Sometimes the differences are insignificant, a matter of wording.

In other cases, the versions radically differ from one another.

In yet other cases, the evidence is strong that a saying is not what scholars call ipsissima verba, the very words of Jesus, but a later invention or version produced by the Church.

That is not unique to Jesus.

I recently read quotes attributed to Albert Einstein. They do not always agree with each other; there are different versions of the same idea. Sometimes the differences are insignificant.

In other cases, a saying may not be ipsissima verba.

In any case, three quotes attributed to Einstein, whether actually his words or not, provide useful commentary on the situation of the Church in Asia today.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

The Church is in decline in much of the world. The Church of which I am a member, the Catholic Church in Japan, is in many ways a miniature version of that phenomenon.

Congregations are ageing and shrinking.

The children and grandchildren of white-haired parishioners have nothing to do with the Church except when they come to funerals.

Local clergy are so scarce that for the first time in nearly a century foreigners are being appointed as bishops.

The situation 75 years ago was different. At the end of World War 2, Japan had nothing. Bombing had destroyed most cities. Food and medicine were scarce. War orphans turned to crime to survive.

Less visible was the moral and emotional devastation of people who realized that they had given their hearts, souls, and bodies to an ideology that made them both perpetrators and victims of death, destruction and injustice.

The impossible had happened: Japan lost.

An influx of foreign clergy and religious helped rebuild education, health care and social welfare. More importantly, they and the small Japanese Christian community offered what was most needed: hope.

Explosive growth of the Catholic Church in Japan followed, led by youth for whom the Church answered their and society's needs. Many of those young men and women became clergy and religious.

Now, three-quarters of a century has passed and those young Christians have passed from the graying through the whiting to the dying stage of life.

Congregations are shrinking.

Seminaries and novitiates contain more dust than aspirants.

Crippled by the lack of wisdom that the social sciences could offer What happened? Or, rather, what did not happen?

The simple answer is that the Catholic Church in Japan is trapped in the 1940s.

Institutions and activities that answered real needs then continue to exist even though no longer needed. We do the same things over and over, hoping to draw new blood to the geriatric Church.

That insanity is not specifically Japanese.

The Catholic Church throughout Asia is insane, propping up institutions and systems that serve no useful or effective function for the Church's mission in the second millennium.

That brings us to the second quote attributed to Einstein: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

After World War 2, the problems were obvious.

Today once again the needs are obvious to those willing to look: climate change, disease, the wealth gap, authoritarian regimes, anti-intellectualism, refugees, war, societal polarization and more.

However, our commitments to answering long-past needs override a response.

Though the problems are obvious, it is not so clear who we, the People of God called to bring the Good News to confront, overcome and heal the bad news of our time, are.

Who are the Catholics entrusted with the vocation to evangelize the world of the 2020s? We know our hair is whitening, but what is under it? What are our attitudes, our aptitudes, our hopes, our fears? We do not know.

Why do we continue in the Church? What is in the minds and hearts of those who have left or never approached the Church? We do not know.

There is a way to start understanding our situation in Asia: the social sciences.

We rightly look to Scripture, theology, history, and tradition to know the Church. However, we are crippled by the lack of a whole realm of wisdom that the social sciences, especially sociology and psychology, could offer.

The Church in Asia needs professional research on every aspect of our life as a community and as individual believers.

We cannot rely upon anecdotal "insights" from amateurs with limited experience, unexamined prejudices, and fear that the social sciences may uncover things we would rather not see, things that might challenge our self-understanding or force us to rethink cherished prejudices and projects.

Asian Churches must call upon the expertise of social scientists to help us better understand who we are and what we can and must do.

What Einstein said (or may have said) of scientists is true of the Church, too: "For a scientist, altering your doctrines when the facts change is not a sign of weakness."

We must be strong enough to get the facts.

• William Grimm is a missioner and presbyter in Tokyo and is the publisher of the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News).

The "economic miracle" of the country's post-war recovery was in full swing. Before the end of the decade, a best-selling book would tout Japan as Number One.

However, the miracle was not yet complete, even in the capital Tokyo.

Large parts of the metropolis were not yet connected to a sewer system, and so what English-speakers called "honey wagons," trucks that pumped out septic tanks, were a common sight and smell in residential neighbourhoods.

Buildings slapped together after World War 2 were being replaced with more substantial structures.

Supermarkets had not yet replaced vendors selling foodstuffs and household items from handcarts.

They used bells, horns or chants to advertise their presence, with different instruments and tunes depending upon their product. I miss them much more than I miss the honey wagons.

Equipped with only a few weeks of language study, I decided to spend my Christmas vacation from language school up north on the snowy island of Hokkaido, staying with a priest in a coal-mining town where the travel instructions were basically, "Go to the middle of nowhere and turn right into the mountains."

The middle of nowhere was easy to find since it was the town where steam locomotives that served much of the island met up with diesel trains.

So, there was always a cloud of black smoke over the place visible from far away.

Now that town is no longer a travel hub, and it does not even exist anymore; it was merged with another.

When I arrived, the priest told me that he had been contacted by people in a little settlement farther out in the mountains.

They wanted to have a Christmas party for their kids.

They knew that the church had something to do with Christmas and knew as well that the priest would not arrive empty-handed.

So, we loaded fruit and candy into the car on Christmas Eve and drove off into a winter wonderland. We drove, that is until we could go no farther on the snowbound road. We hiked the last part of the way.

The party was in a shack with the wind whistling through the walls. There was a handful of kids and a drunk man in a Santa suit.

The priest told the kids the story of Christmas and then taught them to play Bingo.

