Tenrikyo Opens Its UK Centre in Wembley, London

In May 2000, thirty years after Tenrikyo Church Headquarters established its Mission Center in Paris in 1970, already recorded here, and eleven years before its Disaster Relief Corps responded to the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, also recorded here, the Tenrikyo Overseas Department opened the Tenrikyo UK Centre in Wembley, northwest London, as the faith's first standing institutional home in Britain. Tenrikyo missionaries had first reached London as early as 1910, when Senba Branch Church sent three missionaries to the city, and small home based meeting groups had grown up around Britain through the 1980s and 1990s, but the Wembley centre gave the following its first registered charitable body and a resident head minister, Rev. Takayuki Onoue. The faith's Shinbashira, its spiritual head at Tenri, visited the new centre and presented calligraphy reading unity of mind as a guiding principle for the congregation's growth. Academic study of the centre's first years, published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, described a faith spread, suspended and re-established across different stages of British history, its following in the United Kingdom growing more slowly than in countries such as Taiwan or Brazil. By its tenth anniversary in 2010, marked at a relocated centre in Hendon, the UK following had grown to five mission stations and seventy one dedicated Yoboku practitioners.