Mission Work in Japan

Witness readers have been aware of the fact that a new psalter has been a great need. The exciting part now is that the final preparations are now being made for the printing. Interested volunteers have been helping to check the endless details which are, of necessity, a part of this sort of project.…

There’s a wedding this month. Mr. Toyoki Hamada and Miss Imai are to be married on the nineteenth. Mr. Hamada was one of the High School students in the first Bible class held at Tarumi, and continued quite faithfully to study. He spent his senior year of high school as an exchange student to the United States when he lived in Long Beach, California. In the summer of 1970 when the Boyles were in Tarumi, he stopped at the door one evening and asked if he could study for baptism. He carried through this desire and was baptized that autumn. We pray that his marriage will truly establish a Christian home.

We heard a talk the other evening on “Festive Japan.”…The gist of this talk was, “Join in the activities at the shrine or temple. It’s fun. Dance in the Obon street dances. The Japanese will love you for it.” (Obon is the festival celebrating the supposed return home of the spirits of family members who have died. The festival takes place in August and lasts for several days.) Contrast this kind of talk with Mr. Masunaga’s message a couple of weeks ago. Yasukuni Shrine, where the spirits of the war dead are supposedly enshrined, is being given new publicity to lead the nation back to pre-war emphasis on the Shinto religion. Mr. Masunaga spoke very strongly of the sin of idolatry and the importance of the Christian’s clear witness against it, “even if to do so gets us the bad name, hikokumin (non-Japanese.) “

To your praise and prayer list, please add the name of Mr. Miwa for he expects to begin study at the Reformed Seminary in April. He is leaving a good job and will certainly meet Satan’s attacks in many ways.

—Grace Boyle

Fashioning Banners

About thirty years ago, the pastor of the Topeka Reformed Presbyterian Church, Rev. Paul D. McCracken, brought home from Synod with him a Covenanter Blue Banner made by Mrs. Elizabeth Baird of Morning Sun, Iowa. He asked one of the women of his congregation, Mrs. Ruth Lathom Robb, if she would undertake to copy the design and style of it in the making of a new banner for the sanctuary in Topeka. Mrs. Baird had fashioned quite a few banners through the years, but did not feel that she could continue to make them. Mrs. Robb agreed, and by so doing, entered into a program which has resulted in her cutting, sewing, and embroidering 26 Blue Banners since that time.

Rev. McCracken helped Ruth in finding the right materials to use in making that first Banner.… Ordinarily, making a Blue Banner takes an average time of about five months. Once Ruth made one in two weeks.

But, she laughingly stated, “I didn’t do much else during those two weeks, I can tell you.” When I asked Ruth about the cost of the banners, she again replied with a chuckle. “I’m not making them on a commercial basis.”

To Ruth Robb the making of the Blue Banners for Covenanter churches has been a service for God’s glory.

—Winifred Elliott