Had a long but good community leaders meeting today. Gave a little power point on time management too, which felt good. But By 5pm I was really wiped out. Cancelled one evening meeting, but still had our regular Wednesday prayer evening at 7.30pm. Watched some TV to unwind, since we have a big screen now in our reception area. It never really works for me, TV, when I need to de stress.

Went up to our main hall to prepare the chairs etc at around 6.50pm and light the prayer candle.

some times we need others to shed light on our state of mind

Still feeling a bit fried. wondering if anyone was going to come, feeling a bit shaky, I knew there were some people in the building, but hey maybe they’re not up for it tonight…you can guess where my mind and heart were going. Was doing a reasonable job of coming to terms with what I had decided was a solitary evening. (God’s telling me: “leave that for me to decide”, not that I was listening.)

Especially by 7.30pm on my watch, I am thinking ‘yep I’m on my own’. I am half German – everything should start as the second hand strikes 12.

Decided to go down and see if everyone had opted to watch the football instead and thought I might invite people up. But as I was going down, people were on their way up – the guys who were in LG to practice for Live Lounge, Masa from our HQ congregation, and Aska from Bromley who had been helping in the UPF office.

That prayer evening tonight was seriously the best part of my day. I felt that we could not know how precious it was for God that we came together to pray. We sang a few songs, I asked everyone for their thoughts on some notes I took from Hyung Jin Moon’s talk. And then I asked Aska to pray – she shared the most exquisite prayer that just gave me the chance to wash my face clean. Then we prayed altogether for a while.

giving thanks

I was so grateful to those young people for just being there and giving me the chance to pray with them. I had been pretty wound up and strung out from an intense day, and had got into my ‘no one wants to pray thought-train’, but they just came because they wanted to and through that example lifted me up and out of my fear. Thanks guys.

Captain Michael Dick and the team

After 3 years of entry our team finally won the Interfaith Diversity Cup here in Scotland which is played amongst a diverse group of religious and charity groups. Today 16 teams took part in this annual 5 aside football indoor tournament played in Edinburgh.

Stephan Williamson (currently in Germany on work experience)organized a team of his university friends who came together in a good display of team unity.

We won the final against a Glasgow side,who were the winners last year,on a penalty shoot out after the final match drew at 2 -2

We not only won the cup, but Murray Scott, our goal keeper won also the man of the match trophy!

Once again I would like to thank the players: Michael Dick Captain, James Steel, Ross Baird, Scott Fusco, Murray Scott, Calum Wright, Murray Scott and also our photographer and kit manager Eric Williamson.

Last Sunday in our Lancaster Gate community church we looked at our personal finances and how we manage them. The more we recognise that God does not want us to divorce all our possessions (our stuff) and money from our relationship with Him, the more we will be able to bond. Our faith will become more ‘tangible’.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
(Matthew 6:21)

This is a huge principle. This is not an indictment, or a judgement. This is just a self evident truth. When people invest their money into something a bit of their heart goes to that thing. It commands their attention. Where we send our money our attention follows.

When people buy shares in a company. Even they don’t know so much about all the internal workings of the business, their eyes go to the little abbreviation which symbolises the company in the financial pages.

(the sound is fine on the video…BUT at the start of the message the radio mic is on mute for a few minutes… sound starts again at 9mins 16secs in.)

God is not interested in getting our money, but he is interested in capturing our hearts and our hearts are connected to our personal finances. I think we sometimes some of us try to pretend otherwise out of a false belief that money is ‘not of God.’

—Tithing is a spiritual law given by God to humankind to assist people in finding abundance, fulfillment, and gratitude in their everyday lives.

The law of tithing is to give 10 percent of one’s increase back to God, with God represented on the physical level by the source of one’s spiritual teachings — often a church, synagogue, mosque, or a spiritual teacher.

—When a person tithes, the universe that works under the spiritual law of tithing says, “If you have that much to give, that means you are open to receive more.”

—To be rich towards God is to give ‘our extra’ what we don’t need to those who are in need. — —Use your stuff as a tool to allow you to join in achieving a vision that is greater than your own comfort. The decision on how much EXTRA we have is always going to be down to us, and our conscience. When you see someone with just the shirt on their back and their hand stretched out in need, something tells you that you’ve got some blessings to share.

