This year’s Victory event was held on April 29 and drew about 400 people to the suburb of Mizushima just south of Kurashiki and about 18 miles from home.
Victory is a multi-church, one-day super-mega worship service held once every year around the end of April (so I missed it by two weeks the first time I was here). Including the band, I counted about two dozen or so from Tsushima Christ Church, but it was hard to tell, because all together there were about 400 people in attendance. The event was held indoors this year (it has been outdoors on past occasions) in a large auditorium in Mizushima, which is a few miles south of the famous city of Kurashiki, directly to the west of Okayama.
I went with a group of ten (including Hara, Yamasaki, Makoch, and Kazu from the student group) via cars. In the light morning traffic it took about half an hour to reach Mizushima. The event officially started at 11:00 with an hour-long exhibition of music performed by more than a dozen groups from various churches. The styles ranged from gospel choir to hard rock. (Pastor Goto plays bass for a band called “neo storm”—their 7-track first album is in the works as we speak.)
At twelve we broke for lunch and headed outside to the courtyard, where the weather was perfect. Aaron (a bass player originally from New Jersey who has blond dredlocks and works as an English teacher in west Okayama prefecture) and I kicked around a soccer ball with a few guys from a church in Hiroshima during the last half of the lunch break. The Hiroshima church contingent consisted of their youth group, so they had the most interesting mix of fashions and whatnot. One guy even had a mohawk cut in the shape of a heart and dyed pink.
(Although once you’ve been in Japan for a while you realize that this sort of thing is more the rule rather than the exception. There’s a lot of effort put into looking unique by the youth of Japan, and taking things to the extreme is not uncommon.)
We started back up at a quarter past one or so for a special concert by KiKi, a talented pianist and great singer. Afterwards it was Pastor Goto on the stage to lead the next hour of worship. The Hiroshima guys were all up front like for a rock concert. Normally I’m not the type to be on the front row, but yesterday I and several of the college guys from Tsushima were up there dancing and acting like we were somewhat coordinated in our steps. After seven or eight songs we were all exhausted from jumping around and singing.
One of the best things about Victory in my opinion was the chance to see other Japanese Christians from nearby. If you’re always looking at the area you’re working in you might get a slanted view of Christianity in Japan. If you’re in a particularly dry season when no one seems to be interested in the church or if you’re just starting a new church and still waiting for your first baptism you might think that the situation is really morbid. But if you get to go to an event like Victory and see hundreds of other Christians from your corner of Japan you realize that even if things aren’t so hot where you are God is still making progress in Japan. That’s a very encouraging thought worth holding on to as the year goes by.