July 2005

To our Friends and Supporters:

Greetings from Japan! Since our last regular newsletter, we have been on home assignment, where we visited many of you during January, February, March, and early April. We’ve had a full schedule to be sure since coming back, including the 50th anniversary celebration for the Yodogawa Christian Hospital at the end of May. YCH put on quite a celebration indeed, with over 70 guests from overseas and several hundred local people. Tim gave the sermon at the worship service and did most of the simultaneous translation of the Japanese presentations into English for the foreign guests. The message was entitled, “Standing On Our Past; Envisioning Our Future” and stressed the importance of maintaining our focus on ministry to the whole person, body, soul, and spirit.

YCH has a tremendous potential for impacting Japanese society with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and so our goal is to encourage the YCH leadership to deepen their commitment to our mission statement. Translating it from the Japanese, it says: “‘Whole Person Healing’ of the Yodogawa Christian Hospital is a medical ministry conceived in Christ’s love, serving the patient as a total unity of body, mind, and spirit.”

One more news item is that the original Japanese version of Tim’s book, Bible Stories Hidden In Chinese Characters will be reprinted by this fall. It has been completely sold out for several months, and as requests continue to come in, the Japanese publisher has decided to do a reprint. The English version included several characters not in the original Japanese, and so these are being added to the updated Japanese version. (The English version isavailable at our Web site www.konkyo.org.)

Another book that Tim has been involved with has just been released by a major secular publisher and has been receiving a lot of attention in the media. It is entitled Lost Identity, and Tim served as in an advisory capacity and a proofreader. The book focuses on the necessity for Japanese to understand the true history of where they came from in order to get a better sense of where they should go. Included in this is a considerable amount of information showing that Eastern Christianity, filtered particularly through the Tang Dynasty of China (618–907 AD), had an enormous impact in shaping Japanese culture—something that is a revelation to most Japanese. As the gospel message is clearly laid out in the explanation of all of this, it is our hope that seeds of interest will be planted in many hearts that can then sprout into faith in Christ through more direct means.

In Christ,

Tim and Juji Boyle

The 2005 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 251