By Gokulananda das ACBSP
Sounds pretty positive, and such was the title/theme that set just the right mood for this year’s historical gathering of the ISKCON Leadership Sangha – ILS – in Sridham Mayapur. Over 350 “rank and file” temple leaders from all around the ISKCON world (over 40 countries ) met for the eight-day series of sessions and workshops, from Febr.10th to 17th. The clarion call originaly went out last summer from the hard-working group of devotees of the Strategic Planning Team (led by the dynamic vision of GopalBhatta Prabhu) to bring together all of ISKCON’s “middle-managers” in this leadership forum, with the hope of communicating our best plans and initiatives to substantially improve Srila Prabhupada’s mission on all fronts.
One of the central themes and motives was to focus on our first priority: devotee care and support. In order to break the past pattern of the revolving doors and attrition in our ranks, we had to finally get it right by understanding that our core mission is to provide suitable care and nourishment to all our members as our first priority. And many of the dozens of workshops directly addressed this need to foster the right mood of mutual respect and validation, the same love and trust that Srila Prabhupada nurtured into us during his manifest presence. To foster this unity in diversity we repeatedly heard how we can sustain this culture of love and respect by acknowledging everyone’s unique contribution, and help empower each other to offer this example of cooperative efforts to other prospective devotees. Thus we can hope to build more vibrant caring communities, such as the very successful examples of Mumbai Chowpatty, Tirupati, Ujjain and others, to attract so many other good souls to join the great family of ISKCON.
So many such relevant contributions were shared during the ILS; and we got a sense that immensely exciting possibilities were manifesting on the horizon so that ISKCON’s mission was on the brink of major expansion world-wide. And by the end of this landmark meeting of Srila Prabhupada’s grateful followers, a palpable renewed sense of very positive expectations pervaded our hearts and mind, that we could bring back to all our home temples. As we frequently heard during the course of the entire ILS event, Srila Prabhupada’s final instruction to his followers was that: “Your love for me will be shown by how well you cooperate with each other to carry on our mission”. And this sharing of our hopes and plans for more effectively expanding Srila Prabhupada’s salutary misson of ISKCON has surely helped to better manifest his miraculous vision for the spreading of the Sankirtan Movement to all of suffering mankind.
Srila Prabhupada’s ISKCON mission kijay ! Gokulananda das ACBSP – ISKCON Montreal.
