As a cell church, we plan to have meetings in various places around Osaka, but one has to start somewhere. We decided the highest priority was a facility that would serve as the church office as well as a meeting area for cells, and preferably would also have the basic necessities (especially a shower) to allow short-term workers to stay there.

Some apartment landlords allow their places to be used as offices, and we originally thought we could get something like that. But when we tell the realtors that we want to hold church meetings, they only show us real office spaces and storefronts, concerned about the noise bothering the neighboring apartments. An office space with a shower? Not likely, but God found us one! It's a first floor office space that the former tenant had decided to both live and work in, so he had installed a tatami room and a shower. He used to have a kitchen also, but pulled it out when he moved (we added a sink back in). It's a bit of a strange design, and some of his modifications were a bit adhoc, but it will do nicely for our purposes. It is right next to an entrance to a subway station, and about a 4 minute walk from a station on a train line that serves a huge number of commuters from the suburbs into Osaka. In this photo, it is the large brown building, and you can see that it's on a main street, and the subway station is under this street. Also, a new subway line is being built under a perpendicular street behind the building from this view, and it's station will also be about a one minute walk when they finish it in a couple years. We want to be as accessible as possible, so we are pleased with this location.

And those who like statistics may enjoy knowing that it is in the ward (in Japan, large cities are subdivided into wards) of central Osaka that has the least churches per capita. I don't know how much that matters when the number of churches in any ward is still tiny, but it's a nice thought...

Both stations have Sekime in the name, so even though the address isn't technically in the community called Sekime, we dubbed the facility the "Sekime Chapel". Please pray that it will be used in many ways to glorify God!

As you can see in the above photos, the place started out empty, dirty, without a sink, and (what you can't see) full of funny little problems. Unlike apartments, office spaces don't normally get "reformed" by the landlord before you move in. So there was a lot of work to be done before we could use it, not even counting the choosing and purchase of equipment and furniture, laying of carpet, etc. We paid for the landlord to contract for new wallpaper and removal of the old ceiling lights, but everything else had to be done ourselves. Just about the time we got the place, Dan's back went out so badly that he had trouble getting up from his futon in the morning or putting on his socks, so needless to say Karen was the one who became very familiar with the local home center store, Office Depot, and various other places, and spent a lot of time crawling around the chapel/office facility. Here she is assembling a cabinet while a plumber installs the faucet and sink.

Finally, below are two photos from our dedication service on May 11, 2003. Pastor Nagashima came from Hiroshima to give the message, and many friends from OIC and elsewhere came to encourage us. After the service many people stayed for fellowship, and in that photo you can see how we can arrange the chairs and tables into various configurations. In fact, we very rarely have events big enough to arrange the chairs in rows; most of the time we prefer the circle around the tables. You can also see more views of the facility in various photos on other pages on this site.