June-August Mega Update

Hello,

This is Amy and Kazu. This is our mega update for our summer. Wow, we can’t believe our summer is already coming to an end. Time does really fly by quickly when you try to take advantage of every opportunity God brings you to share the hope of the Gospel to those who are totally unaware of it or to those who need to be reminded of it! We take this opportunity to thank you who have prayed for our ministry and our life, and made it what it is today with His grace. Your support and encouragements are greatly appreciated.

As we toil to spread the living hope of the Gospel in one of the most affluent cities in the world, we are reminded that God has called us to preach the Gospel to one of the toughest people groups in the world, namely the rich.

Jesus once said, “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matt 19:24).

Yet, by His grace, God is doing the impossible through us once again. We boldly proclaim the complete picture of the Gospel to our community whenever God gathers us together. Many believers are slowly, but clearly, starting to realize that they have been called to a higher life in Christ. As a result, they are starting to live out that calling by sacrificing their money and their time to love one another as they were called to. Also a number of non-believers are being attracted to the Gospel lifestyle that we preach and demonstrate through our community. About 10% of those who attended our service last week were non-believers who came because they were attracted to their friends’ lifestyle. Instead of being ashamed of the Gospel, we boldly and uncompromisingly proclaim how it changes who we are so we can belong to a body united by love, which God uses to reconcile all things back to Himself.

While God is using our community positively in many ways, not everything is sanitized and shimmering. For every demonstration of God’s grace we witness in our community, we deal with numerous acts of sin, and their devastating consequences, behind the scenes. This summer, we have been serving partially as spiritual fire fighters, running around to extinguish destructive flames people are starting as we get serious about our commitment to share our lives with one another. Unresolved conflicts, jealousy, pride, selfishness, bitterness, apathy; you name it, we are dealing with it. Our community is finally growing enough that we are starting to look like one of the churches that the apostle Paul was dealing with during his time. There are other issues that we face that are giving me more white hair than I care to have, but I will mention them in our next update since it is going to take many paragraphs to explain.

Let me also take a moment and mention some of the programs we started this summer. As one way to reach out to those outside of our community, we started a small outreach/discipleship ministry, called, “Choi Maji,” which simply means a place where we talk about something a little (choi) serious (maji). We encouraged our church members to invite their high school and college friends to talk about issues they see in the world or problems they see in Christianity or in other religions. Then, I used those topics to share what the Bible has to say about them, and, ultimately, to share that the biblical worldview is the only adequate system that provides a realistic solution to what they are frustrated with. However, I do not share the Gospel in these meetings for two reasons. First, I want people to come back monthly to discuss new issues without saying we are trying to brainwash them to join our “religion,” and, second, we use it to disciple our own young believers so that they can personally share the Gospel to them using the topics we discussed. This ministry has a great deal of potential, and we are having a special cookout with the regular attendees tomorrow (Aug 19th). You can pray for us as I will be sharing something from the Bible to these students.

We also had an internship program this summer that kept us incredibly busy. We had two interns, Adam Yoder, and Paul Mackey, both from the U.S., who came to observe our ministry. They lived with us for two months, and intimately experienced what missions work really looks like in Tokyo. We took them to different districts of Tokyo, and made them think about how to effectively share the Gospel with various kinds of Japanese people. We made them observe the differences between the community we are building and the churches they see in the U.S. We sent them to an English Bible school for Japanese people in Karuizawa, Nagano for 10 days so they could teach and encourage those students studying there. We also planned an English outreach in Tokyo to see what we might be able to do in the future as we expand the regular programs that we do. With the internship now over, we believe that they will be able to use this opportunity to aid them in making wise decisions as they continue to seek their future direction in life and the possibility of working alongside of us in the future.

One thing that running all of the programs we are currently running taught us is how we need other full-time and part-time partners to increase our influence in the city. It is almost impossible for us to oversee our worship services, publication ministry, leadership training, counseling, outreaches, and the few other critical things we do every week. Please pray that God would give us teammates who are passionate about working with Japanese people who are socially and professionally competent. We specifically need people who can oversee our worship and community growth.

