Starting November 13, 2022 — please join us on Sundays at 10:00 JST!
WTUC Zoom link https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
WTUC meeting ID: 993 7143 4588
This will be the link used for the 2022-23 season. Please disregard all other links.
After you have joined once, if you open your Zoom application, you may also select the “Join Meeting” function and the drop-down menu will include the WTUC meeting in its list:
Worship with us online, June 4th at 10am! Trinity Sunday — First Sunday After Pentecost. Rev. Paul Shew will be bringing the message for today: “The Most Important Questions: Who is God? Who are We?”
Opening Hymn: “All Creatures of Our God and King” #62
Responsive Reading: Psalm 8
Hymn: “How Majestic Is Your Name” by Michael W. Smith
Scripture Reading: Genesis 1:1-2:4a, 2 Corinthians 13:11-13, Matthew 28:16-20
Hymn of Response: “This is My Father’s World” #114
Closing Hymn: For the Beauty of the Earth #92
There will be a congregational meeting after our online worship service. Please stay online and join us if you are a member of the WTUC congregation.
This coming Sunday, May 21st, Jonathan Oh will be preaching for our online WTUC service. The title of his message is: Our Lord’s Prayer
Scripture readings include: Psalm 93:1-5 and John 17:1-11.
Upcoming Hymns: #139 — Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, #98 — To God Be the Glory, #548 — In Christ There Is No East or West
We hope that many of you will be able to come and worship with us!
The following Sunday, May 28th, is Pentecost and we will have an in-person joint worship service with Mitaka Lutheran at 10:30am. There will be no online service on May 28th. Takamura-Sensei will be preaching and Ruth Ingulsrud will be providing the children’s message. The service will be both in English and in Japanese. We will be having participants read from Acts in various languages during the sermon. Feel free to invite friends and neighbors to attend.
Join us next Sunday, May 14th, at 10:00 am for an online worship service with the West Tokyo Union Church community. Mr. Wong from Sarawak will be bringing us the message entitled, Pursuing God’s Wisdom. The scripture readings for next Sunday will be:
James 1:5, Matt. 4:19, and Proverbs 4.
The hymns will be:
”I Want Jesus to Walk with Me,” “Lord You Give the Great Commission,” and “Be Thou My Vision.”
The liturgist will be Ann; Ruth will provide the children’s message. Kazuko will be providing us with beautiful organ music.
We hope that many of you will be able to come and worship with us!
Malcolm Foster is familiar to most of you. He and his wife Mio were happy to be a part of WTUC for several years before moving to Washington DC last September. He is a missionary kid, born and raised in Hokkaido, and has lived and worked in Japan as a journalist for many years. He’s also an artist on the side, painting mostly scenes of Lake Nojiri in Nagano. He likes his new job in Washington as English news director for Radio Free Asia, which sends news in nine languages to countries and regions of Asia that don’t have a free press (China, North Korea, Myanmar, Cambodia, etc). It’s a great fit for his skills, background and passions. Mio and Malcolm are feeling more settled in DC, and have found a wonderful new church near their home called Grace Mosaic.
Malcolm will be our lay-preacher this coming Sunday, April 30th, at 10am JST, bringing a message called, “Words & Deeds — Which Are More Important?”
Our hymns for Sunday will be:
Opening: “Praise My Soul, the King of Heaven”
Response: “O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus”
Closing: “May the Mind of Christ my Savior”
Our scripture verses will be Isaiah 61:1-2 from the Old Testament, and from the New Testament, Acts 6: 1-7.
We hope that many of you will be able to come and worship with us!
WTUC Worship Link: https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
This Sunday, April 16, please join us for a very special message by Rev. Dr. Joe Ozawa who will preach on 1st John 7 – “Receive My Love.” Hear the Good News that abundant love comes to us from God.
1 John 4:7– “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.”
Here are some Bible verses to look at and contemplate on before our online gathering this Sunday:
1 John 4:7- 12 — “ Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
1 John 4:19 — “We love because He first loved us.”
Psalm 33:5 — “The Lord loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of his unfailing love.”
