Pastor Suzuki’s Testimony
When I was a junior in high school, I listened to gospel broadcasting, and during this time, my brother already had faith in the Urawa EVF church and invited me to attend. I was an introvert, and my older brother was diplomatic. When I was in junior high, I always did well with my grades, and I passed the exam to enter high school. But in my high school, there were lots of excellent students, and I suffered from a lowliness complex. One day my brother came back to our house with a friend from church. I refused to see him; however, I had an interest in the church. It was when I went to church that everyone became friends with me, even though it is a time when everyone is busy with school exams. The next time I went to church, I heard the gospel of the Bible. However, I would compare my self-centered sin among other people, and I noticed the narrowness and weakness of my personality. I spent six months and finally understood that Jesus’ death on the cross was due to my sin. From that moment, I changed.
I’ve been involved in church planting and have served as a chairperson for the Kansai district church planting council. I’ve been a member for over 15 years of the National EVF church mission committee and serve six years as a chairperson. I was also involved with Radio evangelism and served as a chairperson for six years. In 2006 I was chairperson for the Kinki missionary church Executive committee; we had 300 pastors and 1,000 missions’ conferences. My involvement continued with the Korean CCC New Life 2000 project national headquarter general affairs for ten years. We had 13,000 Korean students dispatched to domestic churches. Lastly, I still serve on the trustee of Japan Bible seminary; this is my third term.
I want to share my family’s background further. I am seventy-five years old, and my wife Sayoko is seventy-three. We have been married for 50 years. We were saved and baptized at Urawa Evangelical Free Church in Saitama Prefecture in the Kanto area. We started our ministry career as church planters at Higashi-Omiya Church; this pioneer church was blessed, and two buildings were built in ten years. I still worked for a company; my wife was an elementary school teacher. After that, I attended seminary for four years while my wife supported our family. We were led to the Kansai area, where I pastored three churches over 30 years: Uji Church as the first Japanese pastor in the 5th year of the church planting after missionaries founded and served; Mukaijima Church as pioneer church planting, and Kyoto Church which had a 60-year history. God led me to Ueda Church in Nagano, where I pastored for nine years. Our ministry lives have been a series of many blessings but also hardships. I was 68 years old when we devoted ourselves to the current pioneer church plant of Shinonoi.
We have two sons, two daughters, and eight grandchildren. At the beginning of the church planting of Mukaijima Church in Fushimi Ward, Kyoto Prefecture, we had a lot of difficulties, especially in the first year. However, we had regular monthly support from other churches in the Kansai area. I pastored this church for eight years; God blessed the group, and it became a self-supporting church of 40 members.
During the early years of raising our children, we were in financial difficulties, and my wife and I could not afford to take the train as a family, even for one station away. We encouraged our four children with inexpensive sushi rolls as a reward. We would walk hand in hand for an hour between the parsonage and church every week along the riverbank near the railroad tracks during our children’s elementary school years.
My oldest son, unfortunately, left the Church for a while because he did not fit into the churches he tried to attend during his college years away from his hometown. We thank God that he is now gradually returning to his faith walk. My oldest daughter majored in art in graduate school and studied abroad in Korea. The Lord called her to transfer from graduate school to study at a seminary, and eventually, she married a pastor. My second son, Naoki, worked for a company in Nagano, received God’s call, and then devoted himself to pioneering evangelism. He studied at a seminary for four years, graduated last March, and was led to be involved in church planting tent-making activities at several locations in the Nagano-Shinshu area. Currently, he is preparing to be ordained as a pastor. My second daughter was working for a long time at King’s Garden, a domestically well-known elderly-care facility run by Christians. She married a welfare worker who was a member of Tsuchiura Grace Church, one of the largest evangelical churches in the Kanto, greater Tokyo, area. She moved to Nagano last year to support Nagano regional community welfare and is now part of our pioneering effort.
I have experienced the hardships of a pioneering mission with my family, but God has given us His grace to help us each season of our ministry lives. The generous support from the White Fields at the current time is an excellent help to our son Naoki’s vision and preparation for the next pioneering project along with us.
