Day 2 Japan Mission Trip

The Team

Getting mentally ready for the trip!

Day 2:

Our first day of ministry in Japan was exciting and Surprising! We started off the morning gathering together for breakfast at the church. Talk about a plethora of food! The hospitality here is amazing. The people of the church have gone all out to make us feel at home and we all ate like Sumo Wrestlers in training! After breakfast we meet upstairs for a morning devotional where Pastor Itoh read to us from Luke 5. We discussed the upcoming full day and spent some time praying to prepare our hearts to minister to the Japanese people we would encounter.

The day started off with our ladies leading an English class for Japanese speaking women. The diligently worked their group through the story of Creation in Genesis 1, sharing who God is with people and having them practice speaking about who God is. Meanwhile the Children’s Ministry team was expecting to run a Youth Ministry program for some of the local students at the same time. It turns out that because of a miscommunication in timing, no youth came for the program.

As this was a tad disappointing, our team remained unphased and followed the prompting of the Holy Spirit to perform a prayer walk around the church. This was truly a time of blessing that we plan to continue throughout the week. During the prayer walk we focused on the verses found in Psalm 23 and how greatly our desire should be that God work through us this trip. If we trust in our own efforts we might as well plan to fail but if we trust in God to work through us, despite ourselves, scripture promises we will succeed in abundance! After we finished out prayer walk we went upstairs and had a time of coffee and fellowship with the ladies from the English study. We took this opportunity to share about our personal lives, showing them pictures of our families and developing personal relationships.

We drank coffee and ate snacks, practiced our broken Japanese and were severely impressed with their capacity for the English language. After wishing the Japanese ladies well and inviting them back for tomorrow’s classes we met together as a group for lunch. Once again we were extremely well taken care of with delicious food cooked by the women of the Nagoya church.

We then met as a team for a time of debriefing and to wrap up some logistics for the children’s program later. After this we had a bit of free time and a few of us took the opportunity to walk around the are surrounding the church and visit the local grocery store. I have never seen so many fish! The entire back section of the store was filled with fresh fish! I also had the opportunity to sweet bean snack called On Pan and I loved it!

The children’s ministry was next and this is where God really surprised the group. But in order for you the reader to understand the full effect of what God accomplished I need to introduce you to a few things first. Our team asked to develop two children’s programs each lasting about one hour. We were told to expect no more than 6-10 kids for each program. This was based on the numbers from a group of Canadian workers that used to be involved with the church in Nagoya and provide a children’s ministry program on a regular basis. Currently the church was also expecting only four of their own children to show up and bring a few friends, creating a small but effective outreach for this culture. God had other ideas! For the first program we had 18 kids, for the second we had 20 kids! Way more than we expected or even dreamed would show up! It was amazing, we ran out of crafts and had to use our backup plan on the 1st day! The surprising thing is that only 2 or three of the regular church kids came, the majority of the rest had little or no experience with a Christian church before this night! All I can say is that God is awesome!

Our whole mission team pitched in to play games, make crafts, and teach the Bible lesson. The kids thoroughly enjoyed the time and promised to come back next later and bring more of their friends! The entire time the parents, mostly unchurched, hung out in the back of the room listening and enjoying the excitement. God truly blessed today’s ministry and we are expecting Him to do abundantly more in the upcoming days!

• Please pray for the team’s energy level

• Pray more kids come and we max out our supplies and space • Kathy Kim leading women’s Bible study on Friday

• Rich teaching women’s group on Saturday • Ethan preaching on Sunday

• That God would step in some of the language gap

• A few Japanese ladies that have shown great interest in walking with Christ, one that has been quite adversarial in the past.

Advertisement