8:Action
Key points:
- Piety and Study are essentially selfish if they don’t lead to Action.
- Through Action we become the “hands and feet of Christ in the world.”
- Action in a Cursillo context is Apostolic Action
Suggestions:
- Piety, Study and Action are like the legs of a three-legged stool: nothing is more stable than a three-legged stool when all three legs are equal and balanced.
- The word Apostolic comes from the Greek, meaning one who is sent. An apostolic action is then anything we believe through our piety and study to be something God has sent us to do. We can be wrong of course, and this is one reason why sharing our ideas and thoughts with fellow Christians is important. We will learn more of this later (Group Reunion)
- What God sends us to do will depend on many things: what gifts we have, where we are, who else is there, and so on. We may be asked to do things alone, or in company with others (Christian Community in Action)
- What we are sent to do may not even make sense to us at the time, but may be part of God’s longer plan. We are called to be faithful, not necessarily successful. We don’t have to know how to ‘do’ action, the Holy Spirit is our guide.
- The greatest action we can be involved in is to encourage another into deeper relationship with God: make a friend, be a friend, bring a friend to Jesus.
Comments:
Probably even more than the other talks so far, this talk hangs on sharing our own experience of how we have heard the call of God to apostolic action in our own life. If we can point to incidences where we feel God has clearly been at work in sending us into a situation, then the subject becomes more real to our hearers. It must be made very clear that such stories are only examples, and not blueprints for others to follow. We must also be wary of presenting ourselves as such a model of apostolic action that others are left feeling hopelessly inadequate!