The Words of the Acevedo Family |
HDFC Success of the 12 City Tour One family Under God - Hispanic Home Community Center in Chicago
John and Marina Acevedo
November 15, 2007
When we learned about the 12 City Tour, One Family Under God, We invited our 12 group leaders for a special dinner in our house. We told them about the event and how important this event would be for us and our future generations. Our 12 group leaders are all non-Unification church members, but they love and respect our True Parents through the love and education we are providing to them. That we learned from Bishop Ki hoon Kim.
We told them that the event would be Wednesday in downtown Chicago at 6:30 pm; everybody was shocked because most of them are living in the Northwest and South west suburbs. During rush hour it takes 2 hours to reach downtown. So we motivated them by saying that our church would provide buses if they had 25 guests or more.
Out of 12, only 6 confirmed that they would come and we set a goal to bring 50 people each. They asked how to do that. We encouraged them to write 50 names and pray for them for 21 days and then invite these people and give us their names for us to pray for them too, and trust the spirit world. We talked to them as if they were church members. We also set our personal goal of 200 because we know from our experience that not everyone we invite comes.
Since our group leaders are working, we supervised them. To meet our challenges to bring new guests, the first thing we did was to check the community calendar and see what kind of workshops were going on and which one could bring quality people.
Then every day we visited our old contacts and during weekends held normal HDFC meetings. It was also during this period that we introduced a workshop on building a successful marriages and a "real deal" workshop for the adolescents. We held workshops for married couples on Fridays and Free Teens USA "real deal" workshops for the youth on Saturdays.
Two days before the event we had 125 confirmations. The day of the event we were given 2 buses by our church but we got a total of 87 guests only. Forty were new and the rest were old contacts. We were not so happy.
We worked day and night to bring results but we only got 87? The Chicago event was very successful because of our regional leader and the unity of the blessed central families, but for us we feel we could have done more because the Hispanic community constitutes 30% of the Chicago population.
"What went wrong", we asked ourselves. Instead of lamenting, after the event we called each leader and all our guests and thanked them for coming. That Friday we prepared a victory party dinner for the adults, and Saturday we met the youth. The most amazing part is that they expressed their admiration of True Mother and Hyun Jin Nim.
There the harvest came. All of the leaders who came to the event shared how happy they were to be able to be a part of the event and became determined to work harder and invite more people to our groups. And for those who did not come, we will give them more love and education. The new families are now inviting us to come to their houses and bless their families.
Last Sunday we started visiting and blessing new families, and we got over 40 invitations for Thanksgiving dinner. Now we realize that if we can do it as a couple to bring 87 guest with the help of our HDFC groups, if all blessed Central families in the Unification Church will do the their own HDFC groups then we can restore America.