Fresh Blood

Simon Cooper
March 19, 2010

In headquarters we have been planning and experimenting together with our community pastors over the last two weeks to develop a national outreach campaign. Our international president, Hyung Jin Moon, has been making himself visible out on the streets of Seoul witnessing, and also encouraging our world-wide membership to share the good news of True Parents and all that they bring to this world as the returning Christ.

We are doing our best to plan a national campaign to allow for as many of us as possible to get involved. I want to share with you the skeleton timeline that we have come up with:

22nd March -- 11th April:

Printing and mailing leaflets

Promoting and presenting campaign vision to congregation

21 days of spiritual devotion

12th -- 25th April:

2 weeks of focused outreach with 360 leaflets per member

25th April -- 16th May:

3 week message series with a theme for new guests in each local church (Prepare in advance hospitality team in each church to welcome and involve guests in fellowship. Prepare people to teach.)

4th -- 6th June

Weekend Divine Principle workshop (30 new guests/30 new members)

Goal and focus:

Join together in spirit with True Parents and Hyung Jin Nim as they make a new start with the new Cheon Il Guk calendar and the new temple.

Bring spiritual revival to our congregation.

Bring a new culture of celebrating and sharing our faith in True Parents and the spiritual power of the Divine Principle.

Welcome new members to our local church communities.

As Matt Damon says in Green Zone: "Get your game face on - we're going in..."

I have started going out again over the last month to witness in the street and reach out to friends inside our church community and also beyond. What has struck me is how much this work is like a living prayer. As I share what I believe everything comes into focus, and I am guided to understand more deeply what my faith is about. We all need that. It's similar to my experience of starting to take on our Lancaster Gate headquarters church. When our vision and ideas are related to something tangible they come into focus; we can evaluate and start to see more clearly. (Principle of Creation 3.2)

For me what it means to be a member of our Unification Movement is to worship God (every day and with others), tithe, teach the Principle, and bring people to True Parents so that they may experience rebirth. We need to get ourselves some tangible steps in these different areas so that being a church member becomes clearer for our life. As long as it remains vague I am wasting not only God's time, but my own.

The other experience I had is that I need to be a witness as well as do outreach. (It's a divine principle to be and to do.) I need to be a witness to my wife, to my children, members of our community, my wider circle of friends, and to new people I meet. But especially within my family and community it needs to happen everyday. And this is when it gets personal: we are learning how to share God's love and True Parents' love that we have experienced. To be a witness I have to cultivate something to share.

This is why we want to start with 3 weeks of spiritual revival. We are preparing in headquarters tonight by having a reading of all 28 chapters of the Book of Acts from the New Testament. We hope to read that between 9 pm -- midnight. Now if you are already outreaching and feeling like a witness or want to get started straight away then go for it! I know many of you are already doing a lot to reach out, and spiritual revival of course does not exclude outreach. We just felt we need to make conditions together in our community to bring the Holy Spirit into our relationships and personal lives.

There is a lot more to say, and probably lots more questions to answer, but maybe this is enough for now.

Just to conclude: let's make this a successful campaign where we learn from our experience, grow through our mistakes, and celebrate with each other when we bare fruit. I believe we will come out the other side in better spiritual shape, like a body with fresh blood being pumped through it.