B.B.
TMP Web Engineer
Church: Tachikawa Evangelical Free Church
Ways of serving: Home Page design, Worship Live Streaming Director
Workplace: Worked for many years as a developer, technical sales, and product expert for a foreign software company, and is continuing his second career after retirement
Encounter with God:
My mother is Japanese but with my father being Filipino, I received infant baptism at the St. Ignatius Church (Yotsuya) and attended Catholic international schools from kindergarten to high school. Under such an environment, I naturally came to accept without doubt the existence of a monotheistic God.
My high school years (1972–1974) was a period when media was saturated with the occultic/supernatural/paranormal such as the movie Exorcist, the doomsday prophecy of Nostradamus, Uri Geller’s spoon bending, UFO documentaries, and Kokkuri-san (Japanese style Ouija board). I was quite influenced by this zeitgeist, and came to firmly believe that the Old Testament miracles were records of past encounters with aliens from outer space.
During the first winter break at my US college, I was browsing the bookstore for some paranormal topics and came across one with the word ‘Satan’ in the title. Without checking the contents, I purchased this paperback (‘Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth’).
This happened to be a book about Satan from a Christian point of view — something that I was not expecting. However I did read the whole book and for the first time in my life (despite my Catholic upbringing), it gave me a vague understanding of what the gospel really is, and given my then rock bottom state of mind, provided the early ground tilling for my salvation.
After transferring college for my second year, I met a Japanese Christian woman who invited me to attend a Japanese Church. She would return to Japan in a year, but other Christian friends were given to me and they led me to salvation.
Encounter with TMP:
Around the end of 2018, I did a mobile friendly makeover of my church’s website (Tachikawa Evangelical Free Church). Although my work experience was solely IT, this was my first experience in creating a website.
Shimomura-san of the then newly founded Tokyo Center Church came across this new website and asked me to create a website for his church as well. I wanted a technical challenge in doing this work, so I proposed an online credit card giving functionality. This happened to be something on Shimomura-san’s wish list, and so after lots of trial and error, I completed the new website with this functionality.
January 2020 was around the time that the initial Covid cases were reported in Tokyo, and a few months later, attendance at my church was restricted to YouTube streamed services. Under such circumstances, the online giving functionality was imported to my church’s website as well and was greatly used during this period of restricted attendance.
As a result of this online giving functionality, Shimomura-san received several inquiries from other churches. One of the inquiries happened to be from TMP.
First, I added this online giving functionality to the existing TMP website and about a year later, I was requested to do a complete makeover of the TMP website. About a year into my helping TMP, there was an incident of malicious takeover making the website inaccessible and causing Google hit results to link the TMP website to other non-related sites. It took about a week to find out what was happening and restore the website. Last year, I had the privilege of creating a separate website for Marunouchi Church Tokyo (MCT).
Since the first approach from TMP in 2020, communication was by Zoom/email only. But, I finally had the chance of visiting TMP’s office this year. It was a real pleasure meeting the staff face-to-face!