Please pray for my mother also, who is fighting the last stage of her cancer. She will start taking morphine this week as she has been battling with unbearable pain for months. She still remains one of our biggest supporters and she still gives me ministry advice while she lies on her bed. Please pray that we will be able to be a blessing to her during her last days, and that we can continue to encourage her with the living hope we have in Christ.

Let me close this update by sharing some of the thoughts we have been reciting as we continue to move forward with the message of the Gospel in Tokyo.

One of the many lessons our community is learning is the necessity to be united as the body of Christ.

We live in a world where people are rewarded for being competitive, independent, and self-assured. We love and adore people who are successful, beautiful, and talented. While these people make great CEOs and Hollywood stars, they make poor members of the Body of Christ.

Maintaining true unity within the Body of Christ looks much easier on paper than in an actual community of sinners where most of us thoughtlessly submit to consumerism, individualism, materialism, existentialism, and countless other -isms taught by the world. One thing that unites all of these -isms is that they propagate us to live with our eyes fixed on this fallen world as though there is nothing more to our existence after this life.

As long as we let the world teach us (wrong) theology, and we thoughtlessly submit to it, it is impossible for us to achieve the level of unity which Christ desires to see in His body, because a life that is worthy of our calling is not one of personal success/happiness and self-expression, but of “humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”

If you take a moment and think about these descriptions of what a worthy life looks like in Christ, you will realize that all of these virtues are relational in nature, presupposing that we are already sharing our lives intimately with other believers, which is an assumption Paul would not have made, in all likelihood, if he foresaw today’s Western Christian culture. We as Christians cannot demonstrate humility, gentleness, or patience without allowing others to be close enough to offend us with their sinfulness, or to keep from also offending them with our own sinfulness. True Christianity is not pretty, and it was never meant to be. Christ didn’t die so we could live a sanitized and fashionable religious life that accommodates our own individualistic lifestyle. He died for our sins, so that, with all of our differences and personal baggage, we can be made into one holy people, who share the same life in order to teach the world that Christ was sent by the Father.

This truth is most vividly expressed in Christ’s prayer before He died on the cross. Prior to entering the Garden of Gethsemane, He prayed for those who would eventually believe in the Gospel, “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” (John 17:21).

The new life to which Christ has made us alive demands that we not be overly impressed by a sense of our own self-importance. Its basic demand is totally the opposite of what our modern culture encourages us to do and to be. Yet, it is for this unity Christ gave His life, so that we may die to ourselves and live for God and others who share the same life in Christ.

This reminder is more important to the church today, because it reminds us of the reason for our salvation. It makes us re-realize that it is not about us after all, but that it is about God’s glory and redemptive plan moving forward through our unity. In the end, everything we do as the body of Christ must push us in the direction of allowing the Gospel message to become the reality of the lives of those who believe and of those who are exposed to its grace. If we are united, we are being the church. If we are divided, we are playing the church.

Paul teaches the Colossians a perspective they must obtain in order to live as this Christ-honoring community. “And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to which also you were called in one body; and be thankful.” The peace which is spoken of here does not refer to an emotional sense of serenity or calmness. Instead it refers to the harmony or unity which Christ brought to the members of the Body through His blood. Also, the word translated “rule” does not mean to prevail over, but to be the judge or the decisive factor in how we conduct ourselves before others. We must allow the harmony of believers to be the most important, decisive factor in the way we shape our community, for it was, in fact, as one body, that we were called to this peace. The second part of this passage emphasizes the manner in which the believers were called, rather than the goal of their calling, and it focuses upon their unity.

As long as we remain earthly-minded, then talking about living worthily of the calling with which we have been called is nothing more than a utopian ideal. We must repent and allow the Gospel to renew our thinking and worldview. We must get down on our knees and pray for God’s grace to transform our values and desires. We need to be in the Word to be reminded of our Savior and His vision for His children.

God tells us that we have died to this world and that our life is now hidden with Christ in God who is in heaven (Col 3:3). This world and everything in it are destined to be destroyed in due time. God tells us that this world is sinking and we need to abandon ship. Heaven is where our true hope is. It is where our Judge is waiting to evaluate our lives according to our labor of faith and love. It is where our Redeemer is waiting for those who have fought the good fight. It is where our heart and life belong.

Thank you for your continual support. We are glad that we get to make a difference in the lives of those living in Tokyo together.

Kazu & Amy Kato