About
Three days. Strengthening and renewing your faith. For clergy and for lay people.
Our Mission: By grace, with the Holy Spirit, we challenge leaders to discover and achieve their personal calling, assisting them to influence their environments with the Gospel.
Via de Cristo is a Spanish phrase meaning Way of Christ. It is a highly structured three-day weekend designed to strengthen and renew the faith of Christian people, bringing them to a new awareness of living in God’s grace. It is a combined effort of lay people and clergy toward renewal of the church.
The Via de Cristo movement originated as Cursillo in the late 1940s in the Spanish Catholic church and moved to the United States in the late 1950s. It took root in the Lutheran church in 1971, when lay people and clergy attended a Catholic Cursillo in Iowa and Florida. The first Lutheran-sponsored weekends were held in 1972 and have now been held in over 25 states and several foreign countries.
Gold Coast Via de Cristo grew into an ecumenical Christian movement, currently benefitting people from many denominations — Lutheran, Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and others.
The Basis — Via de Cristo is based on the fundamentals of Christianity, concentrating on the person and teachings of Jesus Christ.
The Focus — The focus is not on Via de Cristo itself, but on the environment of the community of believers.
The Objective — We inspire, challenge, and equip people for Christian action in their homes, churches, and communities.
Cursillo (literally, “short courses of Christianity”) is an apostolic movement founded by a group of Catholic laymen in Majorca, Spain in 1944 as a way to train Christian pilgrimage leaders. Its first stirrings began during the years of World War II, when the idea was born to lead a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. James of Compostela — a time for the men and women of Spain to dedicate themselves in a renewed way to the work of the apostolate.
That pilgrimage produced a brotherhood which sparked further renewal across Catholic action groups, and under Bishop Juan Hervás the first three-day weekends took shape — the pattern that continues, generation to generation, on Gold Coast weekends today.
“You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world.” — Matthew 5:16 (The Message)
De Colores