We hope that many of you will be able to come and worship with us!
Here is the WTUC Zoom link: https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
Abundant blessings to you!
WTUC will have an Easter Sunday in-person worship at 10am! Join us if you can. Worship will be followed by an egg hunt and Easter brunch. (Please bring something to share.) Jim Sack will be preaching — sermon title is “Living in Darkness.” Kazuko will fill the room with organ music and we will be able to raise our voices in song together. “Christ the Lord is risen today! Hallelujah!” Ruth and her puppet friends will help with the kidsermon. Scriptures will be Colossians 3:1-4 as well as John 20:1-18. Hymns will include: Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Have You Seen Jesus My Lord? and Thine Be the Glory.
This will be a hybrid service and we will be broadcasting the worship for those who cannot attend in person. We are looking forward to seeing many of you there on the Lutheran Seminary campus at 10am on Easter Sunday, April 9th.
The month of March at West Tokyo Union Church is dedicated to Music and Ministry. Please join us every Sunday on Zoom for wonderful hymns and meaningful messages about how the Spirit of God moves through music.
Our worship link is listed below:
https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
Our first speaker of the month is Carol Sack, who has a thriving harp ministry. Here is a link to her message from March 5, 2023, “Music to My Ears; Praying Twice:”
On March 12, our friend and musician, Jeff Dawson, joins us remotely from California and bless us with a message called, “Life in the Key of P.” What does that mean, you may well wonder. Ruth’s puppet friends, Hamlet the Pig and Baaabara the Sheep are wondering the same thing.
On March 19, our service will be a hybrid one — both in-person on the Lutheran Seminary Campus and online. This will be a Praise Music Sunday.
On March 26, we are back to an online service format and Rev. Dr. Jim Sack preaches on the raising of Lazarus. The title of the sermon is, “From Bound to Found.” A recording of the children’s message and the main sermon can be found at the link below:
For the month of February, all WTUC services will be held through Zoom.
To celebrate the month of Valentine’s Day, the speakers will share on the topic of relationships:
Join us on Zoom on Sunday mornings, 10:00 JST at https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
明けましておめでとうございます
We kicked off the new year with a Sunday this year, and Rev. Paul Shew preached on “”Bearing Fruit Abundantly in the New Year” — if you missed this, do not despair, we will have a recording available soon.
For the rest of January, we have the following speakers:
Join us on Zoom on Sunday mornings, 10:00 JST at https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
Celebrate Christmas with West Tokyo Union Church at our IN-PERSON and online hybrid worship service this Sunday, December 25!
The 10:00am JST service will be at the Lutheran Seminary and the Christmas Cookie Exchange will follow.
For those joining us virtually,
WTUC Zoom link: https://scad.zoom.us/j/99371434588
ID: 993 7143 4588
Rev. Dr. Jim Sack will be preaching on the Christmas story from Luke 2:1-20. There will be special music from our guest, Rev. Darren IngKang Mok, and a time to request Christmas carols.
Christmas Cookie Exchange: Please bring packaged cookies to share — due to COVID rules we cannot have unwrapped food out in the open, but as long as they are in bags for people to take home, it will be fine.
For those joining us virtually, please use the chat function in Zoom to send Christmas carol or prayer requests.
Offering:
For online giving, please go to https://wtuc.net/offering/
Or you can bring your offering for collection during service.
We hope to see you at the Lutheran campus this Sunday morning, December 25, at 10:00!
James Sack is an ordained missionary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and works through the Japan Evangelical Lutheran Church (JELC). He and his wife Carol came to Japan as long-term missionaries starting in 1982. Jim now teaches in the areas of counseling and Christian Anthropology in the undergraduate school, Clinical Psychology at the Graduate School, and Pastoral Care and Counseling for the Lutheran Seminary. He also has served as a chaplain at Fuchu Prison over 10 years.