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Go and proclaim the good news

(Mk 16:15)

       We are again at that time of the year when many members of our community leave Jakarta to spend the school vacation in their respective home countries. As in previous years, many of our wives and children will be gone from June to August. Thus household prayer meetings are composed mainly of husbands who are left behind.

        My brothers and sisters, as you temporarily go back to your home countries, I urge you to get in touch with Couples for Christ in your parish and attend the weekly prayer meeting and monthly assembly. If you are in Manila, get in touch with Jean (931-8423 and 932-3964). She will help you contact the CFC chapter in your area. She is also planning to organize prayer meetings among the wives vacationing in Manila.

        Couples for Christ is now in twenty-four countries and in almost all provinces in the Philippines. Therefore the chances are good that there is a CFC community in your area. Since we are all part of a body of believers living as a people of God, we should seek our brothers and sisters wherever we go. We should pray with them as a community with one vision and mission and as one people living under the lordship of Christ.

        A few weeks ago our Chapter had its first Leaders’ Workshop on Living as a People of God. All household leaders, unit leaders and family ministry coordinators were in attendance. However, instead of just one person giving all six talks, we divided the talks among the members of the Chapter household and we assigned reactors from among the participants to comment on the talks and share their thoughts on the subject. This modified format was very well received and resulted in lively and fruitful discussions.

        The principal message of the teaching on Living as a People of God is that Couples for Christ is not just a movement, prayer group or service organization, but a Christian community with a corporate life, a system of governance, a covenant, a distinct culture, and a vision and mission. As a people of God, we are given different gifts, talents and abilities. Accordingly, we have different roles and types of services in the community. As a body, order is established through a system of governance that emanates from the concept of authority and submission. As a community, Couples for Christ has a three-pronged vision and mission: rapid, massive and global evangelization, family life renewal, and church renewal.

        Fr. Thomas H. Greene, S.J., in his book Come Down Zacchaeus and in his lecture on Spiritual Exercises in Our Lives, which is available on tape, describes the historical development of various religious communities as they try to live as a people of God.

        During the fourth and fifth centuries many Christians felt that by renouncing the world and living in the isolation of the desert, they could live wholeheartedly as a people of God. Accordingly, there emerged many desert and monastic Christian communities. And they produced many great saints like St. Anthony, St. Pachomius and St. Benedict. After the death of St. Benedict in 547, the Benedictine ideal spread rapidly and many monasteries were founded as more and more Christians were attracted to the order, harmony and gospel simplicity of monastic or contemplative life.

        By the tenth to twelfth centuries the church was faced with the problem of embarking on more and more missions to convert new areas. Thus there developed a growing tension between the contemplative way of life and the need to send missionaries to other lands. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a new type of Christian communities emerged known as the mendicant orders. These were the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Augustinians, and the Carmelites. A Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, and a Franciscan, St. Bonaventure, elaborated the theology of the mendicant life that was to be a blend of the monastic or contemplative life and the active or apostolic life.

        The religious crisis of the sixteenth century, in particular the Protestant movement started by the Augustinian priest Martin Luther, led to the formation of new communities who had different concepts of how to live as a people of God. St. Angela Merici founded the Ursulines; St. Philip Neri, the Oratorians; St. Cajetan, the Theatines; and St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits. St. Ignatius captured the essence of the new fully apostolic Christian communities when he exhorted the Jesuits to find God in all things, to find Christ in the world, to be contemplatives in action.

        The Second Vatican Council brought tremendous changes in the church and provided a new paradigm that gave renewed emphasis to the lay life as a vocation. Vatican II opened the “age of the laity” where lay life was considered a call from God to bring Christ to the very heart of the world, the realm of secular affairs. Fr. Greene called it a move from the “chapel to the marketplace.” Thus post-Vatican II saw the emergence of a large number of Christian communities composed of lay persons bonded together with a common purpose, communities living together as a people of God.

        Couples for Christ is one such post-Vatican II Christian community with a common philosophy, a common mission, a common covenant, a common culture which guide its efforts to live as a people of God. We do not claim that our way of life is better than other Christian communities. We merely say that we have chosen to live in this manner because we believe that this is the way God wants us to. We believe in our vision of “families in the Holy Spirit renewing the face of the earth.” We believe in our mission of rapid, massive and global evangelization because we take seriously Jesus’ command: Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation (Mk 16:15).

        My brothers and sisters, as you go back temporarily to your respective countries, I urge you to not take the attitude of having a “vacation from CFC.” Rather you should consider this as an opportunity to “go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.” As you attend the prayer meeting and share during the monthly assembly, you will be “proclaiming the good news.” So, therefore, go enjoy your vacation! But go, proclaim the good news and vacation with the Lord!

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