A Significant MSC Gathering, Vietnam
Khoi Nguyen msc
This discernment gathering is one of the recommendations of the MSC Australian Chapter April 2023, that the MSC Vietnam Community is recommended to have such a gathering to discern their future together with the support and consideration for future decisions of the new Provincial Leadership Team.
Since February this year, Hien Vu, a Melbourne diocesan priest, and I have been meeting and facilitating a process of communication, preliminary communal discernment at the local level and in small groups, and our discernment as facilitators, and we sense five major areas emerging at this stage:
- Our potentials
- Community life
- Initial formation
- Mission
- Vocations
We have agreed that these will be our ‘launching pads’ into further discernment at this face-to-face gathering, which will be in Vietnamese during the process to accommodate the whole community and respect the local culture. However, these are not our ‘fixed agenda.’ If the community had a sense that differs from these, the discerning community would be open to it. We promise to go where the Spirit leads.
Therefore, we need lots of prayer and support from the rest of the Province in this process, the process of synodality Pope Francis has called us to embody as church community. We pray that we will be united and challenged to be authentic as a missionary community in Vietnam and beyond.
