Narimasu It Is.

I met today with Shoji. He's our church administrator and the one in charge of leading all church-extension projects through the incubation stage. The church-extension projects to this point have been New Hope Yokohama and New Hope Osaka (Osaka is just getting started this month). In many ways, for our purposes, this new school resembles a church plant.

The highlight of the meeting was hearing that Pastor Talo approved us renting the building in Narimasu and starting our school there! The rough plan that we came up with today is to get the remodeling done in July, run a day camp in August, have a once-a-week preschool class beginning in July with day camps maybe once a month. We hope to officially launch the preschool in April 2006. (April is when the school year begins in Japan.) Plans will surely change, but I hope that they change in ways that are more ambitious for God and more in line with his will.

There is so much to learn, so, much to decide, so much to coordinate and so much to do! I'm really grateful for the responses from so many at our dream meeting last month. People offered to help in areas that we hadn't even considered yet, like with organizing a library. Great stuff! "Doing Church As a Team" is the way to go.

The biggest prayer requests I have are for prayers of thanksgiving. God is so good and so faithful. Also please pray for our people. It is a time for leaders to rise up and teams to be formed in key areas:

• construction and remodeling
• program and curriculum development for the preschool
• program development for the culture school (more on the culture school another time)
• publicity and recruiting
• fundraising
• teaching staff

Thank you for taking the time to read this and for your prayers.