Bodhinatha reviews last year's State of the Church message and discusses how each Church focus has been fulfilled. The three focuses were bringing in new members, printing The Master Course trilogy and developing the Master Course trilogy study program for new students.

Unedited Transcript:

Good Morning! Happy Guru Jayanthi.

Last year was my first State of the Church message and it was short and simple. Some of the monks remember, of course, because we have talked about it. Probably all our family members don't remember the three points in the State of the Church message last year. You wouldn't get A+ on that test. I will remind you!

Our first focus for the year 2002 was on new members. Our goal was to get 23-25 new members, something like that. I think we ended up with about 28 new members last year, a nice accomplishment. We were able to bring in the group which consists mainly of individuals who had been studying for quite a while. The requirements kept getting longer, so they still had not become a member, even though they had been studying five or ten years. Gurudeva loved to challenge us with more sadhanas. So, we brought them all into membership and it expanded our international congregation quite a bit. That was our first focus.

Our second focus for last year was the printing of the Master Course trilogy in the hardcover, color edition. We are almost there in terms of our work. We have a couple more days work on 'Dancing with Siva'. 'Merging with Siva' has been in the works over there for quite a while and they are just finishing up the binding of it. They ran into a small problem on the cover in the binding. But other than that, it is printed. 'Dancing with Siva' will be sent off in a few days to also be printed. We'll have all of our work done here on the trilogy, and we can move on to other goals which come up in our year 2003 for our publication department. So, that is a major accomplishment and puts Gurudeva's core teachings into this beautiful format for all to appreciate for many years to come. We are very happy with that accomplishment

To go along with that was our third goal which was, for our new Academy students, to develop a Master Course study for the new trilogy that went along with it. We came out with the first level, the study is in three levels. The beginning of last year we came out with the first level and enrolled quite a few new students in that program. We are just finishing up the second level which will be finished this month. So they can continue on, some of them, into Level Two with their study. That was accomplished quite nicely. Those were our three goals for last year.