By His Holiness Sridhar Swami
There is a saying that if you have to do something, there is two ways that you can do it. One is in an organized way and the other is in a disorganized way. Now, if you do things in a disorganized way, you may not get such good results, but if you have a plan, if you have a system, a technique, a method, the chances are that you will get better results. This is common sense.
As an institution, we are not that old. In fact, we are still in diapers practically. Still “wet behind the ears” as they say. We have got a lot to learn. Now, there is a saying that when you want to do something, suppose you have a big complicated plan, you want to build a new brand of motorcar, there is a saying about the wheels: “You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.” In other words, what I am saying is that there are a lot of people out there who have developed congregations.
We are not the first people to try to get a message out to society, and we are not the first people to promote religious ideas and try to involve the world. It has been done many, many times before. So, we can actually learn even from our own tradition there is so much we can learn from the teachings of Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura and other previous acaryas.
Especially in the modern times, although, we know that we have state of the art spiritual technology, literally we have the best religion and we have the best religious ideas. There was a survey, done in America, and they interviewed new religious movements. Like the Buddhist and some Christian groups and Mahesh Yogi and this Yogi and that Ananda. There are so many groups.
There are 800 cults. They interviewed different people in society, young people especially, about these new religious movements and they asked them questions about their techniques of recruiting new people. They asked them about dress. One of the questions was, “How do you rate new religious groups as far as philosophy is concerned?” And believe it or not, they rated ISKCON as number one in philosophy. So it is a fact.
(Excerpt from the book The Nectar of Congregational Preaching by ISKCON Congregational Development Ministry)
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