Course launch date, Christopher West on Pints, Hakuna
Exciting updates!
These past weeks we’ve been working hard on our one-hour intro course: Introduction to Bitcoin in the Faith. It is the flagship effort of our mission: teaching Bitcoin from a Catholic perspective.
We’ve made great progress!
Drafted a blueprint of our slide deck
Wrote scripts for videos 1-3 (on money) and videos 7-8 (on Bitcoin)
Prepared polished slides for videos 1-3
Planned our soft launch schedule—one post a week for twelve weeks, starting next week
My teammate Rocío (right, in the title image) artfully crafted the polished slides, as well as this post’s image.
We’ve also paid the one-time Substack fee to host this site on our own domain—ngumissions.com is official!
I’ll be recording the first audio this week, and then we go live on Wednesday, March 12th, God willing. Keep an eye out! We’re excited to share with you how the Spirit has been working through us.
Christopher West on our community on Pints
Speaking of the Spirit, one inspiration last week was Christopher West’s appearance on Pints with Aquinas. He described his experience teaching Theology of the Body to leaders of Hakuna, an international Catholic community, and then attending their 17,000-person concert in Madrid last September. Rocío sent the Pints clip to me as we’re both involved in the Hakuna community. A quote from Christopher:
Christopher West - I was in Madrid in September. Do you know about the group Hakuna?
Matt Fradd - No.
CW - There is something to have your eye on and be aware of. The Holy Spirit is doing something. They are going through various growing pains. Hakuna it comes from Hakuna Matata, from the Disney movie.
MF - Yeah, yeah ... means no worries.
CW - Yeah, it means no worries. They just started gathering and singing songs and praising the Lord.
MF - Okay.
CW - And I went to an event in a stadium in Madrid that held 17,000 people.
MF - What?
CW - And it was just this Hakuna Music Group on stage singing these songs and I’m like: what! It must be the lyrics because I couldn’t understand, it was all in Spanish. Everybody singing along! 17k people in the stadium! They had all these fireworks going off on stage, it was quite like… something’s moving, something is happening through what they are doing.
MF - Is it a Catholic group?
CW - Yeah, yeah. Is Catholic, fully Catholic. Started by a Catholic priest and he’s gathered some people around him who are discerning giving their lives to this and living a celibate life in service of this movement. And they are working under the bishop, they have all the right canonical approvals. But they are going through growing pains like it’s really sprouted very quickly and it’s international.
MF - Whoa!
CW - Their music is selling like, it’s bestselling stuff … Mike Mangione from my team, who’s my musician who travels with me, he was with me and we’ve just been … wow, the Lord is doing something.
An English speaker’s experience with Hakuna
By God’s grace (and I needed it), I am one of a handful of native English-speaking charism followers who have attended multiple Hakuna formation events. The Lord placed them in my path in Guadalajara, Mexico, through a post-TLM barbecue in February 2023. A now close friend invited me to one of their young adult talks and Holy Hour Wednesdays. I lived in the city for four months.
Hakuna is an international group, but as Christopher notes, it is currently predominantly Spanish-speaking, with a strong presence in Spain and Hispanic America. At the Europe “All Meeting” in Rome last October, I was told that the movement has translated more successfully into Italian than Portuguese… not much into English. Founded in 2013, Christopher observes that the community is experiencing “growing pains” (true!). And indeed, there are young folks discerning celibate life, or who have already discerned and begun; I’ve met them!
Ro an early Hakuna member
Rocío—the slides and thumbnail creator mentioned above—has been part of Hakuna since its early days in Spain and is now helping guide a new local chapter in Mexico City. She’s a missionary, working part-time for NGU Missions here, and contributing immensely! We met at an annual Hakuna conference in Mexico City in March 2024.
Introducing: Innocent Fools - On Hakuna in English
Continuing the mezcla of these missions—I added the translated charism decalogue to my X bio in early February—I have launched a new Substack publication called Innocent Fools - On Hakuna in English. I will share my experiences with the Hakuna community and charism there, periodically. Ro will oversee for truth and insights of the community’s early days they claim to be founded by the Holy Spirit, and write God willing. :)
What you can expect there
The first post is a piece I wrote for NGU Missions in 2024 about a Hakuna silent retreat I attended to discern the charism, and the second is this post. Upcoming, you can learn about:
The full audio and text snippets of Christopher West on Pints with Aquinas, plus an earlier video from Christopher West a day after the concert
The origin of the name Hakuna (everyone asks this first)
A recap of the upcoming Hakuna All Meeting in March 2025 in Mexico City, including a Mass and Holy Hour at the foot of Tepeyac Hill
Invitation to Christopher or Matt: new missions in the Church
Hakuna’s simple layperson decalogue and their music have been a significant part of my deepening conversion, a conversion that was “kicked off” by studying the Bible with Bitcoin enthusiasts. Maybe the Lord wishes to accomplish two birds with one stone here (do Christians say that?)… I extend an open invitation to Dr. Christopher West or
to chat about our missions at some point—Hakuna and Bitcoin! Qué combinación!We have some prominent figures involved in the Bitcoin mission, whose names will be announced later, so stay tuned. It will be much easier to recommend once the course and that news are live!
Back to work on the course now. God bless!
“The celestial influence of this intimate Guest is called inspiration; its action is the breath of wind, delicately soft and irresistibly strong, that impels our life toward heaven, the warm and powerful wind of love that cleanses, eases, rectifies, consoles, refreshes—but also moves, carrying along all that is before it.” – Archbishop Luis M. Martínez, The Sanctifier, Chapter 3. We are reading the book to help us better understand the Spirit as He guides us.