Click above video to play.

Another post precipitated by hard disk housekeeping... I found this recent video of the last official recording PBA's Rev. Akira Hatori. Rev. Hatori has been with PBA nearly since its beginning, serving as chairman and main radio pastor for decades. Over the years, other men have also come on board to make programs, and run PBA -- but it was Rev. Hatori who worked tirelessly travelling around Japan, building a network of churches that would reach out to their cities, towns and villages with gospel radio, and then TV. PBA is a successful ministry because it works with over 2,000 churches around the country, connecting broadcast listeners to local congregations. He is a man of prayer, and I believe has been anointed by the Lord. People respond to his preaching more than any other minister I know.

Rev. Hatori has been trying to retire for years, but the staff has begged him to stay on. But finally, it was time. I'm glad that as he was headed into the studio for the last time, the head of our radio department came running to get me -- "Tim, we have to get this on tape!" Hadn't thought that far ahead myself!

Also have some photos of Rev. Hatori and the TEAM missionaries from PBA's early days here.

Click above video to play.

Just a quickie today. One of the drawbacks of working in video and TV is that your hard disk fills up really fast. I've got 500GBs in my laptop (main machine) but a couple of months after putting it in, it's full. Mostly video footage in various stages of editing. While looking for big files I can safely delete, I ran across a slideshow/video that I shot and edited for TEAM Japan's annual conference in August. Each year we have a required attendance conference of worship, seminars, business meetings, annual picnic, and more. The slide show was shown at the end of the conference. The guest speaker this year was Dr. Jim Meyer, from Philadelphia Biblical University. Numbers were way down; bunches of people in the US and Canada on furlo this year.

If you don't know any other folk in TEAM Japan, this tain't gonna be too interesting! But since a lot of you DO know at least some of these folk, well, here it is! (About 5 minutes, need a recent version of QuickTime to play. And it's big -- may need some time to buffer.)

P.S. Right after the conference was over, we celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary by inviting the TEAM gang that was still around for a big BBQ bash - 30 or 40 people. Unfortunately, no one thought to take pics :-(