Day 10 (9/24/2017)

Prayer Request: For God to work through the ministries at Azumino Family Chapel and Abundant Life Church (Matsumoto) to bring the unreached around them to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

It's Sunday!

Today, our group gets to enjoy being a part of the Sunday morning church service at Azumino Family Chapel. We arrived quite a while before the church service started, but there were already quite a few other families there. Everyone takes their shoes off as soon as they enter the doorway and neatly places them to the side. There are a few shelves of books just inside that serve as a small Christian book store for the congregation. Farther in, women are bustling in and out of the kitchen preparing tea and snacks for members to eat before the service starts. My hosts join in and I do my best to help even though I'm mostly clueless to their routine. After everything is set up, we all grab tea and snacks and spend some time getting to know each other before the service starts.

The church congregation is made up of both Japanese and foreigners, largely due to a recent (2017) increase in the number of jobs (especially construction) available in the area. While the change is a bit unsettling for locals, this influx of migrants has also brought a level of revitalization to the area too. And many of the people coming into the area, especially Brazilian-Japanese returnees, are Christians, which has been encouraging.

When the service begins, it follows a familiar pattern beginning with familiar songs and hymns in both English and Japanese. Megumi-san translates her husband's sermon quietly for us so we can follow along. Today Chris is preaching on Creation at the beginning of Genesis. His message feels very different from what we are used to in the United States. He explains small details of the text that would be assumed to be known in the states. Unlike here, where most of us grow up learning at least some stories about Christianity, even if we don't grow up in church, in Japan no part of the Bible can be assumed to be known. Even the idea that there is one God who has the power to create everything is in many ways a completely foreign concept and must be explained carefully.

Afterward, we all pitch in to turn the sanctuary into a dining hall. Chairs are moved, tables are brought out and set up, and I'm back in the kitchen trying to be as helpful as my not-very-knowledgable self can be. Soon we are sitting down eating rice and curry and Takeshi-san is making me practice speaking Japanese again. This time I get stuck trying to remember how to say "seven years ago" and have to spend some time drilling "nana-nen mae ni" into my head.

After lunch, we drove over to Abundant Life Church in Matsumoto. The resident pastor and his wife also work with TEAM and were a huge blessing to meet. We had a wonderful conversation about the importance of understanding that salvation is not works-based. A difficult thing to let go of, especially in an honor-shame culture. We also were able to commiserate slightly over being diagnosed as an adult with ADHD. Finding support can certainly be a challenge on the mission field, but if your strengths and weaknesses can be channeled in the right direction ADHD can be at least as much of an asset as it can be a deficit (ha, ha, pun) on the mission field.

At the end of our conversation, we got a full tour of the church including the upstairs apartment where the pastor and his family lived (this is where we would have stayed if we had been able to travel to Japan in 2020) and the bone closet, where cremated ashes are memorialized. While a bone closet might sound unusual for us in the USA, in Japan it is a necessity. Most Japanese families have a Buddhist burial plot and people who become Christians are often concerned about where their remains will lay after they die. Because land is also precious in Japan, cemeteries are not practical, so many churches feel a need to carve out space to memorialize the remains of members after they pass. For missionaries also, the bone closets fill an important need.

Bone Closet

Later that evening we were blessed with a delicious dinner of noodles and gyoza with friends! At times it feels as if we are experiencing multiple days worth of education and fellowship into one 16-hour period. We will truly miss this, but will probably sleep very well when we get back home.

Extra Food Pictures

Thanks for reading!