Helping Everyone to Progress in France

We held our monthly service for members at our training center south-west of Paris. Our two CIG Korean missionaries, Hyang-Shin LEE et Sohyun LEE, gave testimonies about their experience during their first two months in France. They thanked those who have been coming to help them and ask others to join in the weekly program at the witnessing center in Paris. Jean-François Moulinet delivered a sermon on the theme: “Helping Everyone to Progress.” He surprised everyone by beginning to speak about Jesus. He explained how sometimes Jesus said things that were hard to understand, such as (Jn 6): if you don’t eat my body and drink my blood, you can’t go to heaven. Quite an unusual statement and maybe some people drifted away from Jesus after hearing that. If they judged Jesus based on their own limited understanding, they were throwing away the opportunity to serve the messiah while he was on earth. We have no right to judge the person God sends even if we don’t understand what he says or does. He then spoke of the negative emails and negative posts on Facebook and how we have to be careful not to judge True Parents based on our limited understanding. It was an important point that needed to be addressed and Jean-François did it in a very intelligent way without addressing any particular situation or accusation. Jean-François then went on to explain that all big organization have a motto, which sometimes appears on company letterheads or at the bottom of the page. Disney’s motto is ‘Make people happy.’ So Jean-François wanted to make a motto for the French movement using based on True Mother’s words: “Let us do our utmost to realize the hope of our Heavenly Parent and the True Parents of Heaven, Earth and Humankind to make every single person on Earth a CheonIlGuk citizen.” After a lot of work to put it in a form that non-members could relate to he has proposed, “Help every person discover and embody the ideal of true love in his life, his family, his country and the world.” The idea is that members have a short, clear response ready if someone asks, “Well, what do you Unificationists believe?”

He then presented a form that everyone was asked to fill out. It shows as step one, to identify family and friends who are in our Abel and Cain tribes. In the second step we try to get them to participate in any of the numerous activities that our movement organizes while developing a stronger friendship with them. The crucial third step is to either begin teaching them DP or get them to a workshop. At this point they join ‘my spiritual family’ and I need to help and support them in their spiritual education process. In the fourth step they start learning what it is to have a spiritual life and how to care for it; hoon dok hae, prayer, tithing, etc. Then in the fifth step they are prepared to receive the Blessing. In the sixth and last step they become tribal messiah and start trying to guide others through the education process. At the end of the service, we could see for the first time the youngest Third Generation, Gary Vieira, born in New Caledonia. During this service, another service was organized for the elder Third Generation. David Perry