Now We're Reaching English Speakers!
Guess what.
We started our Paz English Club outreach again! 🙌🏻 The poster advertisements in our coffee shop make our reboot official, as of this week.
Believe it or not. English speakers in Japan can be easy to engage with the Gospel in church services. Rather, those who really are motivated to speak and learn it.
Why?
There are precious few native speakers for ESL students to practice speaking with in Japan. As far as the average Japanese person is concerned, they don't have many personal contacts who are high-level English speakers. It's a big blessing and important opportunity.
This English outreach dream started about 3 years ago. I led our first Paz Language Exchange in Omotesando.
Now is the time, once again. Praise God, our prayer and partnership team has grown in recent weeks so I am able to focus more on serving our church!
We are in the early stages of building this new club and are excited about things to come. Our prayer is to start an evangelistic group lesson soon.
Having given zoom lessons to two students for the last few weeks, a young lady I met in the dormitory will also start studying this Friday. 😄
Praise God, thank you so much for facilitating these opportunities to see Japanese people meet Jesus in prayer and generous giving! These relationships are paving the way for major Kingdom wins in Japan.
Like Paul asked, please pray that we speak boldly about Jesus in all these opportunities.
Meetups in Omotesando's Ivy Hall
Our team saw a great opportunity to serve our church members and the guests who came to visit us. We used an app called Meetup to invite people into our English club before our services started. It worked, we had people visit for our lessons and stay to meet everyone in the service.
After a year it was a bit challenging to find new members, but our group met every Sunday until that time. There were lots of laughs in the lessons. People came to hear about Jesus for the first time! Great learning experience for everyone.
Moving back to Noborito, we focused on growing the Coffee Shop, prayer meetings, and Choose Life. Our English outreach went on hiatus.
Fast forward to a month ago on Sunday:
After service, a middle school student approached me. He's a thoughtful bilingual kid, and he started speaking to me in English.
This caught me off-guard as his two primary languages are Portuguese and Japanese. Not English. 🤔
Ah! He was looking for English lessons for school!
What a divine appointment and confirmation. We wanted to reboot the English outreach. I had even started making advertising materials for it at the request of our base director, Pr. Tim.
Now is the time. Praise God, our partnership team has grown to the point I have been able to focus more on serving and sharing the Gospel here!
We are in the early stages, excited about things to come.
Having given zoom lessons to two students for the last few weeks. a young lady in the dormitory will also start studying this Friday. Great opportunities to invest in future leaders and share about Jesus.
Praise God! Thank you so much for helping to open this opportunity, we're making advances for Jesus here.
Our heart is to plant churches all over Japan that take good care of each member. Choose Life and Paz English Club directly grow that vision. God grows these key relationships. After all, our global church is rooted in relationship. Relationships with God and others.
As we share hope through Choose Life we also share the Gospel. As we create relationships by teaching English we can do the same Kingdom work.
Have you ever been in a language class or given an English lesson? How was it?