You have a little time, a little window of opportunity while you are here, so…

Turn your temporary worldly wealth into eternal wealth.

One of our assistant pastors, Steven Huish gave the message today. I kept wondering where his notes were. He just stood there, no podium, notes: “how does he do that?”

Definitely going to ask for some body language tips. He completely didn’t need the podium, when I tend to hang onto it for dear life. Reamonn introduced the wireless mike today so next time I think I will try that out.

A lot of good content, and as always when it is drawn from personal experience it rings true. He was sincere, honest, and direct.

His core message: to become spiritually rounded we need to relate to God and people in the right way, and make a daily foundation to experience the grace that comes from our saviour.

A few elders came up to me after the service and shared how they found it really helped them. One sister said “I was going to take 360 outreach cards, but after Steven’s message I think I will just take 50 and see how I go.” Another said he felt like he has done a lot of work on learning the theory but felt moved to work on his practice. I asked one of the teens and they said they were shocked and surprised at how short it was. I asked them what kind of surprised? They said: “Pleasantly surprised.”

Great lunch by Naomi and her team. And thank you to all who come and serve on a Sunday.

Beautiful song by Kathleen before the message

"I am your angel" by Kathleen Moloney

In HQ 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.

figuring out the message

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 HQ 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 HQ tonight by having a reading of all 28 chapters of the Book of Acts from the New Testament. We hope to read that between 9pm – 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.

I get to work with the coolest, most sincere, clever, generous, committed, honest, sometimes v organised, insightful, humble, passionate, deep, beautiful, hard working, loving, spiritual, skilful  people IN THE WORLD. And sometimes when my head is screwed on properly and my heart is hooked up I even get to work with God too. And I just want to say: thank you God for blessing and trusting me in this way and letting me work with and learn from all these amazing people. And I know that saying this here is not going to jinx me, cuz you are a generous, patient and loving God who only wishes the best for us.

After seeing how so many people, both staff and volunteers put things into place for our Sunday Worship, I just felt  the power that people who share a common vision have. And then through talking to a few different people on the phone this morning and going with one of our HQ staff for breakfast at Pret for a coffee, Proper Pret porridge (that’s a tongue twister…), a work review and an appraisal, I tasted what we can do, when we share our passion, and see each other’s potential.

proper porridge

Actually I want to say thank you to Colin Turfus who as one of our new trustees was sharing about how in his work he conducts work appraisals, and how unless you schedule them in they don’t happen… and gave me the feeling I should really start doing that more often. I guess this is what it feels like when based on faith we have the right give and take dynamic in our lives; it’s just a divine principle.

I am on the flight back to London from Seoul and taking a bit of time to distil the last 4 or 5 days. It is essential for me to do this, in the context of sharing my thoughts with you, because I went on behalf of and to represent our UK church community. To post my conclusions here is important for me because I want to allow us to have a shared experience that articulates the vision for our church community over the next three years.

on the outside of the ground floor shrine for the 4 great saints

The world mission department staff did a great job taking care of all the national leaders. But when they asked for feedback on what to improve we gave them several suggestions. There was a severe case of information overload and by the end they also realised this. As a result of the multiple power points and case studies there was way too much talking at or to us rather than with us; generally there was a need to develop a more effective process of communication.

That was the toughest part for me to cope with and I regret that I was not more constructive in getting over those frustrations in the heat of the moment.

Aside from that I could salvage some interesting information which I will compile and send out over the next week or two.

Now here is what really made it all click into place:

morning devotion in the temple prayer room on Ahn Shi Il

We concluded our assembly this morning by attending the first Ahn Shil Il in the new ‘mega’ Unification Church temple. Hyung Jin and Yeon Ah Moon were there and he gave an almost one hour long message that washed away most of the frustrations from the previous days.

He spoke with a powerful honesty. Through charting for us his personal journey he cast a clear vision for the Unification Church.

He outlined the Unification Movement’s main problem: Insufficient faith in True Parents as the Lord of the Second Advent; a lack of personal daily awareness of how True Parents have saved our lives by dying for us again and again. He pointed to the fact that many members are not able to be openly proud of these truths as evidence of our need for deeper more personal faith. He pointed to the book of Acts as an example of the type of faith we should aspire to. He referred to himself as an apostle.

