Focus. Zoom. Dream.

Focus. Zoom. Dream. These have been the three steps of the IV Mission Assembly of the Compostela province held from Sept. 20 – 22 in Lisbon, Portugal. More than 100 people participated in this meeting with the aim of analyzing the current situation and posing challenges for the future in light of the calls of the General Chapter.

“It’s not about doing more things, it’s about doing them in a different way.” With these words, framed in this year’s motto: Change!, Brother Tomás Briongos, provincial of Compostela, inaugurated the IVAssembly showing his vocation for the future because “we always have to be more parents of our future than children of our past”.

The participants in the assembly focused on the image of the province, of the Institute and, in a special way, the children and young people whom they heard through a letter written by them in the recent Young Assembly and where they asked, among other things, “to give an explicit Christian nuance.”

In the opinion of Father Nuno Amador, young people “are great seekers of meaning and everything that gets in tune with their search to give value to their lives, catches their attention and motivates their commitment.”

Focusing on children and young people, general councillor Brother Joao Carlos do Prado invited them to have a “real, concrete presence” with “time and love” among them, because it must be love that drives the educational work.

In this sense, Brother Carlos Alberto Rojas, director of the Secretariat of Education and Evangelization of the Institute, made an appeal “to reappropriate the passion of Marcellin” and to meet the emerging needs of our time.

Both insisted on the need to build bridges towards the future with three lines of action: walk together; be families of brothers and laity; and work in a network to be global.

Bridges and roads that materialized in the assembly in a series of challenges for the Compostela Province.