April Update

Friends and supporters,

Next Sunday (April 18th) is a big Sunday for us. We are taking some major steps in our strategic community development. Here are some of the changes we are making next week.

1) We are increasing the number of our service from one to two.

We have two reasons for making this change. One thing that we have decided some months ago was our need to become more family friendly as a church. One of our strengths we possess is the number of younger people we have. Even today, 75% of our members are 35 and younger. However, that also became our disadvantage as most attendees do not have kids. So, until we took over the ministry, we did not have intentional programs to attract regular families since we did not provide programs for kids during the regular service. Now, things are changing. We are intentionally changing our culture in order to accommodate families with children so that parents and kids can grow together in our grace-driven community. In order to make this happen, we had to recruit a number of people (about 7% of our members) who are excellent with kids. However, pulling that many members from our regular service on a regular basis proposed new challenges. So, we decided to have a shorter, but equally intimate and meaningful service for the workers before the regular service.

Another reason has to do with our building capacity. Since we have began our ministry, 90% of our seats have been occupied with worshippers. While we are rejoicing that people are joining us weekly, we are struggling with having more space for new people. So, by adding another service, we can make more room for new guests in the future. We are still looking for a new gathering place but we are going to move forward with our temporal solution for now.

2) We are changing our worship philosophy and programs.

When we decided to make our church more family friendly, we also decided to evaluate our philosophy and practice of worship. When I say we evaluated our worship philosophy, I don’t mean, traditional music vs. contemporary music, modern vs. emerging, or any other kind of western philosophical/stylistic conflict.

The aim of our evaluation was rather simple and practical. We discussed what the Bible had to say about worship and we evaluated how we can practice it most authentically and naturally as a metropolitan community in Tokyo. Our discussion involved critical topics like the history of Japanese church culture, current Christian cultural issues, Christian aesthetics, biblical theology of worship, and assessment of spiritually mature people within our own congregation.

Please continue to pray that God will provide the right people to lead and revolutionize how we worship God in Tokyo so true worshippers can worship the Father in spirit and truth.

3) We are officially starting a nursery.

Well, as we are becoming more family-friendly, this was a given. We just had three couples giving birth within the last few months, and we need to prepare for the changes that are already happening within our community. We welcome any donation of childcare items (diaper station, books, toys, equipments, etc) or financial gift at this time.

4) We are starting our brand new Sunday school program for all members.

Finally we are starting our Christian education program for the church which we have planned over the years. Every member of our church would go through this program which will last for 7 years and 6 months. It covers most of the basic things that believers must understand in order to be well equipped for every good work. Please pray as this much needed project adds us another weekly responsibility for much of the next decade.

5) We are starting a new leadership training program for core-members of our church.

We will start a new program to help people become mentors to others. For the next six months, we will be teaching our core-members what it means to be a Christ-centered community and how to be used by God to build up His church. Relationships can be messy. Especially most city people spend many hours and many Yen/dollars to learn how to avoid relationships that are difficult. But as a Christ-centered community, we are convinced that it is worth investing in people’s lives and the results of going through the messiness of relationships can be far greater than people being isolated from one another in the Body of Christ

We truly desire you to partner with us in prayer because as we make these constructive moves, Satan is also at work to discourage and distract us from our effort.

As we planned to move forward with our new worship program, we lost two thirds of our initial musicians at once for different personal reasons. And the last person who played a key role in our music ministry hurt her hand severely. However, God is greater than our adversary. As we went through a program crisis, God added two new members to our community who have led worship at other churches before. Furthermore, as I shared some of the difficulties with our current situation, many younger people showed great enthusiasm to participate and help us make our worship and praise more glorious before God. We cannot stop thanking God for being faithful and providing every need we have in order to serve Him.

Finally, we are still raising money for our website project. Now that your taxes are done and some of you might receive something back from the government, please prayerfully partner with us financially so that God’s amazing work through us can grow in its effectiveness and reach more people with the transforming Gospel of God’s grace.  Here is a link to our donation page.

We are thankful to God that you are showing interest in what God is doing through us in Tokyo and have been praying for us regularly and providing monetary gifts to help us with our work. Thanks for reading once again.

Kazu and Amy