There are now 12 churches planted by WEC missionaries and now under Japanese leadership. These are known as SFDD churches. (SFDD is a translation of WEC into Japanese.) There are a further four churches under WEC leadership. As well as monthly meetings of small groups of leaders from the various churches, the retreat is the one time in the year when a bigger gathering can take place. It is also the time that the missionary kids get to play with the Japanese pastors’ children, which is fun to watch!
This year saw new missionary Simon Cozens giving a three-hour seminar on leadership. Simon’s Japanese came up to scratch, and his in-depth studies on leadership while at All Nations Christian College in the UK, as well as his past career working as a computer programmer and editor for a number of companies, provided a great help. He spoke about what a leader isn’t (such as superman!) as well as guiding us through a number of definitions of what leadership is from across the world. Jesus Christ was promoted as our example. In small groups, with this information at hand, we came up with definitions of the type of leadership we want in our own group of churches.
college lecturer Kaori Mukai, who led a session on leading worship. Through imaginative group skits, we saw how God is a parent, who delights to bless us as we come into his very presence in worship; and how the worship leader is like a butler, leading God’s people to their master. Innovative song projection programme ‘Songbee’ was used to project the songs in worship. This a resource produced within our team of workers, for Japanese or bilingual (English:Japanese) worship songs, and is open for use by others on request.