Adam recently came to be part of our church and is recently married to our missionary in Japan, Sabrina. Hear from Adam, a missionary himself to Japan, as he shares more about himself.

Please share a little bit of your background and how you came to Evergreen.

I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. I come from a family of Italian Canadian nominal Catholics. I decided to follow Jesus during my third year at university, becoming involved in student ministry and by extension, missions. I’ve traveled to India and Japan for short-term missionary work, and spent one year in Osaka, Japan (August 2019 – August 2020) for medium-term missionary work. Amid my preparations for my Osaka term, I met Sabrina through an online dating website. As we met in-person and dated in Japan, we decided to meet each other’s families. This brought me to California in September 2020, where I had the privilege to meet Sabrina’s biological family and her spiritual family here at Evergreen.

How has your time at our church been so far? What are you initial impressions of our church?

COVID-19 has definitely made things interesting in my initial engagement at Evergreen. I first started attending Sunday services online. I’ve appreciated the love of Jesus being made explicit during the services, and seeing that incarnated with the people of Evergreen as I’ve been attending in-person.

My initial impression was that Evergreen is big! My home church in Canada is a small percentage of the size of both the congregation and the campus. The size and scope have definitely been a change for me, especially after returning from Japan, where a group of six people every Sunday was a successful turnout.

The few families that Sabrina has invited me into fellowship with have been loving, patient, funny, and encouraging. These families have been intentional in cultivating community with us, not as a duty, but as a natural outflowing of their character and care for us. We’re excited to dive deeper in relationship with them.

What are you most looking forward to in your time at Evergreen?

More than anything, intentional community and the organic discipleship that comes out of that are something that excites me about my time at Evergreen. I’m excited to learn more about the vision of discipleship here, and encouraged to see that vision play itself out within these families of community Sabina and I are engaged in.

How can we pray for you and Sabrina? 

1. Our marriage. We are seeking to cultivate a space where we are living out our identities as family, as missionaries and as disciples. Pray that we prioritize loving God, loving each other and loving others in this.

2. Immigration and citizenship processes that we’re currently involved in. We are seeking to become dual citizens (Canada-USA), and the processes are long. Pray for favour.

by Kenny Wada

Though all of our Congregational Life ministries have either stopped or become virtual gatherings, we continue to ask the Lord to leverage the advantages of online interactions and fill in its inherent deficiencies.  Some of the pluses of online communities are:

1. Easily accessible, so it makes it simple for newcomers to "drop-in" and check out small groups or fellowships

2. More consistent attendance since busy schedules, freeway traffic and unplanned interruptions are less of an issue when attending a meeting is only a click away

3. Less work involved in preparing the meeting space (you don't have to get snacks together or clean up your home!)

4. Easier to meet new people online, stay connected to them through social media and in some ways get to know them quicker because of the ease of communicating online

However, the ease of connecting to an online community is also an inherent weakness.  Online communities require less effort and are therefore less costly than in-person relationships: 

1. You don't have to deal with unpleasant smells like bad breath (your own or someone else’s)

2. You don't have to fear standing alone by yourself because everyone is equally spaced apart in nicely framed rectangles (you can even hide yourself and still listen in on what everyone is saying!)

3. You also don't need or deal with all the awkward tensions and conflicts of in-person interactions

But all these extra efforts, awkward tensions and anxious relational issues are all a part of real, face-to-face relationships that challenge and shape our character and cause us to turn to the Lord for the strength, forgiveness, courage and ability to love like Jesus.  

It is the deep and painful costs of loving real, broken and sinful people that God uses to bring us to the end ourselves and to the beginning of our total trust and dependance upon him.  Nothing brings us quicker to the foot of the cross and the mercy of Jesus than the hardships of in-person relationships.  

I would imagine that your in-person relationships at home have either driven you nuts or have driven you to the foot of the cross.  If that's true for you, that’s because in-person relationships are costly.

May we continue to take advantage of the benefits of virtual communities while remaining aware of their built-in limitations.