Tsunami Victims say "Thank You"

Our December Newsletter is Online...

Our December Newsletter is hot off the press.  If you'd like to read it, you can do so here:  http://eepurl.com/hDFB6.

Introductory Packet - Our Family and Calling to Japan

Recently, we put together an updated packet to introduce folks to our calling to Japan.  The goal is introduce our family and give a bird's eye view of the the need for new churches among the world's second-largest unreached people group.  If you'd like to access the full document, you can do so here.  Questions or feedback welcome!  Email us at jwsink@grace4japan.com.

Our latest prayer update can be found here:  http://eepurl.com/gWM6n.  Use the link to the right to add yourself to our mailing list and begin receiving our updates via email.

Finally Back Home!

Jeremy and Wayne in Ancient Ephesus

     These past two months have been a whirlwind of travel, training, and presenting (which also explains my neglecting this blog).  In September, I attended MTW's LEAD conference in Izmir, Turkey.  The conference takes place every two years and calls together MTW's team leaders from all over the world.  This year was a historical meeting, because national partners were also a part of the leadership gathering.

     What's a national partner?  Think indigenous leader.  Our goal as a mission isn't for national churches to be forever dependent upon Western missionaries to lead them.  The old adage about teaching a man to fish is a good one.  Ultimately we want to see Japanese leaders leading Japanese churches, Africans leading African churches, and Germans leading in Germany (you get the point).  Our goal is always to be working ourselves out of a job, passing the baton, and moving on to new, unreached areas.  Of course, realizing such a goal can take a long time - even generations in a country like Japan.

     This isn't a new strategy for MTW.  Missionaries have been pouring themselves into national  church leaders for decades.  But this LEAD conference was particularly exciting, because we have reached a point where missionaries and national leadership were able to work side by side at the highest levels of our organization to help define our vision for the future.  What a milestone!  For those of you who may wonder if we're making progress in the Great Commission, I'm happy to report that we are!  The Gospel is gaining strength all over the world, and the baton is being passed successfully from missionaries to national leaders.

     The highlight of the week - for me - was the time I spent with our team leader, Wayne Newsome.  Wayne and Amy have been hard at work in Nagoya for almost two decades.  During that time, their team has established a growing church, a seminary (now overseen by a separate MTW team led by Dr. Michael Oh), and a Christian Academy (which has also been successfully handed off for outside oversight).  The team's vision for the future is to establish a network of new Gospel-proclaiming churches throughout the city.  Gina and my role will involve leading one of those new church plants and helping to shepherd and develop leaders in the other new sites.  It was exciting to interact with Wayne as we looked at a map of Nagoya and talked about unchurched communities where there will soon be a Gospel witness!
     Another high point of the week was the day we spent in the ancient city of Ephesus (remember Paul's letter to the Ephesians?).  If you'd like to see some photos of the city, you can view them on my Picasa page located here.  If you just can't get enough of these, volume 2 is located here!

New Prayer Update Online

We've just published a new prayer update that you can view here.  Please note that you can subscribe to future updates and newsletters by clicking the link in the right hand column on this page or using the "subscribe" link on our prayer update.  Thanks for praying for us!

Want to stay in touch with us?

Gina and I place a high value on communication with our partners, and this blog is only one piece of our overall communication strategy.  We also publish a monthly newsletter to subscribers, send out 1-3 prayer updates each month, and post regularly on Facebook and (occassionally on) Twitter.  If you'd like to receive our monthly newsletters, you can subscribe via the link in the margin to the right of this paragraph.  If you'd like to read our September 8, 2011 prayer update, you can do so here (there's a "subscribe" button in the upper left-hand corner of the page, if you'd like to join our prayer team and receive these requests in your inbox).  You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter.  Our hope is to build an army of pray-ers who will lift our family and the Japanese people before the Throne on a regular basis.

Of course, the best method of communication is face-to-face.  If your family, small group, church, or club would like to know more about church planting in Japan, please contact us.  We're happy to travel almost anywhere to speak to groups of any size who are interested in taking the Gospel to the world's second-largest unreached people group.  May God shake Japan with the Gospel and flood her with Grace!

*** If you subscribe to one of our newsletters, please take the time to add jwsink@grace4japan.com to your online address book or SPAM filter.  This will help ensure that we don't get filtered out as SPAM!

Reflections on CCMI

During July, our family took part in MTW's "Cross Cultural Ministry Internship" in New York City (see my 2 previous articles for related stories).  We took a lot away from our experience there, and I'll highlight a few of those things here:

Prayer IS the Work of the Ministry:  I friend of mine likes to say, "I think I remember forgetting this before!"  And that's precisely how I feel about this lesson that I've needed to learn over and over again.  At every turn, each speaker at CCMI hammered the facet that we're doing Spiritual work, and real fruit comes as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit.  In light of that, prayer isn't an optional discipline that we have the luxury of inserting if we have time.  Prayer is an expression of our real dependence upon God, and it's the real work of the ministry.

We're NOT too old to Learn Japanese:  OK, so that's a bit of an overstatement, but next to Japan's high cost of living, we've been most worried about our ability to learn the language.  CCMI  didn't leave us with the illusion that language study was going to be easy - Japanese is going to be a difficult language to master, and it'll require a lot of hard work.  However, we left CCMI with some new tools for language learning that'll serve us well as we begin to study Japanese.  We also realize that learning a language while immersed in a foreign country is much different from our past attempts to learn languages in classroom setting in the U.S. (think high school French or Spanish).

