Summer Ministry at Kanagi Chapel

Our group set off for three days to spend time with Armin and Heike and their ministry in Kanagi, a town 30 minutes north of Itayangi. The second night we were in Kanagi we had a concert scheduled in an art gallery beside the church. The owner’s of the art gallery are an elderly couple, NAMES. The lady attends the church, and is said to be the backbone of the church, being an example of a real servant through her hospitality. She cooked us a lovely curry dinner before the concert and throughout the night went around quietly serving people. Her husband is quite a famous artist and attends the church on Easter and Christmas. It was his art that surrounded us as we sang songs to the Lord. The colours of his paintings are vivid reds and blues and speak of both the joys and pains of his family’s life. Singing glory to God in that space was a bittersweet experience because we were in the midst of an expression of the pain and joys of life experienced without God. The room was crowded with people, about forty or so, and as we sang I realized that some of them were hearing about Jesus for the first time, and although in a different language. A few of the church attendees brought along friends to here the music and see the skit about the love of God. A definite highlight was meeting the parents of Yudai, our friend from the Itayanagi church who was with us for the month that we were in Japan. Yudai came again to our concert and brought along a friend of his from school, who we got to hang out with later.

We also had the priviledge of seeing God water some seeds in a man name Abbe. He had come to the concert the night before because he had been given a poster about our concert. He had enjoyed it so much that he drove to Kanagi to hear us again. This is one of the exciting parts about being involved in a short term mission trip: that our team can have unique opportunities of ministry that can be followed up and built on by the missionaries here. We hope that this connection is one that will bear fruit.

It is amazing to me that we can have so many different styles in which to worship the Lord in the same concert. We had a dance, a drama, contemporary worship and choral songs all in the same two hours. And all of this worships the Lord!