PDF version is here. Japanese version is here.
News for November
CPI
This month’s highlight has been the Church Planting Institute conference at Fuji Hakone Land. Over four hundred missionaries and pastors from around the country came to study and seek God together for the future of the church in Japan. The WEC group consisted of four missionaries and two Japanese pastors, and it was as much a bonding time for us as it was a chance to meet others.
But we did indeed meet others, and I had a good time connecting up with missionaries from nearby prefectures, as well as people who I had known by name or reputation but not met in the flesh! There was a strong focus on networking and forming teams to plant churches, and so it was good to meet people from Kyoto and Nara, with the hope that we can work with them or vice versa in the future.
Our team were also helping to run the resources exhibition, and I was presenting on Songbee, our worship projection software. This got a good amount of interest, suggestions for improvements, and even some bug reports that I was able to fix on the spot! <
Most of my time at CPI was spent on the “Ten Gai Nai” seminar track, which was a series of teaching on planting small house church networks, with an emphasis on transferability and reproduction - the aim was to be able to teach people how to get involved in Christian ministry from the first day they believe, and give them something they can pass on to others. To demonstrate it, we went on a field trip from the conference to Moto-Hakone, the nearby town, to share our testimonies with people there. It was a scary but an empowering experience!
The whole thing had a big effect on the way I see church and church planting, and made me much more motivated to get involved in this style of church. First, though, I will need to spend some time thinking about how it fits into what we’re doing as a missionary field - or even if it does - and how it could be useful in our next project. Which is...
Kizugawa
Kizugawa is a city between Kyoto and Nara, around 50 miles south-west of Nagahama. It’s gaining a reputation as a center of academic research, and some local universities are starting up campuses in the city.
Two of our churches in Kyoto have developed a vision for planting a church there, and myself and another of the missionaries have been asked to help form vision and strategy for the new church plant. I don’t know at this stage if I’ll be actively involved in the plant - although I suppose it would be strange if I were not! - but I will certainly be working on a consultant basis, doing research on the town and working with the pastors to help think through how to get to where they want to be.
This is, of course, something I have no experience of at all! And so I expect it will be a big learning curve for me. We probably won’t be starting actual church planting work until March or so next year, but will be meeting, praying and visiting the town until then.
Coming up
In February one of our missionary couples will be returning to Korea for a year’s furlough, and we need to decide how to handle their church in their absence. We will decide this at this month’s missionary meeting, so please pray for wisdom for everyone involved.
This month I will be giving two talks about the UK in local schools, and I’m also performing a wedding on the 23rd! More about that next time...