Recent Ministry:
Ninth Year as a Congregation
We are in our ninth year of church planting, and our church is gradually being accepted and recognized in the community around us. Yoko, a woman in our community, joined our Rose Garden Growing Workshop. She is studying the introductory Bible course with Minister Suzuki. There also is Ms. Masuda, the mother of Ms. Niwano, who was baptized last month; she also came for the Rose Workshop.
Another outreach is Ms. Hee’s Korean language classes. We have two classes, one for adults at our church and the other at a facility for the lightly disabled youth within Nagano City. One of the students is Ms. Kumiko, as reported last month. Personal interactions and involvement with people in the community, even compared to larger-scale concert projects, have indeed increased, and solid relationships with them have grown. Even though our area is known to be a very conservative area with tough soil for missions, we see that the Lord is at work.
The mother church of the eighteen churches of West Kanto has brought in a younger yet experienced successor senior pastor with more than ten years of pastoral experience in other churches to lead our district. We sense the new senior pastor’s openness toward our prayers and vision for multiple church plantings and formations in our district. We pray that God will work to open renewed regional cooperation, and we thank the Lord for His timing and providence.
Members of our church are moving out of our district due to marriage. We will miss them. In the past eight years of our church planting, we have said goodbye and sent eight young people in their twenties and thirties to cities in other areas due to life changes. Nurturing new Christians and seekers takes time, and it is difficult to say goodbye to these new believers. Yet we do not have many people moving in to join us from a large city due to the hardship. Nagano’s local people are known as stubborn and argumentative. However, we believe that souls will be saved when the Holy Spirit is at work. I am encouraged by the Word of God.
Pray that God will lead those who attend the Korean language class to connect further with the church. Pray for Eijun, who has returned to Korea to recover from her illness and is preparing to settle in Shinonoi for the rest of her life. Pray for Yuki Fukushima, who moved from Ibaraki and started working as a welfare officer at the city office this Spring.
Baptism
On Sunday, April 21st, Chiaki was baptized. It was a long-awaited moment of joy for all of our church members. Chiaki has been studying the Bible (via an Introductory course by Minister Naoki Suzuki) every Wednesday for over a year for training and discipleship. She started to attend church faithfully about a year ago and has been participating in worship services. As reported in the past, when we had the Autumn Sound Concert, we asked for a local newspaper production department to design advertising flyers for the community. We also inserted newspaper ads into 12,000 households in the area. Chiaki works at this newspaper stand, and the Lord touched Chiaki while she was picking up the flier and looking at it as she was inserting them. As she was already very interested in reading the contents of the flyers, she came to the concert and was moved by the music, the praise songs, and the testimony. The following Sunday, she came to the worship service and stayed to join the Bible study. At that time, we could sense that Chiaki was a very well-groomed soul. Chiaki had been attending concerts for over two years. She was a seeker who came to worship in prayer and correspondence and was serious about learning. Lately, Chiaki has brought her mother, Chieko, 86 years old, to worship services. Chieko has already come to the service five times. Chiaki is now praying for her witnessing opportunities and sharing her testimony with her family.
Creating a comfortable place for unbelievers
I sense it takes time for people in Nagano to open their hearts. For that respect, I have been thankful for the opportunities to use my experiences and gift in gardening for my outreach ministry. It has been two years of holding a monthly rose-growing workshop. At a recent workshop, about ten people came, including Chiaki, who was baptized, her mother, Chieko, and another Chieko, a seeker who has been participating in the workshop for over a year. We planted various spring flowers together and set up our flowerpots this month. People all enjoy making their flowerpots and hearing short gospel messages. In the upcoming months, I plan to take the whole group to visit the famous rose garden in Shinshu Nagano during the peak season of roses to deepen the relationship further and have a fellowship lunch together.
Pray for Chiaki to find a new job where she may have Sundays off, and pray for salvation for her mother. Pray that Kumiko will be able to join the Bible Study. Pray for my wife Sayoko for pain relief and recovery from shingles. For the health of Eijun for her recovery from insomnia and from swelling of her face.
Mrs. M.I. was not receptive to the words of the Bible and showed a strange attitude because she had visited and sought guidance from a local animist leader in the neighboring town, hidden from our church family for over a year. The animist leader is well-known in the city and has influenced many people. Mrs. M.I. had also invited several business connections to this animist leader. During a Bible study, she confessed her sin and surrendered all to Jesus, relying on Him to care for everything. She has started studying the Bible actively and has now brought her husband to church.
