Good Beginnings

Mustard Seed Christian Church has been meeting regularly since January 10th. It is really exciting for our team to finally see the church gathering taking place after 2 years of laying the foundation in language learning, prayer, and preparations.

Our church meets Sunday mornings at 11am in the city of Nagoya. Half our team, ourselves included, live in the city of Okazaki. So we generally go up to Nagoya the night before and stay with teammates. Everything needed for church has to be packed in the car - everything! So we unload the car and begin setting up around 8am Sunday mornings. Everyone has their own specific duties. The band gets geared up and ready for worship leading. Seth's role is to do various tasks to prepare the room for the group to gather. This often includes the necessary Febreeze spray throughout the room! I (megan) watch our teammates kids as their parents prep in the worship band.

Every week we have a time of worship and a time of teaching from the Bible. The words for the songs are a mix of Japanese and English, often mostly Japanese. Things have gone great so far! There is Japanese translation during the sermon and that has gone well too. During the service we do a special lesson with the kids on the 3rd floor, and I help with that time. It's a lot of fun! Here is a picture of the lesson about Noah and the Ark - They got to put the animals into the ark and then later we snapped a picture of Brayden (mid smile) and Reo with the Ark.

We have had new people each week come and hear about God. We have Bibles and other Christian books available for people which has proved very helpful. After the service there is a time of coffee, doughnuts, and conversation. Spending time with people after the service has been a true joy. We even get to practice our Japanese a bit!

Thus far we've gone down to the Striker's Bar restaurant on the first floor of the building to eat lunch! It's a western themed sports bar so they have burgers, quesadillas, and other yummy food.

Afterwards we have to tear down everything, load it back up into the car, then unload it again into the storage space. It's quite the effort! But Sundays are awesome and we are so excited to be able to be apart of the church God is planting in Nagoya. Please continue to pray for more people to hear about the church gathering and attend!

some of the staff in front of our church sign