Japan family fun night

On Saturday night we ran a Japan-themed family fun night at our home church. Of all the various up-front things we do, it's one of our favourites. Alas not many churches take us up on the offer to do it. Over the years we've done them in about six different churches.

The principle is simple: introduce people to Japan and mission in a fun way, with lots of interaction and activity.

On Saturday, we knew that people would probably wouldn't all arrive at 5pm when it began. So during the first hour we had a variety of individual activities for people to get into the theme: from origami to Japanese-themed colouring-in and worksheets to dress-up in Japanese clothes. The kids really got into the origami, but there were quite a few takers at the photo booth too.

Then we had a bring-and-share dinner, to which we contributed rice balls (onigiri) and coffee jelly.

After dinner the main programme began.

We divided the group into teams by playing "happy families" where people were given a card with a Japanese surname on it and they had to find the rest of their family.

Then we ran a slipper-chopsticks relay (pictured). They had to change out of their shoes into Japanese slippers, run up to the bowls and move five sultanas from one bowl to the next with chopsticks and then reverse the journey back to tag the next team member.

Chopsticks proved harder than the slippers, though David did advise them not to run in the slippers!

The next activity we started moving towards our theme for the evening: support. Each team got a bag with 45 plastic blocks and had to create a tower that would support this "Japanese missionary" (aka wooden doll). They did really well at this!

The main element of the evening is pictured below. One volunteer (a young girl) was our "missionary" who was first given a box representing "ministry". She was then given a lot of other boxes representing other things missionaries have to do, or need in order to function healthily, eg. visa help, language and culture learning, education of their kids, spiritual growth. Needless to say, she looked rather overwhelmed after being loaded with all that.

So we got more volunteers to take some of the load off her (I've blanked out faces for privacy reasons). It was quite a powerful demonstration of how missionaries involved on the "coal face" of evangelism and church planting, can be mightily helped by having others around them to help. It was pretty obvious that without all those other tasks, the missionary would have a lot more time to do ministry.

The analogy was continued when David asked everyone else to form a circle around the kids. We represented those who remain in the sending country and we support the missionaries by praying, giving, etc.

It was a fairly small group but we were hopeful that those who did come would not forget what they learned there. As our home church, it hopefully helped them to understand why we're doing what we're doing as support workers.

Speaking at churches when you're a support worker in mission isn't the easiest thing. People like to hear conversion stories, news about people being baptised. Teaching science and editing a magazine doesn't have quite the same impact. So we've been trying our best to raise awareness of how important what we do is to those who are evangelists and church planters. That what we do will help those who do those things stay longer and be more effective.

We have one other opportunity to present this to a church group this home assignment. Though if you're reading this and would like us to do this in your church (and you are in SE Qld), then do get in contact with us as we've still got some Fri/Sat nights free (or even mid-week nights).