He outlined the solution to the problem with two elements: For each of us to get into a life of devotion which allows us to first see True Parents with our spiritual eyes, and secondly gives us the heart and conviction to bring people to accept True Parents as their saviour and lord.

But why us, and why now?

Father is 90 years old and is doing his very best to stick around and give us a chance to help him secure the future. It is us because True Parents have blessed us and given their lives for us more than for anyone else. In that way we are the bridge for True Parents to the world. If it is not us now, then who is it and when?

Pastor Hyung Jin Moon says thank you as he leaves

It is clear that pastor Hyung Jin Nim will keep on repeating this vision until is sticks. But what we must do is unpack it and bring it into a practical set of action steps for our community. We have to flesh it out so that we have a workable strategy and process which will empower each family member and give all of us the opportunity to fulfil the vision: Establishing True Parents as the Way, the Truth, and the Life for building the Kingdom.

I know we all have different approaches and styles of doing what we have got to get done. That is inevitable and fine. Nevertheless we need a recognisable rallying point for all of our efforts. The Sunday before I went to Korea I spoke about our HQ church’s main purpose. We need to focus on teaching the Divine Principle and bringing people to True Parents. We will do many things, but our clear and transparent objective and purpose should be to successfully do these two things.

Again this needs to be unpacked and articulated in more detail. But let us keep our eye on these two purposes and patiently, step by step, answer all the other questions that will spring up as we go along.

I had my video camera ready because I felt in that precious moment all of you needed to be there too!  Here is part 1 of Hyun Jin Nim’s talk at Ahn Shi Il:

On the bus to Incheon airport after leaving the temple this morning I realised we have to thank the Japanese church members for Hyung Jin Nim. It is because of his experience with their faith in True Parents that he is able to provide authentic spiritual leadership. That is why sincere, genuine, personal, mature faith counts. We need those adjectives to qualify the noun, but let us nevertheless remember that faith counts and trumps personality, local culture, and any other relative human factors.

UNfortunately my video camera battery died. But God bless my iPhone, just it doesn’t have a zoom yet. Here is part 2 and 3 of Hyung Jin Nim’s very personal morning message, u might need to turn up the volume or use some headphones for volume:

On Saturday, I joined a few brothers and sisters witnessing in Croydon.  I really enjoy sharing my faith with people, especially as openly as I do when I approach people on a high street:

“Hello, my name’s Matthew.  I’m a member of the Unification Church.  Can I ask: Why do you think God created us?”

This question separates the atheists from the theists.  But for some reason, the atheists always seem like the nicest people, with whom I would pursue the deepest conversation.  I guess they’ve already done a lot of thinking, which at this stage has resulted in them losing faith in God, but perhaps they’ve at least grappled with the important questions of life.

Croydon high street is incredible on Saturdays.  It’s like a religion market, where you can take your pick from the Hare Krishnas, several denominations of Christianity, the Communist Party and, of course, the Unificationists, all of whom are vying for your attention.  I loved it!  We’re all passionate about God (well, all of us except the communists, who didn’t stay for very long!) and we want to testify to God, as witnesses of His/Her love.  I happily received a flyer from one church group, promoting a free concert.  Some MCs were rapping with a PA system (I’m assuming they were from the same church) and I actually enjoyed their marriage of message and music:

“Are you born again?
” – what?
“Are you born again?
” – what?
“Are you born again?!
” – yeh!”

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON, more popularly known as the Hare Krishnas) were singing and dancing.  There were many young people witnessing for all these religious groups, and some of the ISKCON members were especially young, which gave me confidence that the HARP witnessing day we’re organising for Saturday 27th February will go swimingly.  Do any of you remember the good old days, when Aunty Mary Franklin organised HARP witnessing days at the end of every month?  Well, very much inspired by her example, we’re going to resurrect that activity, so if you’d like to come along to 43 Lancaster Gate at 10am this Saturday, you’re very welcome to join in!

