Hello everyone! After so many months of training, the CIG missionaries of 2020 - 2021 have finally begun our mission in earnest! For the first time in CIGYM history, our mission is taking place here in the United States!
This year our team has the special opportunity to work with a new program, Heavenly USA (HUSA). It is a fast paced and energetic missionary group working here in America. Its focus is to bring unity between all Christian denominations and inspire American youth through God’s love! Despite the pandemonium of trying to launch a mission in the middle of a pandemic, we strongly felt that God needed us to impact America.
CIGYM and Heavenly USA Missionaries meet in Atlanta to join forces for the first time!
Without further adieu, let's hear about the first few weeks of our mission! We arrived in Atlanta, Georgia on Saturday, April 10th. There we received a very the warm welcome by the HUSA missionaries. In Atlanta, we adjusted to our new mission and dived deeply into the spirit of Christianity. We attended several Sunday Services, Bible studies, created a prayer trail, and even had the most patriotic missionary on our team, Jerry Olson, give Sunday School there!
On April 17th, our team split into two! One group stayed in Georgia and continued supporting HUSA's activities there. The other group went to Washington, DC and attended a large event held by the American Clergy Leadership Conference called the Pastor's Summit, which was held from April 18th - 20th. It was an incredible event where pastors from all over America’s Southeast learned about the Blessing; A marriage dedication/rededication ceremony. In it, couples recommit to giving selflessly to each other and to God. We were so grateful to receive guidance from incredible men of God as we listened to the lectures and joined in the discussions. Our team danced, cooked, cleaned, and served all the pastors during the event! We even committed to a purity pledge at the end of the event, giving hope to our elders that there were youth that genuinely wanted to strive for purity. Here is a short testimony by our team’s leader, Masami Kageyama, summing-up our experiences:
“As a Cheon Il Guk Missionary supporting Heavenly USA, I feel that we have a very special privilege and mission to support ACLC activities. Whether we are dancing or singing, helping on stage or in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as I can be here and support the revival and unification of the Christian body as one movement under our Heavenly Father, I will gladly march forward with a hopeful and expectant heart to see God’s Kingdom!”
After attending the pastor’s summit, both the Atlanta and Washington, DC groups both traveled to New York and New Jersey. Where we supported the Blessing Beyond Borders event on May 1st. It was another program about rededicating marriages to God. We reached the 100 person maximum for the event on the live Zoom call, and had more watching on Facebook and Youtube! Some our team handled the tech for the event, and the others were inspired to start a prayer chain for the event’s success! We felt a lot of pressure, because of how the large event was, but we felt an incredible sense of accomplishment when the event ended. We are very excited for future events by Blessing Beyond Borders, and we are excited to see how it will expand in the future! Here is a reflection from one of the Heavenly USA Missionaries on it:
“Just thinking about the Blessing Beyond Borders Event, I get excited. Though it was stressful for me as a ‘backstage worker’, I feel exhilaration knowing that I was part of a historical event. That’s what motivated me to do my absolute best in the moment.”
The most recent week of our mission was spent promoting a very exciting event, the Peace Starts With Me - Peace & Blessing event on June 5th. Peace Starts With Me is an incredible peace movement, that you can check out here! peacestartswithme.com This time they are sharing about how Blessing is changing lives, families, and the world through rededicating people’s relationships to God. To help promote it, we called over 450 churches in Brooklyn and New Jersey! Sometimes, it could get quite tiring. For example, one day a Heavenly USA Missionary, Michael Victor, had 10 voicemails or out of service numbers in a row! However, beyond the exhaustion, we felt God working through the incredible connections we made through the churches we visited at the end of the week.
This Mother’s day, we visited 10 churches, some of them we met through the calls we made, others we met through the American Clergy Leadership Conference! The pastors and congregation were excited to see us bring our youthful spirits and also our gifts for Mother’s Day! In the churches some of us danced, some of us sang, and one of our team members, Terushi Nakaza even spoke in front of the youth at Chaber Evangelical Baptist Church! The pastor, Lemmew Samuel, was so touched by Terushi’s sincere prayer that he shed tears after hearing it! Each of us had a spirit filled experience as we could see the pastors’ and congregations’ sincere love for Jesus.
Thank you for reading everyone! This has been an incredible and jam-packed mission so far, and we are excited to share more of the experiences God is going to give us in the future! God bless you, and you’ll hear from us soon!