Psalm 37 3 Trust in the Lord and do good. Then you will live safely in the land and prosper.4 Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you your heart’s desires. 5 Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you.
Ahh- appropriate for Christmas and appropriate for now….and I don’t profess to be an angel, but I bring you good news anyway!!
Just to recap and bring you all up to speed. In January-February last year, the board of secretariat of the former North Central New York Walk to Emmaus made the decision to sever our ties with the Upper Room and the Upper Room Emmaus model. We held our last weekend as NCNY WTE in the spring of 2010. We have been working on rewriting all of our documentation with a planned release of spring 2011 of those documents. Our Spiritual Director, Bill Vallet and Assistant spiritual director, Bill Mudge have met with the new Upper New York Conference to explain our position and express our desires to continue as a community in the same geographic area. In October of 2010, we decided to change our name to Closer Walk, pending acceptance by the Conference. In November of 2010, Chrysalis decided to change it’s name to Koinonia.
We have been waiting for a decision by the Upper New York Conference allowing us to move forward with our community. Bill Vallet has recently heard from them with their response….which I am NOT going to share with you right now, but I will tell you it is very good. The formal announcement will be made by Bill Vallet at both secretariat on Friday, January 21st and the Community Gathering on Sunday, January 23rd.
I will send out a formal statement also following the weekend for all those who can’t attend. But the other part of this message are these 2 points…..
One: It’s time…it’s time for everyone who has not been involved for awhile…it’s time for everyone who has been waiting to see what was happening….it’s time for everyone who became discouraged without a summer and fall weekend….it’s time for anyone who needs a recharge to come out and reconnect with this amazing community….we’ve missed many of you for too long, and it’s time for us to gather, regroup and re-energize our movement!! Let’s see some of those faces again that we haven’t seen in several months or years. This is and always will be your community and continues to exist because of you. Come get reconnected! If you know someone who hasn’t been involved in awhile, get them involved!!!
Two: What the name change means…..someone asked me, “so I can’t say I’ve been on an Emmaus weekend?” Of course you can….Everyone who has made a weekend prior to now has either made a Cursillo weekend(first 6 or 7 weekends) or an Emmaus weekend(from 7 or 8 to the present) Our name change doesn’t change the fact that you made and Emmaus, Chrysalis, YAC weekend. Moving forward, people will make a Closer Walk or Koinonia weekend, and the community and events will be referred to by those names, but it doesn’t change what has happened in the past.