This article tries to grasp the language policy of Japanese ethnic churches and the legitimization of church member identities in the midst of dominant languages in Canada. While church members frequently construct Japanese ethnic Christian churches with ‘grassroots’ language policies that appear to warrant their Japanese language and cultural identities and practices, their membership to their churches and their Christian faith often leads them to meeting with legitimization as Christians in solidarity with other Christians in the world (Takamizawa in Torch Trinity J 4(4):34–45, 2001). Employing theoretical descriptions of language planning and policy, the article debates the scholarship of ethnic church studies, kokusaika and nihonjinron discourses, and groupism as described in frame theory (Nakane in Japanese society. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1970), as a framework to contextualize church member experiences and perceptions in the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of language policy of Japanese ethnic churches in Canada. The article employs Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough in Analysing discourse: textual analysis for social research. Routledge, London, 2003) to assay pertinent language policies and interview texts that disclose the perceptions of Japanese ethnic Christian church members from three churches in Western Canada.