What a great welcome to Japan!

After a 14 hour flight to Tokyo, the another hour internal flight, I came out of the airport in Nagoya to the smiling faces of Miyuki and Kenichi. This lovely couple from Community Church Nagoya came to pick me up from the airport and take me to my hotel in downtown Nagoya city.

The first two days (Wednesday and Thursday) were relaxing days to recover from the journey and to get acclimatised to this new culture. It was great over these couple of days to hang out with Nilesh, who, with his wife Risa, have been leading the pioneering work in Nagoya.

One of the main reasons for my visit to Japan was that Community Church Nagoya had a weekend away as a church. So on the Friday we travelled from Nagoya to Toyota to a lovely hotel where we would meet for the next few days. This was an opportunity for this new church plant to come together to build relationships and for Nilesh and I to teach into Vision, Values, and Vehicles, i.e.:

• Vision – unite the church in vision that God has called us to;
• Values – ensure that the foundational values of our family of churches are laid well;
• Vehicles – train the church in the tools that we will use to share the gospel, make disciples, and plant churches

This proved to be such an important time for the church, laying foundations, strengthening believers, sowing vision for the season ahead, and equipping the church to be on mission for Jesus.

We also spent a lot of our time building relationships, eating together, talking, and the church even went on a hike together! Relationships are so important for us, as the church is our family, and it was lovely to build these relationships with brothers and sisters on the other side of the world!

On the Monday we finished our time together by celebrating the baptism of a new believer, which must be the best way to end a church weekend away!

Friendship, joy, worship, Holy Spirit ministry and the Word being shared! What a great time we had. It was truly a time of building, and strengthening the church, which I believe will give them a firm foundation for the next season of growth ahead of them.

After our weekend together as a church we went on to Hikari Gospel International Church in Toyota to join a No Place Left training team who were leading a days training for the church. The Hikari Gospel International Church gave us a very warm welcome, a very tasty lunch, and our worship together was vibrant and Spirit filled. It was great to see members of Community Church Nagoya, who we trained the day before, already stepping up and delivering some of the modules of the training to this church on the very next day!

It was great to meet other pioneering missionaries who are working in Nagoya with other organisations and church families. There are a lot of missionaries in Japan who are labouring for Jesus, and it is good that we can stand with them, partnering together to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to that nation. Even on my way home I was talking to a lady in Tokyo airport, telling her why I was in Japan, and she said that she was a Christian and had been praying for revival for in Japan for many years.

If you are reading this, maybe stop and take a minute to pray for Japan. There are some wonderful churches in Japan and lots of missionaries. God is at work, the church is alive, and there is a growing emphasis on sharing the Gospel and making disciples and we are seeing some fruit of new disciples coming to faith.

Please continue to pray for Community Church Nagoya and the amazing pioneering work that God is doing through them, that more labourers will be raised up, more disciples made and many churches established that will impact the city of Nagoya and beyond.

Anyone interested in joining our pioneering team in Nagoya, please email me and we can explore this calling together.

Grace and peace,

David

Some more photos here: https://youtu.be/UL0itzKpjrY