Emi Matsumoto is a member of Higashi-Omi church. She also often helps the missionaries (in-cluding the field leader!) with their Japanese. Here she shares how she came to faith in Jesus.
"I was brought up in a Christian home, but myself and my brothers were born during the war and we never had the opportunity to get baptised. The pastor lived next door to us and so on Sundays and Christmas would come and teach us hymns and stories of God.
When I was at high school and university I used to visit a friend of my fathers’ who was a pastor at a church in Kyoto, but my heart was not open to God at that time; I didn't think it had anything to do with me.
I came from a Catholic family. My mother didn’t like Christian people because the Catholic priests preached that Christians (protestants) people were false prophets. Therefore, I didn’t allow Christians(protestants) spoke to me about Jesus, because I believed my mother. And she said to me "When the Christian people get together to pray they transform into a goats, that's why they close the door to pray". It aroused my curiosity...
36 hours after this years team of six female students arrived from Singapore, we sent them off to stay for two nights with non-Christian Japanese families. It was arranged as a kind of cultural exchange, but it meant that the team were quite literally in places that long term missionaries cant so easily access. Heres what they had to say about their experiences.
