service, and faith formation.
The Word of God in its written (Bible), incarnate (Jesus), and proclaimed (preached) forms is central to our life. In and through it, we encounter the presence of the living, triune God, who calls and equips us to love God by loving our neighbors. We love our neighbors by recognizing the image of God in which they (and we) are created, and seeking the justice and righteousness of God’s kingdom for them. We seek to be disciple-making disciples, sharing the good news of the God who loves us and calls us into relationship with God’s very self through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. We live by faith, entering the community through baptism, encouraging one another in our pilgrim journeys, regularly eating together at Christ’s table, and so keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus and the hope of resurrection.
On the following pages, you can read answers to frequently asked questions about Jesus and the church, learn about our leadership (the Session, comprised of Pastors and Ruling Elders, and the Board of Deacons), a very brief history of the Presbyterian church (we are a member congregation of Seattle Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church (USA)), our denomination’s 1983 A Brief Statement of Faith, a 2016 Presby Statement of Faith, and several statements issued by our Session in 2020.
See this document for more information. Please contact our pastors if you have any questions!