The Words of the Navarro Family

Growing Our Venezuelan Church

Jesus Navarro
January 2013


Left: Members performing a skit about how love directed righteously can eliminate social scourges like HIV AIDS. They would later perform this skit for True Parents; Right: A young person takes responsibility for his community by inspiring younger ones.

In 2007, an Anglican priest introduced me to the dean of the engineering faculty in Alejandro de Humboltd University, who offered me a job as a teacher. I began teaching college subjects such as critical thinking, how to study and think effectively, ethics and report writing. The students were very young, having just graduated from high school. They were very pure and just beginning a new life, so I introduced many points of the Divine Principle through my lectures and classes. The students were very interested. Many of them asked questions and invited me out to coffee during breaks. We became friends. After they passed my subjects, we continued the relationship. I began inviting them to Divine Principle lectures in my home, and I started a new ministry with young students. These students brought more young members. I had been teaching Divine Principle in my home and in my backyard, but we could not continue there because there was not enough space.

I began to hold Divine Principle workshops, two or three-day workshops, at a house owned by an ambassador for peace in the countryside. In the beginning, she lent it to us free of charge as long as we took care of it. We held sixty workshops there, forty-eight three-day and twelve seven-day Divine Principle workshops.

We had an educational structure, but our church didn't have the infrastructure to educate people as full-time members. For that reason, I began to send them to workshops in other countries, such as Argentina, which had a set of twenty-one day workshops within a formula course that ran for either one year or two. That was where our full-time member training began.

From the more than twenty young members I'd sent to Argentina for this spiritual education, enough of them came back with a very good, solid education that we could have full-time-member programs now in Venezuela. We had young leaders who could take care of the youngest, and we began to grow.

My approach was somewhat radical. I remember once listening to Hyung Jin Nim talk about proclaiming True Parents as the Messiah and thinking, "How can I do that?"


The purpose of involving Venezuelan college students in service projects is to help them discover for themselves the value of unconditional giving.

And I had the idea, well, let's proclaim that everyone is the messiah, because we are all potential messiahs.

The only way we can develop that potential is through the Messiah, our True Father. So I began to proclaim, "You are the messiah," which became our workshop's approach to the participants. In that way we were demonstrating God's existence. We were demonstrating that the Fall was a sexual issue, but we were also demonstrating that a person has the potential to be a messiah.

People felt so high -- Wow, I want to be a messiah! After this experience, we introduced them, in a seven-day workshop, to True Father as the Messiah. "Now you can be the messiah, because the Messiah is here, and he is teaching all of us to be messiahs." This was our approach to very young people; specifically, teenagers. Teenagers hearing these ideals become very excited; they want to become messiahs, and they work very hard to become messiahs.

In five years (2007-2012) we had seventeen full-time members join in Venezuela, who are very happy. Four of them are now in Argentina. We have twenty blessed central families. We have twenty-three second-generation children. We have twelve young home members, and we have seven elders. We are growing. This may not seem like much to members in other countries, but to us it is a huge result after many years of stagnation in the Venezuelan church.

I feel that two events were significant for the Venezuelan providence. In February 2010, we went to Korea to perform at a cultural festival for True Parents. We presented a play aimed at helping prevent spread of the HIV virus (AIDS), drug abuse and teenage pregnancy. Only true, pure, responsible love can overcome all these situations. We presented this in English to True Parents, who seemed very happy. This was the first time Venezuelans reached the point of being close to True Parents and making them happy.

This-year, after performing in front of True Parents a dance of the saints -- involving Buddha, Confucius, Jesus and Mohammed dancing in celebration of True Parents' victory -- fourteen members remained in Korea for six months. Because for the past few years we have had to pay a fee to use the ambassador's house, they raised funds to purchase a country side workshop site.


The purpose of involving Venezuelan college students in service projects is to instill in them the expectation that they can become incorruptible.

It was such hard work and the result they were expecting was slow to materialize. Father heard about our team and he was so excited about it that he decided to give a large grant to the Venezuelan members. They reached their goal thanks to True Parents.

Our members came back to Venezuela, and we are now re-inaugurating our CARP activities. Many of them are university students.. We have nine CARP student members working at four universities in Caracas. We call our version of CARP "An Incorruptible Venezuela is Possible." We want to reach out to young people at universities and in high schools and tell them that if everybody becomes incorruptible, we are going to change our country; we're going to change society, and we're going to change the world.

People were so interested in the word "incorruptible" which we feel somehow unites heaven and earth. It's a very earthy word. It corresponds to the first blessing. No more personal sin, plus maturity of character, it signifies a responsible person who lives for the sake of others, freely and happily. Incorruptible people will form happy families and societies.

Both corruption and incorruptibility are results of our decisions. Through appropriate values education, we learn and teach decision-making based on goodness, upon which we can build an incorruptible life. Training for incorruptibility requires introspection and practice. Character development involves disciplining one's desires and emotions so as to incorporate universal values into everyday life.

We decided to work with young people, and they are having great results. Right now, the most important activity we are developing is debates in the universities. These debates are held between college students. We call this program Incorruptible Values, Image and Power. The idea is to focus on three types of-power that we need to master in order to avoid being corrupted -- the power of sex, the power to dominate or hurt others and the power of money. The program has proven very attractive to young people. It serves as an approach to the discussion of the incorruptible individual, family and society as well as incorruptible leadership.

Every week, also, in two or three universities, we have what we-call "a conversation." We pick an important figure in history -- it might be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Helen Keller -- and we talk about their values, why they were so great. Afterward, we hold an-open discussion. We guide the conversation toward the topic of becoming incorruptible. We give participants some ideas to reflect on -and the following week they return with that reflection, and we continue those conversations.


Harnessing the physical energy, the desire for intellectual expansion and the idealism of young Venezuelans was made possible through the inspirational message that each one is a potential messiah.

For instance, we might say to them, "Listen, evil doesn't exist. Evil is just a human creation. We decided to create evil. If we decide not to create evil, evil won't exist."

Statements of this type make people think a lot.

We continue, "To avoid evil all that is needed is a decision, but it also involves hard work because we have to first define what goodness is. Then, we have to incorporate, that is, incarnate, that goodness. That means we have to deal with our desires and our emotions. So please come to our workshops, and we will continue working."

We are now dealing with these kinds of topics at universities. We combine them with social service projects that we hold every Saturday. Many volunteers come. Our goal is to enable young people to discover the joy of giving love without expecting compensation in return. The focus is on benefitting others, especially the needy and disadvantaged. We indirectly enrich ourselves spiritually, emotionally and ethically. We also develop a healthy sense of belonging (of ownership) and feeling for our own country and our people, whom we want to protect. We learn to educate by example. This helps create a dynamic energy among young people.

We are encouraging these members to become our young leaders. They are great. With our CARP programs, I believe we will soon see incorruptible people in Venezuela that will provide the best leadership in any political, economic or legal system. 

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