Japan is one of the world’s largest unreached peoples, with around 0.5% evangelical Christians. That means about 125 million people there don’t know Jesus. This spring, we – a team of four second-year Bible school students – went on a mission trip there.
The Word of Life has never sent a team to Japan before, and officially has no contacts there. So why go there? It all started with Ville Männistö spontaneously asking if we could ask for it. Which we did with pleasure!
As we started to pray about this, it became more and more clear that God really wanted to send us here, so exciting!
One of the class received a prophetic word during one of these prayer sessions.
‘Yokoshima’ she heard, a word none of us had heard before. It turned out that this is the name of a district in the small town of Tamana, which is in the far south of Japan, very rural. In fact, the place is so small that when we talked to people who live in Japan, they hadn’t even heard of the place.One of the class received a prophetic word during one of these prayer times.
What did God mean by this word? Did he want us to go to Yokoshima in the city of Tamana? We gathered again and prayed and asked him.
Then we got the word from Joshua 2:8-9, where Rahab says: ‘I know that the Lord has given this land.’ It was a clear confirmation; God was calling us there.
Our main task was to plough the ground in prayer before we left, and so we began to pray for the places we would visit. During those months, several people had a vision of a man who was very happy to see us. So we knew we were going to meet a specific person, we just didn’t know who.
When we started our journey in Tokyo, we had decided that we would not have a church to work with when we went to Tamana, and that we would therefore be more or less alone down there. God had other plans. Four days before we were to go to Tamana, we were in a church in Tokyo called TLEA (The Light of Eternal Agape). This is a church that God had unexpectedly connected us to just a week before we left for Japan. When we had dinner with the church leaders and told them we were going to the small town of Tamana, they suddenly said, “You’re going to Tamana? We have a church there!
As it turned out, the church had prayed earnestly to God to send young helpers to them and we became an answer to their prayers. God had planned everything when he gave us the prophecy about this place six months earlier!
The pastor of this church was an elderly Japanese man who over 20 years ago felt God calling him to move to Tamana as a pastor. He fit perfectly into the images that various people had received several months earlier, of a person we would meet in this town. He even wore a light blue shirt, which someone had described in detail from his vision!
He has been faithful all these years, holding services, evangelising and standing up for the people around him. Yet he had seen almost no fruit. But the fact that God sent us there told him that God sees him, hears his prayers and cares deeply for him. He had been about to give up, but because we came, he saw that God is with him. We had a book with us in which we had collected prayers and encouragement from Christians in different countries, for the Christians in Japan. When we gave the book to him and the town of Tamana, he, an elderly Japanese man, stood in front of us and cried in gratitude to God. It was an incredibly powerful moment, and we ourselves were moved to tears by God’s goodness.
There are so many testimonies and stories from this trip that we wish we could share with you. We saw many healings, relationships healed, and people hearing the Gospel for the first time. God even gave us an interpreter! It was an amazing answer to our prayers when a girl we met in Tokyo travelled all the way to Tamana to be our interpreter and helper while we were there.
God is so good, and he knows what we need. When we seek Him and when we are interested in His ways for our lives, He is willing to lead us! He sees us and always hears our prayers. If you serve God for over 20 years without seeing any fruit, it does not mean that he has forgotten you. He sees you and works, whether you notice it or not.
/Team from LOBC year 2
