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Challenges and Upgrades

Challenges and Upgrades
Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem / Unsplash

Hope the sky is blue and the sun is shining for you these days!
For me, this Sunday ended up being a more difficult day emotionally than I expected.

Stress from several minor challenges added up:

  • An outreach to elderly English learners at the Tama city hall fell through (due to visa-related concerns).
  • Some long-time Japanese friends were assigned to a small island a few hours off the coast of Japan.
  • I suffered some minor embarrassment because I addressed a new dormitory student with a completely irrelevant question about where I thought she was from. After all, she looked like another new dormitory student. There was little I could do to save the social situation. 😅
  • Sometimes the hope that more friends meet Jesus weighs on my heart.
  • There was mental fatigue from seeing how much work remained until reaching my ideal Japanese communication level. (Likely 3+ years of focused, daily study)
  • This was mixed with some other interpersonal worries.

If you want to hear more about how that turned out, I discussed my conclusion to these worries in the latest Bible Bilingual YouTube video. Surprisingly, I ended up with a unique verse in the book of Jonah.​

Paz Church in-person services are back in full swing; this Sunday will be our third week back. We're running a live stream and in-person service simultaneously at 10 am JST.

Please join us in praying for more Paz Kids volunteers. 🙏🏻

Lately, I've been trying to solidify my Biblical knowledge on a very controversial but essential topic: women in ministry.

I highly recommend Mike Winger's ongoing series for a timely deep dive on that issue. It's been very insightful so far; I'm waiting to hear the rest of his research presented in the upcoming videos.

Church in the Japanese Metaverse

(That's not a band name. Yet.)

While the metaverse has become a bit of a buzzword in the last few months, I am interested in digital missionaries planting churches online.

It's reasonably experimental, to say the least. Still, I'm curious to know how it looks and feels to organize a Jesus community this way.

So, I'm working to take some necessary first steps in that direction.
Especially once I get a welcoming, and passable 3D model of our Paz Coffee Shop finalized in Unity. :)

Japan has its own metaverse platform called Cluster, and it's not incredibly big. But to my knowledge, no church community is there just yet. It would be an honor to refine and test the first one.​

We have really welcomed brothers and sisters to our church community outside Japan. And are always thinking about ways to serve these members better.

Volunteering isn't necessarily something that strictly requires physical presence anymore. A faithful friend from Malaysia helps us regularly with our online service uploads, social media accounts, and Paz English Club. It's a fantastic help to have her serving with us!

A servant's heart isn't limited by space but rather by the desire to serve others or not.

Check out our Paz Church live stream for some major upgrades in the next few weeks!

With generous support from Paz International partners and our church members, we are currently installing new video equipment! We aim for excellence in what we do, especially as we share the good news about Jesus.

If you look for Paz Church Japan on YouTube, you'll also find the thumbnails I've uploaded to YouTube for our sermons. 👀 We've been learning how to do that more effectively as well.​

Thank you always for your generous support as we continue planting churches and sharing Jesus with the 98% of Japanese people who are not yet believers.

How do you deal with challenging times?