Hello!  We pray you are doing well and having a wonderful summer.

We are visiting our home church in Texas for a month and enjoying seeing family and friends.

We wanted to share about some of the special memories from this past spring and summer!

Our church hosted a team from Nuuanu Baptist Church in Hawaii. We had a great fellowship with them!

This year’s youth and young adult retreat was a lot of fun! We all learned what it means to be filled with God’s love and to share His love with those around us.

We visited the nursing home with our church members.

Michael’s Japanese friend and his wife invited us to have a picnic under the beautiful cherry blossom trees!

Our English classes are growing!  We are teaching two classes right now.

We have several students and young adults who attend LIFE (Sunday Evening Bible Study and Worship) regularly.

We were invited to the BBQ fellowship at one of the local churches that we partner with and we made many new friends!

We hosted three BBQ fellowships this summer and had more than 70 people total! We are so thankful Michael’s new friends and their families joined us for the first time!

We are thankful for our missionary partners (from IMB) and Japanese Christian friends. They are leading and helping with the ministries while we are in America.

God is working in mighty ways in Japan!  Thank you so much for your continued prayers for our ministries in Japan!  We appreciate each of you so much!

We are so thankful for everyone who donated money to buy the children’s Bibles for the families that come to our church’s weekly ministries. Thanks to your generous gift, we were able to buy 40 Bibles! For most families, it was their first time to receive a Bible. We don’t have pictures of every family that received, but we could tell everyone appreciated this special gift. After the Christmas break, many children and moms told us how much they enjoy reading it. One boy said he is already half way done. Another girl asked many questions about her favorite story. We want to say thank you to everyone who gave and prayed!

(We apologize for not being able to post these photos sooner.  We asked all the parents for their permission to post them on our blog.)

We have been reading the children’s Bible at the end of our English class every week. All the kids love listening to the Bible stories and they ask many questions. Since most of them come from non-Christian homes, they do not have a Bible. We decided to give the bilingual children’s Bible to all families that come to our weekly ministries. We need your help to buy all the Bibles we need. Please consider giving $30 (cost of 1 Bible) or more so all families can receive the Bible. If you have given or plan to give, please email us at michaelandyu@gmail.com so we can put your name on the poster for everyone to see at our church. We know it will mean so much to them. You can give in memory or honor of someone.

Please use the following site to give: https://sending.org/worker/michael-and-yu-towery

Thank you so much in advance for blessing many families and making this Christmas extra special!

We partner with one of the local churches and help them lead the English Bible Study and worship on Sunday nights.  We hosted a summer BBQ fellowship recently and we all had a wonderful fellowship.  Many people who come to this ministry are interested in both English and the Bible, so teaching the Bible in English is a great way to minister to them!  We are also thankful to partner with Japanese believers and our missionary friends, Kevin and Donna Qualls, as we consider them as our team members!  Please continue to pray for this ministry!

We led the Children’s Retreat at the Northern Japan Baptist Association Retreat. More than 100 people from 12 Baptist churches in northern Japan gathered to have worship and fellowship together. We had about 20 children and had a great time with them. Many of these children came from Fukushima and they have been going through a difficult time due to many different reasons. We are thankful God gave us this opportunity to minister to them and to encourage them. It was also a blessing to meet many believers from different churches and to learn about their ministries. We look forward to keeping in touch with them and partnering with them!

Hello!  We apologize for not being able to update much recently.  But God has been doing amazing things here and we will be sharing many stories with you!

We teach English to children at our church every week and most children come from non-Christian homes. Thanks to your prayers, this ministry continues to grow. We had a summer party and we all enjoyed a banana split! After each class, we share a story from the Bible and have a prayer time together. Several children and moms are asking questions about the stories they heard. Please pray they will continue to learn about God and His love!

The Sunday night Bible study at Sendai Baptist just completed its third year. We have had a lot of friendly faces come and go. Many of our students have been college students. Some are older and just wanted a fun place to learn English. This year we have had a strong group of university students studying hard to be a scientist.  At least once a month we try to have a meal together after the worship service that’s after the Bible study. It’s always good to have a fellowship together. They are also so kind to our boys.  We look forward to the rest of the year and how God will guide us as we minister.

We have a lot of people come to Sendai to help with the ministries throughout the year.   It is always a blessing to see the same faces come back year after year.  The BGCT (Baptist General Convention of Texas) has allowed that to happen for at least one of our very good friends.  Sherwood Moffett is a retired missionary to Japan.  He has led many of his students from Texas on teams throughout Japan.  Sherwood is a member of Austin Baptist Church.  He joined the first BGCT that arrived back in 2012 and he has come back to lead a team ever since.  He always has a good group.  And those that could not make this trip were spoken of very fondly by the team members.  This year we had the pleasure of having a professional singer perform at Taitomi Church.  They also helped with the English Bible study and worship on Sunday night.  We really enjoyed having them with us.  But they had to go so that they could help TBC Ishinomaki Mission for a week.  We are thankful for the ways they encouraged us and blessed many lives.

