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By His Grace Tirtharaja Dasa

My opinion on congregational preaching in ISKCON is that full-time devotees must facilitate the congregational devotees. The most important thing is to understand the needs, interests and concerns of the people who are interested in Krishna consciousness. I think it is very important that devotees don’t presume to know what it is that people actually want from Krishna consciousness. The needs of the congregation may be different from what we think they really are. We need to sit down with our congregation and hear from them about their vision for the future. We must ask them what role we can play and determine what we can do for them, as far as the Krishna conscious philosophy allows. If Krishna consciousness is nonsectarian and not really a religious process, but a process which helps people establish love of God, then it is very important that we first of all seek to understand where people are at.

I don’t think the contribution of the congregation is any less than what devotees in the temple make. Rather, I think that the two groups complement each other. According to peoples’ past lives and their present situations, we need to learn to integrate with the congregation, and in that way spread Krishna consciousness through all different spheres of our society. Basically, people are conditioned by the culture of their upbringing. When we meet people we need to understand that, for example, in Poland people identify themselves as Catholic. So the two just go together. If you’re Polish, you must be Catholic. You cannot be Polish and not be Catholic. In South America, they have a certain way of looking at things that may be different to the Chinese people. First of all, the devotees need to be aware of that cultural upbringing. I think it is very important so that we don’t disturb people. I think that in the beginning of Krishna consciousness, we probably disturbed a lot of people. For example, many of the Indian congregation may have been disturbed by our strong preaching against demigod worship. We need to be culturally sensitive in our preaching. Then we need to understand what we can add to their lives.

One important thing we have been doing is interviewing everyone who comes into contact with Krishna consciousness and asking them “What have you been doing in the past 10 or 20 years since being a devotee? What experiences would you like to share with us?” We can do the same thing with those people who come to the temple. That is called a skills matrix. When we have a skills matrix of our congregation and of our devotees, then we can do more things that we wouldn’t have been able to do. We need to recognize that we have a wealth of experience and many resources that we can tap into. Also, I find it encourages the devotees a lot, because when somebody takes an interest in the things they are doing, they become more interested to render that service. Sometimes people who haven’t done something for a long time, when they start speaking about things they have done in the past they become enthusiastic to do them again. It brings back good memories.