The Words of the Cooper Family
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The Words of the Cooper Family |
I hope you enjoy the latest FFP newsletter. I want to briefly mention about some of the projects I am working on with others: we are currently looking at making an audio book of Father's auto biography, relaunching the old 'One World' magazine, under the Rising Tide title, and seeing how a 17 seater mini bus our 43LG community just bought can serve the wider community.
What ever I do at the moment I am thinking how can it facilitate and provide tools for all of us to serve in our neighborhoods as tribal messiahs and develop home church projects. I just moved house and went into the council office to fill out some forms. I asked the man behind the desk how we register for recycling etc. and he was trying to tell me when the bin vans come round. Unfortunately the systems crashed, but he still kept trying, God bless him. Then it dawned on me… "don't worry, I'll ask one of my new neighbors, I am sure they will know."
He looked at me like I had discovered a new technology. See, they do an amazing job in Ealing Council, one of the biggest in England. They take care of so many people. But, you sit in their reception for 10 minutes and you start to get very sleepy. It's not just the central heating, it's the fact that we all go there to be taken care of. That's the danger of big centralized organizations.
Chieko and I crossed the road to meet the lovely elderly couple living opposite our new home, they invited us in, their lunch sandwiches ready on the table, the husband just coming in from a morning's work in the garden. And they quickly went up stairs to get us a neighborhood association welcome pack. I'll blog about that again another time but, basically everything and anything you might need to know from the local reps. when the garden parties are, when the meetings are and an invitation to come along, residents issues, constitution, etc. It was the first time I had experienced something like this and it made us feel like we were being invited into a family.
No one telling them how to do it, just the raw initiative of people who care for their community and want to make a difference. That's what we want to do, no? Anyhow, they told us when the bin vans come round.
Recently we have been looking at how we get our 43LG congregation to connect what happens in worship on a Sunday to what we do the other 6 days of the week. To live one life. We made a community graffiti wall which we scribble on when we arrive on a Sunday morning. The graffiti wall has gone well. We are starting on our second 'wall' next week.
At Sunday worship we continue to study the Bible and True Parents' words about 'home church'. The home church message is basically describing the course we walk to become tribal messiahs -- how to build a piece of heaven in the circumstances and environment where we live.
For a long time the phrase 'tribal messiah' has for me been a theological theory, a daunting expectation, rather than what it really is -- an amazing and life giving vision.
I had a little bolt of 'realization' lightening yesterday when I was catching up with some missed morning study with Chieko and our ill 2nd son. It hit me what an amazing idea Father had, and how maybe he was thinking when he came up with it.
He knows that he will not save the world, one person will never do that, he knows that the whole purpose of God sending someone is to not solve people's problems for them, but to provide a model, and make the foundation for it to be reproduced. And in that moment I could feel, that just as Jesus spoke to a bunch of people who certainly were not feeling like a light to the world and the salt of the earth, that Rev Moon has a great hope for what we can do when his vision registers in our heart and mind.
Anyhow this was what I was reading when the door opened in my mind just that little bit more: www.tparents.org/Moon-Books/SunMyungMoon-CSG/CSG-13-04-03.htm
Don't take it on one reading, but give it time I have read passages like this before, but like all scripture, sometimes it doesn't grab you and then… one day it does.
Keep reading and studying everyone, unpacking what on earth God is on about, and keep figuring out how to put it into practice when it dawns on you. Our UK church organization, will never change this nation ….but when that vision God has gets inside our hearts, WE can, just like our elderly neighbors across the road.