Warning: This does get a bit graphic.

So yesterday and today I have mainly been assisting at Nagahama’s first Latin American funeral. This was the first Christian funeral I attended in Japan - you can read about my Buddhist funeral experience - and I get the impression it was fairly typical of the genre, despite the Latin cultural influence. Read more about More funeralia

So this week marks my second Christmas in Japan. I think this has been the least Christmassy Christmas of my life so far. I have felt like Charlie Brown (hence the sermon) for most of this month. I'm sure this is partly to do with the fact that many of the things I associate with Christmas haven't been here.

I've been asked to write a post about Christmas in Japan, which I will later on, but first I want to talk about the Brazilian situation here.

One of the few things that the Koizumi administration achieved was the promotion of Cool Biz - an environmental campaign where government offices were encouraged to allow workers to remove their jackets and ties so that air conditioners could be set marginally higher than normal, saving energy.

I spent most of today helping to destroy a church. One of our church plants had run out of money, manpower and members, and so we made the obvious decision to close it down, end the contract on the building, revert all the alterations that had been made to it and to return it to the landlord. For some involved, I'm sure it was a sad day, but I have to admit that I took a perverse pleasure in it, laying into bookshelves and partitions with a ball-peen hammer. It's a great way to take out your frustrations. I wish I could call it creative destruction, but it wasn't, it was just destruction, pure and simple. I wish I could say that symbolically I was breaking down the building to set free the church, but no, really, I wasn't. I was just merrily swinging away, laying into pieces of wood that didn't really deserve it. And I loved it.

Evangelistic meetings, at least here in Japan, are a funny sort of performance art.

I spoke last night with a missionary from OMF, who has been working on a book on contextualising the church in Japan. At All Nations, and at some of the church planting sessions during missionary orientation, the need for contextualisation was hammered into us as if it were the magic bullet to make church planting work. But over the past couple of years I have become a little more nuanced in how I think about contextualisation. Read more about Contextualisation: No magic bullet

So I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to recently because, well, I have no energy. I'm currently hosting a Swiss short-term missionary who is helping out with Nagahama and Maibara, and I guess I feel quite a lot of pressure - self-inflicted of course - particularly in this first week or so, to make sure he is OK and well looked-after and entertained. The downside of this is that I feel I have to be on duty 24/7, not just making sure everything is OK but also making conversation and finding useful and interesting things to do. I am very bad at all of the above, hence the stress.

Today I raced down (and back) to Shizuoka, about half way to Tokyo, to meet a man who's working on issues of church growth and the lack of it in Japan. We had a good chat, more of a get-to-know-you thing than any real deep content, but important to do none the less. And now I have come back with a head full of thoughts, which is always good.

I remember reading - I don't remember where - about one of the key questions in Trinitarian missiology is "Who's not here?" Symbolically it pictures the Trinity in a "dance of love", and while they enjoyed perfect community together, the question "Who's not here?" leads to them reaching out to include humanity. Then the dance expands to include the Israelites, the Gentiles, and so on until all are included. The challenge, then, for the church is to keep on asking "Who's not here?" Which sectors of society are we lacking? What part of the richness of God's creation have we failed to take account of?