BACKGROUND

CFC’s mission ad gentes was inaugurated at the First CFC Southeast Asian Regional Conference held from 6 to 8 December 2002 at the Baan Phu Waan Pastoral Training Center, Samphran, Nakhon Pathom province, about an hour’s drive from Bangkok. A total of 360 participants attended from eleven countries, including the nine Southeast Asian countries of Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, as well as Australia and Hong Kong. The First Regional Conference adopted the Bangkok Resolution on Couples for Christ’s Mission ad gentes, which affirmed God’s call to CFC for mission ad gentes and urged the community to pray and prepare for this mission.

Two years later at Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the First CFC CMTV ( Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam) Regional Conference held from 12 to 14 November 2004, adopted the Phnom Penh Framework Plan of Action on Couples for Christ’s Mission Ad Gentes. The Plan recognized that mission ad gentes can prosper only if we remain open to dialogue – dialogue with religions, dialogue with culture and dialogue with the poor. In this regard, our Lord Jesus Christ is our model. The openness of Jesus to accept people of other faiths without reservation is evident in the account of the healing of the centurion’s slave as related in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

In our dialogue with other religions, we must also be guided by what Pope John Paul II said in his 1990 letter to the Asian bishops: “Although the Church gladly acknowledges whatever is true and holy in the religious traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam as a reflection of that truth which enlightens all men, this does not lessen her duty and resolve to proclaim without fail Jesus Christ who is ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’… The fact that the followers of other religions can receive God’s grace and be saved by Christ apart from the ordinary means which he has established does not thereby cancel the call to faith and baptism which God wills for all people.”

The GMA Conference will draw experiences from five CFC communities (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Viet Nam), as well as from other countries that are predominantly non-Christian, in sharing Christ to our non-Christian brothers and sisters as basis for producing a Medium Term Plan of Action (2007-2011) on mission ad gentes.

Agenda