mission.japan

See photos from Praise Night

May 7 saw the very first Praise Night of the year. Praise Night is our third service at 7:00 on Sunday evenings. Matt Shipp was handed the reins for practically the entire service, and with me doing the slides and Yukiko assisting with the worship, we have formed an informal Praise Night triumvirate.

In comparison to our Sunday morning services, Praise Night is an extremely casual affair. The morning services follow the same timeline every week that covers everything from the order of the worship and the message to the passing of the offering bag. This isn’t to say that this is a bad thing—in fact, it’s a good thing, since the Japanese are accustomed to formality and procedure and would probably feel uncomfortable an Sunday morning if either went missing. But with the high percentage of internationals (not counting missionaries) who step through the church’s door every week, there is a desire to create something more freeform and worship-centered.

The first step to accomodating the non-Japanese guests expected at Praise Night was to take out all of the Japanese verses from the songs. Matt plays guitar and is planning on introducing one or two new English songs every month so we can grow our library. With Betsy and Yukiko handling vocals, Matt and Takayuki-kun on guitar, and Pastor Goto on piano (the man’s list of talents just doesn’t end), we had an excellent crew for the very first night.

My responsibility for Praise Night is the set of slides with song lyrics. Thankfully we don’t have to use the highly-legible-but-uninteresting yellow-and-white-on-blue scheme that we always use for the morning services (it reminds me of when I first started programming in DOS using Turbo Pascal), so I’m allowed plenty of room for creativity. A blurred, dark background with white lettering and fade transitions between verse and chorus seems to work well with the atmosphere without being distracting. For the worship segments of the evening we kill half of the lights, which has the dual effect of enhancing the ambiance while making the slides easier to read.

Our total (non-staff) attendance was around a half dozen for the first night, but we did have a first timer, Miki. We hope that as the year goes on and Praise Night evolves into a strong point of Sundays we’ll pick up more newcomers (perhaps from Okayama University) who are attracted to the evening-ness and English-ness of the service. Definitely keep this service in your prayers during these first few developmental months.