Encouragement from our local church

This was our pastor taking a photo of the congregation of the
9.15am congregation on the 56th anniversary early this year.

One thing I love about our Japanese home church is that it is balanced. It has a wide range of ages—from babes to elderly and most of what’s in-between (a thinning in the teen to young adult range, though). The other balance we’ve repeatedly seen demonstrated over the years is its view of its place in the world. It is not insular.

It is rooted in the local community which is demonstrated in events like the annual summer festival and weekly café. They’ve just started an afternoon homework-type club for local kids.

It’s a rooted in Japan, demonstrated by concern for ministries going on in various parts of Japan, we regularly have had speakers from various ministries like Bible translation into Japanese sign language, hiBA (a high school ministry), university campus ministries. For several years the church sent teams to the post-tsunami devastated area of Tohoku.

It’s got its eyes on the rest of the world too. The church supports ministry and missionaries in other countries. It supports a school for disabled and abandoned kids in the Philippines. Missionaries in countries such as Taiwan and Turkey have spoken at church and the church supports overseas missionaries. I’m not sure how many (to say I find reading the finance report a bit difficult is an understatement), but it seems that we often have a guest here saying thank you for supporting our ministry.

It does all of this, while at the same time working hard to pay off the debt of the small block of land next to it that it bought in the last couple of years. But that hasn’t stopped it looking outwards.

Yesterday we were blessed with a guest speaker from Wycliffe. The speaker was not a translator with Wycliffe, he was a teacher of the kids of missionaries in Papua New Guinea.

It was amazing to hear the parallels of this family’s story to ours. Actually, I have worked with the wife at CAJ’s Thrift Shop, but hadn’t heard much of their story. The husband was called to ministry when he did a short-term mission trip to Indonesia (we also did a trip there in our early 20s). He was felt specifically called to teach missionary kids, as was my husband. They first went to Papua New Guinea from Japan in 1999, just a year before we went from Australia to Japan. He still feels passionate about the education of missionary kids, despite being called back to Japan to head up Wycliffe’s sending branch here.

I’m thankful to be a part of such a church. Oftentimes I struggle to feel a part of it at all. My language skills hold me back from knowing more people and what’s going on. But it’s a blessing that we can be present every week. There is a love there that goes beyond the spoken. I love standing on the sidelines and seeing what this church is involved in and quietly thanking God that his name is glorified in this place.

It’s good for us during the summer to go to more rural and remote places and worship in other churches, to catch a glimpse of how it is to be a part of smaller churches. But I continue to be encouraged that, in this country where the chance that you will meet a Christian is less than one in a hundred people, there are mature churches and mature believers. Churches and believers, that though they are seriously in the minority in this land, continue to draw their strength from God. They haven’t collapsed in the face of the enormity of the task and they aren’t looking inwards. It’s terribly encouraging.