On the topic of sharing my faith, I read something today which annoyed me.  The CanadaEast.com’s news article about True Father’s 90th birthday, cited recently on the family fireplace,  reported that True Father “has proclaimed himself a messiah sent to complete Jesus Christ’s work on Earth.”  Why am I upset?  I’m not upset with the news agency, as they’re being entirely accurate.  No, my beef is with the fact that True Father is forced to declare himself as the Messiah.  Why should he have to do it?  It’s because not enough prominent people are doing it on his behalf.  All the news agencies should be reporting that WE are declaring True Father to be the Messiah.  And not just “a messiah” among many, but THE Messiah, the one chosen by Heavenly Father and Jesus himself to complete the Messianic mission.  We should become prominent in society and be so reputable that Father doesn’t need to declare himself Messiah, since we’ll already do it for him:

“In 2010, Matthew Huish declared Sun Myung Moon to be the Messiah, sent to complete Jesus Christ’s work on Earth”

If you like the look of that sentence, copy and paste it into a response replacing my name with your name there instead!

This is a great conference going on live in California, Orange County at the Saddleback CHurch, and you can watch it for free at the following link:

http://www.saddleback.com/webcast/radicalis/

It’s a great message. CHECK IT OUT. they even have an iphone app so you can watch it on the move. How techy is that?

An anonymous testimony:

There are a lot of different factors that together help to provide us with a rich and uplifting life of faith. This testimony from a recent university graduate helps to show how keeping an open heart and mind allows God to be a part of defining our direction in life:

Cheong Pyeong Heaven and Earth training centre: Sept 19 – Oct 28

“During my last year at University I decided to take 6 months off upon graduating, to travel amongst other things, but also to have the oppurtunity to take a breather from the career orientated, rat race inclined London life. Fortunately my employers are accomodating and deffered my starting date. My travels included a 3 months stint in Korea which was subdivided into catching up with my parents who live there and 40 days in Cheong Pyeong (CP), both invaluable. When Simon asked me to write a testimony about the latter, I happily agreed but as I sit here looking back on my experience I realize how awkward it is to summarize 40 days worth of diverse experiences and personal realizations as well as recount them publicly. Nevertheless, since I had a very positive eye-opening experience, if I can in any way inspire or help better prepare for a trip to CP, I’ll happily share a little bit.

a place to find peace

Just like any regular western person I’m not a huge fan of something that would appear to be syncronised slappings of oneself in addition to a daily schedule nowhere near our real lifestyle. Not for nothing my previous experiences at CP have all been epic failures. Nevertheless I think I was lucky to have those previous experiences as it emphasized the importance of prepation. Making it my own decision to go made a huge difference and it allowed it have an open mind and having previously been allowed me to manage my expectations and set goals which were realistic to me.

finding a vantage point: tree of blessing

As a result, instead of it being a hellish process of self-denial, a simple adjustment of mindset to viewing everything in CP as an aid to achieving my goals made it an enjoyable experience in which I wanted to invest, which was probably the foundation of my whole experience there. I could see all the challenges as specially prepared for me in order to have certain realisations.

If there’s one thing I could take away from Cheong Pyeong, I definitely say that it is the realisation that no matter which direction your live takes and what kind of decisions you make, God is always there trying to be a part of your life no matter how distant we sometimes choose to be. The moment you allow a little space you feel completely filled up instantly and I felt like I discovered an unlimited source of Love. I guess one big part of my experience was (physical) Daemoonim. I have never met a more genuinely caring person and her ongoing concern for the well-being of our members completely softened all of my scepticism. There are these moments in life where everything is just crystal clear, where everything makes complete sense and I don’t think I will ever forget the moment I experienced that once again in CP. This whole experience reminded me of the importance of our environment and how much it influences our lives.

As aforementioned, I can’t possibly put much of my experience in words. What I’d say though, and conclude with, is that because we place such importance on the Spirit World within our movement, Cheong Pyeong can be immeasurably useful in clarifying as well as solidifying something without which little of what we believe in makes sense. Although I paint a pretty picture, distancing oneself for 40 days from the life you’re accustomed to is always going to be challenging.. but no where near as challenging as not having a clear grasp of what you believe in. I know I’ll remember everyone I met there for a long time to come as they all significantly contributed to my experience.
One last thing.. if you’re considering going to Cheong Pyeong and can avoid the summer rush, I’d strongly recommended it. I felt that the peace and tranquility of the environment was preserved in the absence of thousands of people and that was essential to my experience.”