The Experience helped us as a Family:  I could share a lot more about the specifics of our classroom time since we spent several hours each day in that setting.  But the most beneficial part of our experience at CCMI wasn't tied to the classroom or even the cross-cultural ministry experiences the staff put together for us.  The most beneficial part of CCMI - for our family - was the fact that we were moved out of our own routines and spent a month living together in vastly different surroundings than we've been accustomed to.  Granted, Nagoya will be much different than New York.  However, living in an apartment in Manhattan and riding the subway to Queens every day is a lot different from day-to-day life in Asheboro, NC.  We struggled with some of those differences and embraced some of them readily - but we did all of it as a family.  I was so proud of how quickly our boys adjusted to their new surroundings.  Given another month, I think we'd have felt comfortable letting Joshua ride the subways alone.  Josiah also became very adept at navigating the city and would be happy to serve as your tour guide if you ever want to take a trip to NY!  On our first subway rides, our boys wouldn't take a seat beside of a stranger, but clung to us for security.  By the end of the month, they were pros, and it was fun to watch them squeeze into seats between total strangers - and even talk to them while riding to our next stop.

CCMI was a rich month for us as a family:  Full of great memories, helpful training, and rich conversations with our boys.  Gina and I feel like we're all coming home better prepared and much more "together" in our calling to church planting in Nagoya.  We're so happy to be working with a missions agency that is committed to our whole family's preparation for the field.

Learning to Follow a Third Culture Kid

Grand Central Station

The following is an article I wrote for this week's CCMI Newsletter. It's just another glimpse into the life of our family as we prepare for life overseas.  If you'd like to read the other newsletter content from this week, you can do so here.




"On Wednesday evening, after our second session with Jeff Marlowe, our oldest son came bouncing down from the youth group sweaty, red-faced, and grinning from ear to ear. He asked, “Dad, can I choose where we eat dinner tonight?” When I asked him what he had in mind, he was very secretive and assured me that he knew the spot and how to get there. He had obviously given it a lot of thought.

I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical at first, but it’d been a good day – and the family seemed up for the adventure with Joshua as our guide. He walked a few paces in front of us to the Queensboro Plaza station, where we boarded the 7 train toward Manhattan. We’ve been using the N train between Times Square and Queensboro, so this was a different route from the one we’d been taking.

Joshua looked up and grinned as we pulled into Grand Central Station. He said, “This is where we get off. You guys are going to love this!” He led us all over the station – recreating the tour that Ruthanne Burch had obviously given him earlier in the day. He showed us the main terminal, the room where you can whisper to one another across diagonal corners, and the big food court. As we walked, I pointed out that he’d seen parts of NYC that we hadn’t seen yet. I also complimented his good sense of direction and navigation skills. I was more than a little bit proud of him – and told him so. He puffed up a bit and rolled his eyes.

You should know that Joshua has really struggled with our decision to move to Japan. He’s 13 years old, which is hard in itself. He’s old enough to have a good sense of the things he’s giving up in this move, and he’s grieving that. Sometimes he grieves in a way that’s seasoned with faith, and sometimes (like me) he’s overtaken by fear and unbelief. It’s been hard and messy. We wish we could spare him this particular struggle, but we can’t. It’s part of the story that God has written for him. So we (like you) are moving forward and resting all of our weight in the covenant promises of God for us and our children – Joshua included.

Last Wednesday, God gave us a special moment as a family as he also taught Gina and me another lesson about parenting. I’m so glad we entrusted Joshua with the lead that night. Twelve dollar cheesburgers at rush hour in Grand Central Station wasn’t really what I’d have chosen for our dinner menu, but it was one of the best evenings we’ve had as a family since we’ve been in NYC. May God give us wisdom and grace as we continue to lead our kids toward our respective fields!"

Jeremy

Our first two days in NY

Those of you who receive our monthly newsletters already know that we're in New York City for CCMI during the month of July.  During the month, I'll be posting updates here, so you might like to check back from time to time.

Just to bring you up to speed, we flew out of Raleigh, NC bright and early on Friday morning.  By 10am, we were in our apartment, unpacked, and strolling down Broadway in search of our second breakfast since waking up at 3:45am.

After talking over sausage biscuits at McDonald's, we decided to go ahead and ride the subway to the central park zoo, which was high on Josiah's list of things to do.  It was a good first day, and all of us were ready for an early bedtime that night.

On Saturday, we reported to Evangel Christian School in Queens for orientation where we met our staff and mentors for the month.  On weekdays, we'll be spending our mornings planning and implementing an ESL course at Astoria Community Church (also in Queens).  Each afternoon, we'll be in a classroom setting studying things like team dynamics, ethnography, basics of cross cultural servanthood, and language acquisition on the field.

I'm writing this first post on Sunday evening.  Since our team was assigned to Astoria Community Church, we'll be worshiping there on Sunday mornings.  Astoria Community Church was founded by two pastors - an American (David Ellis) and a Brazillian (Darcy Caires).  Pastor Ellis preached this morning from the book of Proverbs and reminded us that we have a Heavenly Father who loves us so much that He's even given us this book full of strong, practical wisdom for day-to-day life.  Then, Pastor Caires served the Lord's supper and invited us to commune with the one who gave us the wisdom of proverbs.  We're so glad that in God's providence, he's connected us with this particular group of believers for the month of July.  They welcomed us and fed us well this morning.  We look forward to ministering alongside of them for the next 30 days!