by Pastor Victor Chen

In an old television commercial, a bear climbs a yellow trailer, rips off the roof to peek inside and exclaims, “Hey, where’s the cream filling?”

The bear thought the yellow trailer was a Twinkie. 

You too may be looking at our website, Plugin or app and be asking, “Hey, where’s the summer program?”

Good question. 

Why isn’t there a weeklong summer program?

Though things are reopening after over a year of the “stay at home” order, much of our church, especially families, are still home. As we explored having a weeklong program, it became difficult to anticipate how many families would feel comfortable sending their children to a weeklong program and how many volunteers would feel comfortable serving throughout the week. In short, there were a lot of unknowns that made it difficult to plan.

Why isn’t there an online weeklong summer program?

Producing weekly videos for families to join Church School online is already a lot of work. Producing an entire weeklong program would require even more time and additional resources. For now, the livestream service and Church School videos are the priorities online. 

Furthermore, we are still providing in-person worship services in the sanctuary and in-person Church School in the MPR with breakout sessions in the MPR and various classrooms. It would be one thing to only produce online content, but to do both online and in person requires more attention, time and resources.

Finally, as a pastor (and parent), I am concerned about the screen time consumption our children have had with a year (or more) of distance learning. This summer, I would recommend our children rest their eyes, go outside, be active and play!

Our family is comfortable returning, what is available this summer for us?

I’m glad you asked! Because we want families to return to service and Church School in person when they are comfortable, we will have opportunities for families to come out on campus outdoors as a step towards returning. 

On June 27, we will have our next Summer Worship Night where families can come early to bring dinner and picnic on our lawn from 4:30-6pm. At 6pm, we will begin our program with family-friendly group activities for both children and adults. This is followed by a time of worship with a devotion as we learn and sing songs that span the generations represented in our church.

Note that this is not just for families, but for the entire church family. At our last Summer Worship Night on May 30, we were blessed to have a great mix of generations join and participate. College students and young adults led the group activity and hand motions for kids worship. It was neat to see the entire group worship as one family.

On July 30-31, we will have our last Summer Worship Night on Friday night with an optional Summer Worship Campout afterward! Households can come set up their tent, have a dinner picnic and join with the summer worship time. Afterward, they can sleep in their tent on our campus under the stars. We hope to provide brunch Saturday morning and allow everybody to enjoy hanging out on campus together.

If you are interested in participating in our Summer Worship Campout, please contact me at vchen@evergreensgv.org to sign up!

by Pastor Victor Chen

Mere months into leading our 5th/6th grade Church School department, I was faced with the task of identifying a person to head our 1st/2nd grade department. It was the beginning of the 2020 school year and we were still in the midst of a “stay at home” order. 

Church School was still largely done online and I was having a difficult time recruiting help for Church School. Finding a Department Head seemed impossible.

What were we going to do?

I remember proposing a solution to our other Church School Department Head leaders after much prayer. Though they admired my heart, they were concerned this was too much.

I admit it sounded crazy.

I would lead both 5th/6th and 1st/2nd grade departments. The only way I could do this is if we had a unified curriculum across all grades. I would produce pre-recorded lesson videos each week to be shown online, followed by break-out small groups by our Church School teachers. I would teach in person outdoors to everybody 0-6th grade and break everybody out into small groups according to their age groups.

Over six months later, we continue to offer a unified curriculum, “The Gospel Project”, across all grades through high school. For grades Pre-K through 6th, we continue to offer an online option with small groups. On May 2, we began having a unified Church School gathering indoors at 9am in the MPR. I teach the lesson in person, after which everybody breaks out to their respective departments for small groups and activities. 

More families are coming out as things reopen. children online and in-person are beginning to grasp the rhythm of the curriculum — the key passages families can commit to memory and the overarching themes for each unit of 4-5 lessons. The curriculum covers the entire Bible over three years, specifically highlighting how each part of the Bible points to the good news of Jesus. I especially appreciate the resources the curriculum provides to facilitate family worship throughout the week. With a unified curriculum, a family with multiple children can review the same lesson, the same theme and the same key passage.

Looking back, I had always wanted to introduce a unified curriculum for our Church School departments. My wife dreamed of being able to track with all three of our children and what they had learned in Sunday school. 

Who knew a unified curriculum would provide a solution to our church in a difficult season? Praise God that we have a clear path in “The Gospel Project” for a unified journey through the Bible and discovering how it points to Jesus.

This fall, The Gospel Project will begin its 3-year cycle going through the entire Bible beginning with Genesis 1. Join us as our Church School goes through The Gospel Project together. There is even a potential option to add an adult track so everybody can join along! Feel free to contact me at vchen@evergreensgv.org for more information. 

by Dan Christian

Some people thrive on newness and change. 

Others thrive on constancy and stability.

Transition is exciting for some—there is a thrill in shaking things up a bit. It keeps life interesting.