One of them was intellectually handicapped and could not understand the numbers for the game.

Since I had at least learned my numbers, we were paired as a team.

Here I was in a drafty shed with snow blowing through the walls.

A drunken Santa Claus was snoozing in the corner.

I understood next to nothing that was being said, teamed up with a poor kid for whom, apart from pointing to numbers on a Bingo card, I could do nothing.

I was on the far side of the globe from my family and friends, and all that Christmas with them meant.

I began to feel lonely, thoroughly miserable, and sorry for myself.

What the hell kind of Christmas was this?

And then, so forcefully that it almost seemed audible enough to be heard by everyone, one word came to me: Bethlehem.

This year will be a kind of reenactment of that Christmas in a shed in Japan for many of us.

COVID-19 forces us to do without so much that traditionally makes the feast and season special - being with family and friends, partying, visiting, shopping, gifting, feasting, even churchgoing.

This year, much of that is impossible.

Many of us mourn family and friends lost to the disease.

Many are out of work and sinking beneath financial disaster.

Schools are disrupted.

Experts tell us that things will worsen as January is likely to be the worst month before vaccines become widely available and begin to beat back the plague.

What the hell kind of Christmas is this?

With so much else stripped away, even life itself, one word remains. Bethlehem.

Like it or not, we are forced to face this Christmas with everything stripped away except the simple fact that Christ is with us not as a doll under the Christmas tree, not as the subject of songs and stories, not as a distraction from the other elements of the season, but as God with us, Emmanuel.

God with us in our worst situation.

God with us in our own poverty and that of others. God with us not to make everything as we wish, but God with us to share our confusion, our disappointment, our pain, our death.

That is the meaning of Bethlehem.

This year, Christmas is either about God with us, or it is nothing.

If Covid Christmas teaches us that, next year, we may resume the trappings of the season, but with new unclouded knowledge of what the feast really is.

A note: that priest with whom I spent my first Japan Christmas died last April, one of Covid's victims.

• Bill Grimm is the publisher of UCANews.com. He is a Catholic priest and Maryknoll missioner who lives in Japan.

That is true whether we modern believers are Japanese or not, Catholic Christians or not. The Church within which we live and worship endured persecution so recent that I know a woman whose grandfather died a martyr.

The rest of her family — parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews — was wiped out on Aug. 9, 1945, when the atomic bomb exploded over the Catholic neighbourhood of Nagasaki. She was the only member of the family out of town that day.

During the centuries of persecution, Christians in Japan had no church buildings, no clergy, no religious, no Masses, no religious institutions, no diocesan structures, and no contact with the rest of the Church in the country or outside.

What they did have was each other and a commitment to maintain as well as they could the faith that was passed on to them and to pass it on to the next generations even at the risk of their lives.

They were poor, oppressed and lived in perpetual danger, but they prayed and shared their ability to help one another in need. In many ways, it was the Golden Age of Christianity in Japan.

Those Japanese Christians knew that church is not someplace to go, but something to be, something to do.

The coronavirus pandemic is an opportunity to learn or relearn that today.

We have had to be faithful without much of what we thought essential, symbolized by a building and what goes on inside it.

But God is still with us whether we are in a cross-decorated building or not. The real issue is, are we with God?

Around the world, there are Christians who clamour to have their buildings reopen so that they might exercise their Christianity.

They ignore the fact that confronted with a highly contagious disease, the most Christian thing to do is to protect others by following the advice of disease experts.

Jesus never told his followers to gather in a particular place each week. He did say that our lives will be judged on whether or not we respond to him in our needy sisters and brothers. He did say that when we pray, we should go apart to a private place and pray in secret to the Father who sees what happens in secret.

When he spoke with the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus said that places are not important, that what matters is worship "in spirit and truth."

The woman had asked him where proper worship should be done, at the temple on Mt. Gerizim or at the temple in Jerusalem.

His answer was basically, "Neither."

In that case, do we need buildings at all if we can and should pray anywhere and everywhere?

We do not and we do.

Originally, Christians gathered in homes. Besides being persecuted, Christian communities were small enough to not need special buildings and were too poor to erect them.

Eventually, as numbers increased, homes were modified to allow larger gatherings.

The remains of the oldest known one are in Dura-Europos in Syria.

Its frescos, the earliest surviving Christian art, are in a museum at Yale University in the United States.

Over time as Christian communities grew, buildings were adapted or erected for liturgical use.

The three-aisle layout that is so common in churches comes from basilicas (public halls) that were repurposed into churches or were the architectural model for them.

So, we have buildings in which we gather in the name of Jesus so that our discipleship can be confirmed, nurtured, confronted, affirmed and comforted.

But the discipleship is the important thing.

Without that, the gatherings are nearly worthless. And that is the reason this pandemic is an opportunity for each of us. Discipleship does not require a particular kind of building or a particular kind of gathering.

Buildings, Sunday gatherings, public prayers and hymns are the accompaniments of religion, but not the essence of Christianity.

Christianity is not a religion.

It has religious trimmings, but its most basic reality is a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The "religious" trappings aid our commitment to and celebration of that relationship but are not the relationship.

Now that the danger of contagion makes the buildings and large gatherings unavailable, we are invited to concentrate on what our faith really is.

It is prayer, service and trust that we celebrate with others when we can, but which we must live regardless of circumstances.

We can gather few by few to break open the Word, break the Bread, and share our faith. We can be church, as were the persecuted Christians of Japan.

• Bill Grimm is a Catholic priest and Maryknoll missioner who lives in Japan.
• First published in UCANews.com. Republished with permission.
• The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of CathNews.