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Our Holy Name Interfaith Missionary Alliance is not organized in the formal business or political sense. Other than the Council Organizer or task Force Director, there are to be no governing officers, no unnecessary rules or regulations, no fees or dues, nothing that will create a governmental or business-like structure or profit-and power dynamic, which may destroy the organic evolution of a healthy COMMUNITY in the fellowship.
The need for certain service to the faith community is self-evident, and it is assumed that council members are already committed to, and active in community service according to their inspiration, gifts, capacity and means. Thus persons will spontaneously perform those services to the community, which they are gifted for and called –to by God.
With love, a service attitude and the mutual respect that bears fruit in trust, it is to create social order without the problem and pathologies of dominance and submission, or profit –motive exploitation. With an all volunteer structure and no profit involved, we should be free of governmental and other unwanted agency involvements, oversights or constraints.We are an interfaith spiritual fellowship of service.
We are not in competition with any government, agency or religious institution. We are religious persons, but we are not a religion, a new religion or a sect, lineage or denomination. We are children of God seeking fellowship with each other as mutually respecting equals in the mood of friendship. Our goal is to become friends with those who desire to serve God. Our membership and alliance is based on certain common essentials of faith and any morality, and it is formed in mutual respect and love.
“For where two or more are gathered
In My name, there I am in the midst of them.”
These are the words of Jesus Christ in the 20th Verse, of Chapter 18 of the book of Matthew in the New Testament of the Bible.
An alliance assumes some common interest, value or goal. What is our common non-negotiable, irreducible FAITH? What is our common moral ideal? These fundamentals of our common faith and morality are the foundation of alliance.
God will be at the center of everything. God’s Self Revelation through Name-form, God’s divine light and Shekinah/ Shakti, God’s love, mercy, grace, beauty goodness, God’s saints, sacraments, holy scriptures, God’s scared benevolent social order… God must be at the affective devoted heart of everything we are and do.
Sacred community begins with two or more gathered in the Holy Name of the One True GOD-WHO-IS-LOVE, the Transcendent, Incarnating and Immanent Supreme Personality of Godhead. He has hundreds and millions of Holy Names, and there are not even any hard-and-fast rules for invoking the Lord by them in this age! Because of our great sinfulness in the age, God has shown us His even greater mercy, making Himself and His Grace easily available to us in His Holy Names!
WHAT OUR INTER-FAITH EFFORTS MUST NOT BECOME
Humanity doesn’t need one more modality for impersonalism and voidism to destroy its theistic civilizations. The great devotional traditions need a grass-roots medium in which to develop better relations at the local community level. Regionally and globally many inter religious organizations are dominated by non theistic and even atheistic groups. Thus, in spite of having good intentions and large memberships, these inter religious organizations have been rendered spiritually impotent, because they have attempted to embrace everything calling itself a religion or ‘spiritual’ .Having admitted the non theistic and atheistic traditions has hopelessly compromised the hoped-for effectiveness of these inter religious organizations. Devotional theism and atheism masquerading as ‘spirituality’ are fundamentally irreconcilable. Thus it is disastrous for devotees of God to involve themselves themselves with atheists, whose entire agenda (hidden or not) is bent on destroying their faith.
We must always remember that purity is potency, Without God in the origin, in the middle, and at the conclusion of everything, our individual and collective effort in this mission will just amount to another ego-centric self-promoting botheration in the world
It is always the same general cadre of both overt and ‘esoteric’ impersonalists and voidists who carry out this campaign to discredit the theistic devotional traditions. They use the forums that interfaith assemblies provide to undermine the credulity and authority of the bhakti or theistic devotional traditions. Thus they hijack and abuse inter-religious organizations, conferences or assemblies to actually subvert authentic faith traditions and related traditional values. Because of this, the abused inter religious organization etc. have a reduced potency to improve the spiritual and related social-communitarian condition of humanity.
So it is imperative that our alliance not be taken-over by these impersonalists and voidists posing as ‘religious’ of ‘spiritual’ persons. Since purity is potency, it is better to have two humble faithful persons united in the Name of God, than to have a thousand mundanely powerful persons promoting their own atheistic self-interests. Ours’ must be an inter FAITH alliance!
Thus our councils and task force should grow naturally and and organically, as real friendship and communities of faith and loyalty grow. Our idea is never to merge-everyone into some artificial, homogenized featureless mass of impersonal humanity! Rather we are interested to promote a transcendent unity that can truly embrace our spiritually perfected diversity as persons and people.
If we do this successfully, we will see the spontaneous emergence to divinely ordained social order. People will find their natural organic religio-social niche. At present there is almost no natural healthy social order, because communities have been destroyed and there is no freedom for people to develop their gift naturally and appropriately.
The industrial revolution and destruction of home-based arts and crafts small community businesses, family farming, etc. and destruction of the village, small town or parish way of life has totally de-natured, impoverished and disabled humanity. Sexual immorality, drug abuse, gambling and a violent life-style have destroyed the family. To rebuild these basic elements of a healthy society, we need to rebuild people’s faith in God, and God-centered families and neighborhoods, parishes, villages, etc
We need spiritual renewal from the individual soul and couple through the community level. Communities are the building blocks of civilizations. Communities are both concrete or incarnate as physically locally landed, for instance in parish, neighborhood or ashram, or they may also be made up of per persons with no specific physical environment shared. For example, members of religious orders, professional associations or family members who live a distance, may still have a real community. There are many similarly dis –embodied communities in cyberspace now. We need to develop both kinds of communities, the physical local and the non physical remote kind.
We must try to foster each others independent and autonomous viability as much as possible. This is consistent with the goal of community self-sufficiency. A diversified, natural local human-need-centered economy with community-based education and employment, diversified free-enterprise cottage industries and local food production, etc. should be part of our community development strategy. Consistent with this vision is the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the community interfaith council(s). Empowering individuals and peoples requires giving them both freedom and local control . Our job is to help persons and communities to ‘realize’ their own inherent God-gifted greatnesss, and to be able to share that greatness with the rest of humanity in a God –centered devotional fellowship of mutual appreciation.
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