Miss M.S. kept asking me to officiate at her engagement ceremony, but I first refused as her future spouse was an unbeliever. She had an ambiguous attitude toward her faith, but her attitude changed during Bible studies. She earnestly sought the Lord and prayed genuinely for his salvation. Both are Forestry Agency public servants and many officials there are often transferred and sent to remote areas, so when they decided to continue to seek the Lord’s guidance and promised in front of everyone that they would continue to study The Bible even online, I realized I could actively help this couple step forward in their relationship. On the day of the couple’s engagement ceremony, both sets of parents, all unbelievers, were moved to tears and thanked the church. The brothers and sisters of the church show such tender love for her future, and I believe that this also helped her future spouse open his stubborn heart. Her fiancé, Mr. T.S., faithfully continues his Bible study.
We are entering the eighth year of our current pioneering mission. The Lord has blessed us with more than twenty worshippers, and we have reached the point where we anticipate being financially self-reliant in two years. We have added two more to our ministry team and set up a vision for the next stage of development. As we move toward developing another church plant in the district, many Japanese church members are aging, and there are difficulties in finding a pastor willing to work with a small local church planting effort and do the hard work of local evangelism. Please pray for our ministry team’s unity and wisdom as we seek to develop our leadership team.
Pray for C.N., who is studying for baptism. Pray for the spiritual growth of the engaged couple, M.S. and T.S., as they study in preparation for marriage. Pray for the growth of a 9th-grade student who recently accepted Jesus. Pray for the unity and wisdom of church staff.
Funeral service for Mrs. I
Thank you for your prayers. We consider hosting a funeral our opportunity to minister, preach, and share the gospel in the community with the unsaved. The mother of Mr. I, one of our members, passed away; she was 92 years old and had dementia, so she could hardly communicate with us. Mr. I is the only child in that family and has a slight developmental disability, so the church supported him and took care of all that needed to be arranged surrounding the Christian ceremony funeral service. All his relatives are unbelievers. The Christian funeral service touched the families; we saw it was a good testimony among them. We are also planning to hold a memorial service; please pray, as the family is planning to attend our church on that occasion again.
Mengumi, whom I mentioned earlier in my prayer requests, had been dating a non-believer man but repented. She and her boyfriend are continuing their faith study with Pastor Kim. They are both initially from Kyoto, with a strong Buddhist influence. Please pray for the salvation of her boyfriend. In my past forty-six years of ministry in pastoring, I have witnessed fifteen couples, each of which led the partner to become Christian, and women led their boyfriends for salvation fourteen out of those fifteen couples. Each shared stories of complications in their relationship and spiritual warfare. I encouraged and prayed with believer women who were in tears and advised them to lead their partners and friends to salvation by the grace and mercy of the Lord.
Bible Study and Future Marriage of Mr. S. & Ms. S
As I reported earlier, a believer and a seeker repented and confessed their sin of sexual impurity. While they were studying the Bible, they realized their sin. The believer, our church member, invited her boyfriend to church. During more than ten times of study, the two who had rebelled against the Bible yet later repented, and our member’s facial expressions changed to peace. The boyfriend continued coming to our church and has been taking the seeker’s class and marriage class. They decided to have the wedding ceremony at our church. It is so touching to see their change of attitudes and heart. We are counseling them about their wedding, and we believe that this will lead them to a clear confession of sin and a decision of faith.
Strategy meeting for the subsequent development plan
Since our church planting ministry began, my wife and I believe the Lord has been calling us to form a new district. We have weekly staff meetings with Associate Pastor Kim and his wife and Minister Suzuki and his wife. We have come this far with our motto, “Building a flock of love to establish a missional community.” When I was transferred from Kyoto, I prayed to develop multiple churches and create a district council, an independent cooperative flock of churches. The church I was assigned to in Ueda City, Nagano Prefecture, was a young church pioneered by the mother church, Urawa Church, and the previous pastor had resigned, having some problems. After nine years of assignment, the church became self-reliant and received consent from the local government to be an independent religious non-profit legal entity, which led to the current Shinonoi Pioneer Church. We are now praying to start a third church in the Matsumoto/Azumino area after studying the population survey, economic structure, urban planning, existence of Christian churches, and the history of past missions. We aim to strategically investigate our resources in this targeted area. When Shinonoi Church is ready, we will send my son, Minister Suzuki, and his wife to promote the pioneering work. Please pray for us. In the photo on the left is Minister Naoki Suzuki and his wife, and Associate Pastor Kim and his wife on the right. They are both working and serving as tent makers.