Transition is stressful for others—there is peace in living with thought-out routines. It keeps life predictable. 

No matter where you land on the spectrum of thriving in transition to stressing in transition, the reality is that all of us have been walking through multiple layers of change in the past two years. As a church family, we entered into a senior pastor transition when Pastor Cory retired and God provided Pastor Rocky to shepherd our church. Less than a year into that transition, COVID-19 hit and our church moved suddenly and unexpectedly into another major change: cancellation of all church functions and worship services via livestream from our homes. In the midst of the pandemic quarantine, we experienced several changes in our staff team, both in saying farewell to staff and welcoming new staff, as well as transitions of roles between pastors. There have been multiple changes of worship service format and location, from livestream only to inside to outside and now back inside. And along with those changes are coming changes in the look and feel of the worship service. 

So for some of us, this is a super exciting time because so much is new and changing, and the transitions are breathing fresh life and enthusiasm into our souls. But for others of us, this is a very painful or difficult time because people and routines we have counted on are no longer in place, and the multiple layers of constant transition are draining our souls.

If you were a part of our church in the fall of 2018, you probably remember going through a study on transition, which was both a sermon series and an accompanying small group Bible study series. In that study, we looked at transition through the biblical lens of a trial, as something that tests our faith as we learn to trust God in deeper ways. We looked at transition as an opportunity for transformation, as we learn to walk more closely with God in a season of change. And we looked at how we can train our hearts to respond to God in the midst of all that is uncomfortable about transition. 

Those truths we studied could be summarized in this statement: In the trial of transition, we train our hearts to trust in God as He brings transformation in us.

We had no idea in 2018 that there would be all these additional layers of transition that we would be facing, yet here we are. So once again we are faced with the opportunity to continue the training of our hearts, that our trust in God would be deepened through the testing of all these trials. 

If you were a part of the Transformational Transitions study, perhaps now would be a good time to dust off those study books and review the things that you learned. And if you weren’t a part of that study, you can still benefit from it. The books have now been edited to apply to a general audience (i.e. those who are not part of the Evergreen SGV church family), and are available for purchase on amazon.com. So if you are wrestling with transition—whether the layers of transition happening in our church family, or a transition you are walking through personally—pick up a copy of the Leader’s Manual and pull a few others together to walk through the study with one another. All the study notes are in the Leader’s Manual, so you could learn a lot simply from reading through it, but it is best experienced as a small group study with others, and there is a Participant’s Guide to help facilitate that. 

May God be your refuge and strength, your very present help in trouble (Psalm 46:1) as you walk through all the layers of this transition time.

by Rocky Seto

This 12-minute video is great to hear how Capitol Hill Baptist grew into a singing church. Mark Dever (Senior Pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist in Washington D.C. and founder of Nine Marks Ministry) has helped disciple me as a Senior Pastor. This interview captures a lot of the ideas he has imparted to me about the value of congregational singing.

by Ian Nagata

“Say you strike up a conversation with someone on the train who’s never heard of Jesus. How would you share the gospel with him?”

It was a great question. And like many of the other questions people asked about my missionary game plan, I hadn’t envisioned that far yet.

So I said the first thing that came to mind:

 “I’d try to find a way to get him to sit down and read the Bible with me, so He could encounter Jesus.”

Nine years later, ironically, it’s the only question that I would still answer the same way. The person of Jesus is our greatest evangelistic tool.[1]

I could share why I feel this way based on multiple conversations, Bible studies, and yes, random people I’ve met on the trains here in Tokyo. But the past three weeks I got to experience this not only in Japan, but on a global level.

For three Wednesdays, I participated in an online training on the Person of Jesus by seeJesus ministries. Participants logged in from Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, alongside trainers from Guatemala, Jordan, Philadelphia, and So. Cal. 

Besides the personal joy of seeing Evergreeners Jon Hori and Darren Inouye, we delighted in six hours of seeing and studying Jesus’ compassion, honesty, dependency, love, and ultimately, beauty throughout Scripture. (Though Jon and Darren are also quite lovely and beautiful.)

What struck me most however, wasn’t just Jesus’ beauty. Rather, His particular beauty in each of our cultural contexts.

For example, Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet is beautiful to those of us in America. But have you ever thought how shocking such humility would be in a hierarchical society like Taiwan?

Or take Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. Have you ever thought how the Father’s welcoming would resonate all the more in a shame culture, like Jordan? 

Or think of Jesus’ acknowledging Bartimaeus amidst a great crowd, asking what He could do for him. Can you imagine how courageous this would be in a culture like Japan, where people ignore each other on the trains in fear of disrupting the peace?

So pardon the seemingly sensational title. But I truly mean it when I say we have no greater evangelistic tool in the world. Because as the hymn says, only Jesus is our “Beautiful Savior, Lord of all the nations,” from Jordan to Japan, La Puente to the ends of the earth,

[1] Stole this phrase from Jon Hori’s teaching during the Person of Jesus online training!