So grateful for Masa of Ajigasawa Church who spent his Golden Week holiday improving the front entrance of the staff house.  Masa is a construction worker who suddenly showed up at an Arthur Holland concert the church hosted and came to faith back around 2004.  Circumstances have forced him to take a job with a construction company and live in their dormitory down near Tokyo, but we look forward to his visits "home" during the major holidays.

Opening Prayer at Spring Work Camp

Our Father in Heaven, we thank you for providing us with the Aomori Christian Center.  May this place be used of God to strengthen the churches of Aomori Prefecture.  May it be used of God as a place of evangelism.  May it be used of God as a place of Biblical teaching.  May it be used of God as a place of fellowship among the brothers and sisters of all the churches.  We pray that those who do not yet know You meet you for the first time at this Center, and know your salvation.  We pray that through the ministry of this Center, You will raise up pastors and missionaries from among the next generation.  We pray that those who are troubled will come here and find true inner peace in Christ.  O Lord, preserve this property as a place of peace.  Bless our labours today.  Guide our hearts, that our service may be pleasing to You.  May Your Holy Spirit guide our conversations.  May not only our actions be pleasing to You today, but the words of our mouths and the thoughts of our hearts also.
We pray in the Name of Jesus Christ, Your only Son, our Lord,
Amen.

 We praise the Lord for a fruitful Spring Work Camp.  The weather started out bad, but that gave us a chance to burn a great deal of the brush wood that is still cluttering the grounds.  We are grateful to the 20 or so people who worked hard to tidy up the grounds, clean the chapel, and set up the breakfast nook for the work team coming in May.  Summer Work Camp is July 23 (Sat.), but there's lots of work to do between now and then!

The origins of the Aomori Christian Center's "Moya Camp Song" are attested in the Center's 40th anniversary anthology.  It was written in the spring of 1973 on the night train by a young lay leader on his way home from a camp ministry conference.  It has had a great impact on many campers over the years, and singing this song every morning is among my own greatest memories from Bible camp.

As always, much is lost in the translation below, and there are no doubt better ways to render it into the English. 

THE MOYA CAMP SONG（Verse　H.T.・Music　H.M.）

１．By the light of the dawn, waking

　　Begin the day with this prayer

　　"Lord, this day also, please be my help"
　　So it taught me, so it taught me
　　Moya Camp

２．Under the wide blue sky, arms linked

　That song sung with a friend

　Surely God is listening

　Abounding in grace, abounding in grace

　　Moya Camp

３．Under the starry sky, when I prayed

　　God's light shone on me

　　From today, I also am God's child

　　I'll never forget, I'll never forget

　Moya Camp

O Lord, open our lips
     and our mouth shall show forth your praise（Psalm 51:15）

We are now in the midst of making preparations for reopening the Aomori Christian Center for ministry programs--Bible camps, "Living English" camps, snow camps . . . please pray with us that the Lord will empower us to use this facility to His glory through evangelism, Christian education, and fellowship.

Youth Group Fun

Tubing and Sledding with the Evangelical Church of Aomori's Youth Group, YOUTH FORUM. We were delighted to see that some of the young people brought their friends for the first time.

ACC Sunday at Aomori Baptist Church

Blessed with an opportunity to preach and share our vision at Aomori Baptist Church on January 31.

ACC Sunday at The Evangelical Church of Aomori

The Evangelical Church of Aomori (ECA) was planted by TEAM missionaries in the early 1950s and has been a major supporting church of the Aomori Christian Centre (ACC) ever since its beginnings as the Kominato Bible Camp in 1956. Luke attended here when he was grade one, and it is the church we attend as a family now, when we aren't away on an ACC Sunday church visit. ECA is currently exploring the several options of rebuilding, relocating, or renting. Please pray for wisdom as they seek a way forward. Their current building was built many decades ago on the site of OMF Japan's former field headquarters (later moved to Sapporo and then to Ichikawa). Half of the building is now unusable, and the other half is proving too expensive to maintain.

On January 9 we had the opportunity to host the Aomori KGK (Japanese IVCF) monthly meeting at the ACC staff house . . . part of the fulfillment of our first term goal to develop an ACC student ministry based out of the staff house.  We had a delightful time tubing, discussing a wide range of issues in the Christian life, and cooking and eating supper.

Happy New Year!  May God bless each of you in the year of our Lord 2016.  Here in Aomori three OMF families celebrated the second day of the year with a mini-snow camp . . . a forerunner, we pray, of many future snow camps to be held here where Christian families are spiritually refreshed through fun time spent together and where their un-churched friends meet Christ for the first time.  After the children sledded to their hearts content, we made our way to the "basketball field" where we made a snow house that bathed the night snowscape with the warm glow of candlelight.