Pray for C, who is in a baptism prep course. Pray for growth for those who continue to study the Bible faithfully. Pray for the pre-marital counseling and the salvation of Mr. S and our weekly Bible readings. Pray for our church to be self-reliant and unified in vision as we establish a stable team. Pray for Minister Suzuki and his wife’s practical preparation for their future pioneer church planting work. They are in the process of raising their child.
On Saturday, November 18, we had a rose-growing workshop and party. Aiko, a conservative peach farmer, and Chieko, who has participated in the rose-growing seminar for over a year, attended a recent concert outreach event where I shared a short message from the Bible.
Tetsuya who has been coming to our worship service periodically since this summer is the husband of Miyuki, who recently made a decision of faith in Christ. Tetsuya is about forty-five years old and is a truck driver. He comes to worship whenever he has free time on Sundays. He is a long-distance driver who travels all over the country so he says work can feel very lonely. We send him cassette tapes of my sermons so he can listen in his truck and video messages from my cell phone. He and his wife are friends of Sadao, who recently had a revival of his faith at last year’s Christmas service. Tetsuya attended the worship service with us and is becoming very attracted to a new faith in Christ.
We had a church retreat and Rev. Takashi gave a lecture on the theme of Church and Family. We learned about church formation based on the principles of worshiping with adults and children together in the same service. We have five children at our church ranging from an infant to grade three. We continue to hold services together and have not been able to do a separate Sunday school due to logistical reasons including lack of space, time, and volunteers.
However, in the past, two elderly families left the church because they were dissatisfied with not hearing the sermon well when children, especially toddlers, were incorporated into the service for adults. We are trying to form a church that nurtures children as we anticipate them being the future of the church despite a declining birth rate and aging population. We are encouraged by the fact that our church plant has four young families who are attending, supporting, and being a part of the church. In our region, there are three elementary schools with six to seven hundred students attending. The recent composition of the community reminds us that we are a city of young families, and we also need to remember to have a good balance in reaching out to the multiple generations in our community. I sense the importance of reaching the older generations who have funds and time to spare for ministry and involvement.
The last weekend of the month, there was a joint cooperative distribution of tract flyers from churches belonging to the Kanto West District Council. Pastors and members from seven churches participated, traveling three hours each way and visiting three-thousand houses with flyers. The purpose of the visit was to publicize the concert of Ryoji, a former cellist with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. A total of thirty-four people attended the event. We stopped distributing flyers for three years due to covid and are grateful to be able to continue this outreach event. We have had three people connected to the church so far through this outreach. One is Ms. Chiaki who made a clear decision about salvation and attends the introductory class. We are grateful to the participants who circulated the flyers and for their support and cooperation.
I was invited by the Yasu Evangelical Free Church in the Kansai area, the west central region of Japan, to give a sermon at their service and share my testimony of church planting during the afternoon. When I received the initial request from them, I asked why they wanted me to come to their distant Kansai region. They replied that one of their congregants remembered my involvement in resolving a church conflict and they wanted to hear my testimony as a pioneering missionary, and so invited me to the church during their pastor’s summer vacation. I also learned that my experience with an incurable disease was a great encouragement to them. A former core member of their congregation who lost his eyesight suddenly due to an incurable disease attended the service and looked up to the Lord with me. The pastor later contacted us to say it was a great encouragement. I praise God that our church planting testimony was helpful to this church group.
- Pray for the successful completion of the renovation of the parsonage for the evangelist that was approved by the church general assembly.
- Pray for God’s direction and guidance in the next Nagano church planting and development at our pastor’s meeting. A new discussion began last month, and I was getting the impression that the voice of certain generations with no experience in church planting is getting more dominant in making future decisions.