Last year we brainstormed for new events we could have at our home church Taitomi Church. With summer approaching we realized there had never been a VBS (Vacation Bible School) at Taitomi Church. We had a great trio of teachers by profession come from our home church in Texas to help with our first ever VBS (By the way, you ladies are always welcome back)!  This year for 2015, we decided to ask the youth and adult team from Hawaii to help.  We have been partnering with Waialae Baptist Church for a few years and we were so happy when they said they would be bringing a youth group to Japan!

The youth team taught English to the kids and the adults led the craft activities for the moms.  We also taught a Bible lesson at the end of each class.  We ended our time together by hosting the Hawaiian Festival.  All the kids loved the fun booths and prizes from Hawaii!

Everyone learned something new every day.  The Hula dancing was also very popular!  We also took this team to the preschool and nursing homes in the community.  The fact we got to visit the public preschool was a blessing!  The team also wanted to visit the disaster area so we took them to one of the mission churches and also to the temporary housing where our friends live.

Thank you everyone for loving on the kids and sharing God’s love to everyone you met.

Greetings from Hawaii!

We hope you all had a wonderful weekend.  We left Japan and flew to Hawaii last week.  Our goals for this trip are to maintain Yu’s status as a permanent resident, to visit churches to share what God is doing in Japan, to see friends who came to Japan on mission trips, and to recruit prayer and financial partners.

God has already blessed us in many ways.  The mission house that our friend’s church has provided for us is perfect (there is a playground that our boys love!) for our family, we already saw several friends that came to Japan last year, we spoke at two churches yesterday and met people who are interested in going to Japan in the future, and several people told us they want to partner with us!  God is good!

If you are a new reader of this blog, welcome! We look forward to keeping in touch with you.

Here are some recent photos of our ministries in Japan!

Children’s choir

Kids’ English class

Love these children!

With Pastor Fujii and his family at Sakata Mission Church

English Bible study

Weekly play group at our church

Your prayers and support mean so much to us!  Please let us know how we can pray for you!

Mahalo (thank you)!

This summer we were sad to know that Pastor Noguchi passed away.  He was a seasoned leader. Even though he was supposed to be retired we received continuous reports of his steady outreach to the churches in his community.  In case you did not know, he was a teen during WWII and was drafted into the army to train as a torpedo sub kamikaze.  The war actually ended two weeks before his scheduled mission.  He later became a believer and pastor.  He will be greatly missed.  He was full of wisdom and encouragement.  Please remember to pray for his family.  We are not able to attend the funeral in west Japan but our hearts were with all those who did.  The picture of us with Pastor Noguchi and his wife, (They married September 2013!)  was the last time we saw him.  Michael gave him a hug and told them both we loved them.  We said goodbye knowing that was the last time we would see each other this side of eternity.  That was in June. However, we continued to hear many reports of his boldness to preach and share the gospel until he passed away.  Such a man is hard to find.  We pray the Lord will lift up more just like him.  His life story is available on Amazon, Sacrificed: Given to an Empire; Found by God.

We were blessed to host a team from our sending church, First Baptist Church Arlington.  They came to help with our VBS at Taitomi Church and Sakata Mission Church.  It was their second time to come to Japan and we were excited that they wanted to come back.  Mary, Martha, and Kristen were so much fun to have around on both trips.  They are teachers by profession and it shows because they have connected with the kids so well.  The team also went with us to Sakata to encourage the pastor’s family and also to minister to children in the community.  It was the first time that they met Susanne who was already hard at work helping the Fujii family.  One of the most touching moments was when we arrived in Sakata.  When class started the kids sang the welcome song that Kirsten taught them two years ago.  It was awesome to hear them singing in English to the team.  It was great to see so many friendships rekindled throughout the two weeks this team served with us in Japan.  As we drove to the train station to send the team off I asked them what was one thing they would remember most about this trip.  Kristen was so impressed with the patience of the Christians here who minister in a very difficult religious setting.  Mary and Martha both agreed what a blessing it was to see the kids again and to share God’s love with them.  Please pray that the Spirit will continue to work on the hearts of everyone they met.  This was truly an encouraging group of ladies.  Thank you as always Mary, Martha, and Kristen, for being here. We look forward to serving with you again.  And thank you to FBCA and to their families for allowing them to be serve.

They prepared for many fun activities.

Kids had so much fun!

They were so proud!

They learned many Bible songs.

These kids loved the special gift from Texas!

Visiting the Christian kindergarten in Sakata.

Loved spending time with the Fujii family and the church members.