sentences:  After becoming a general authority, Kikuchi was assigned to preside over the affairs of the church in Japan.As area supervisor from 1978 to 1982, Kikuchi promoted rapid proselytizing of local adult converts, especially through baptism, and published graphs in the official "Area News" that tracked and compared the number of baptisms in each mission.However, as scholar Jiro Numano has noted, these "hasty baptisms" had negative effects on the church, which encountered difficulty integrating large numbers of newly-baptized converts unschooled in doctrine and practice, and on missionaries, who had to deal with apparently contradictory directions from different church leaders about how and whom to baptize.