Brad and Gretta met at church while serving the Lord, and both shared a desire to be missionaries to Japan. They were married in 2007 and began serving together. They served together at a church plant of Post Falls Baptist Church for 9 years where Brad served as Pastor. They have four precious children, Jared, Enoch, Charity, and Lydia.
In 2018 God called the Gardner family to serve as missionaries to Japan. During a survey trip to Japan in 2019, God confirmed their burden and strengthened their desire to be missionaries there.
Nearly 126 million souls
2nd largest unreached people group in the world
Less than 0.5% are Christians
Less than 0.22% attend church
Suicide is the leading cause of death among young adults
Deputation
We began deputation August 30, 2020 and arrived in Japan September 2, 2022.
First Term
We are serving with at Nishimaiko Baptist Church in Kobe, Japan as we study the language and culture and prepare for future church planting ministry in Japan.
Our Vision
The Lord Jesus Christ is the only hope for this hopeless lost world. We desire to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ by faithfully preaching the gospel and by exalting Him in all that we do. We believe that a team approach to church planting is biblical. As the Lord leads, we would like to partner with others to plant a church under the authority of our sending church. We plan to conduct door to door outreach, Scripture distribution, evangelizing through teaching English, and however else the Lord leads us to win souls, disciple believers, and establish Japanese Independent Baptist Churches. We recognize that here in Japan there is not only a great need for doctrinally sound churches with biblical standards, but especially ones with strong families. We would like to emphasize the importance of strong Christian families to build strong churches.
We also recognize that Japan's problem of decreasing population is an opportunity to reach the world with the Gospel through the great number of immigrants coming to Japan who often are more open to the Gospel. We would love to start a Japanese church with an international ministry to help reach souls around the world from Japan.
When we begin local church planting ministry, we would like to host groups from like minded churches for short-term mission trips, and mission interns to assist us in establishing a church, and to help others experience the great need of souls in Japan for the Gospel.
