The School of Evangelization from Joe Murphy's Perspective

My name is Joe Murphy and I had the pleasure to visit Espanola the weekend of June 21-24 to participate in this wonderful mission. I attend the University of Ottawa with Angele, Marc-Andre, and Mary-Claire (where I met all three of them).

I traveled to visit them with three CCO Impact alumni (Zak Brownrigg, Jeremy Eckert, and Daniel Rodrigues) and Pat Hoffman, a CCO missionary (who happens to be Mary's brother). Our van made the long journey from Ottawa to Espanola to assist with the retreat by providing music ministry and helping set up.

Having never gone on a summer mission like Impact, I had no idea what to expect when coming to Espanola. Boy, was I sure surprised.

Meeting all of the parishioners of St. Jude's showed me the great rapport that the Revive team has with the parish community, which has been exemplified by their successful faith studies and projects completed thus far. We got to help out at both Sunday masses, encouraging people to participate in faith studies (we were even introduced to the parish at the one mass!).

The retreat itself was unbelievable. Michael Dopp, who gave the retreat, was an amazing speaker whose passion for Christ was truly inspiring to experience. His approach to the New Evangelization gave the participants an understanding of its significance to the Catholic Church but also provided everyone with a toolbox of methods to share their faith with others. The anecdotes he provided were incredible, and the words he chose to describe certain concepts were thought-provoking. I walked away from that retreat renewed in my commitment to Christ, and the challenge was presented to the parishioner attendees to continue working in their parish after the weekend was over.

Since I have absolutely no musical aptitude, I was more than happy to change the slides so everyone could sing along with the songs. I was so moved by the wonderful performances given by Jeremy, Zak, Marc-Andre, Mary, and Angele during the praise and worship parts of the weekend. Even when no one was around, the group would be doing jam sessions covering everything from Church songs to 1980's pop songs.

We were also treated to five star level accommodations during our visit. The Sweeney family opened the doors of their home to us with open arms and their neighbours (whom none of us had ever met) let us stay in their trailer AND use their showers. I would like to classify this as Northern hospitality, which is much better than any Southern hospitality you may find elsewhere. Our group was truly blessed to have this opportunity to come and visit.

On a final note, all five of us walked away from this weekend wishing we could stay and remain part of the mission. Michael affectionately referred to us as "the red shirts" all weekend, and many parishioners were delighted to see the Revive team more than double in size for the weekend. Everyone we interacted with were so delighted to have us there, but we were the lucky ones. Even if it was just for the weekend, we got to be part of something special. I got to see their "Command Center" where they had developed all of their plans, I got to pray, eat, and hang out with these talented young missionaries.

 As Pat Hoffman noted during the weekend "What you guys are doing here in Espanola is the whole point of what CCO is all about". These young people have taken what they have learned and applied it to the real world. Revive Espanola is a great mission, and everyone from our group was more than thrilled that we got to experience this amazing opportunity.

And there's still more to come! I look forward to hearing more about will be happening in the coming weeks in that fine little paper town...

God bless,

Joe Murphy

The School of Evangelization from Zak Brownrigg's Perspective

What a great weekend in Espanola! This past weekend was the best weekend of the summer so far! It was also the first weekend of the summer but you get my point.

I got a chance to meet so many wonderful people! It was great getting the chance to witness so many people interested in the New Evangelization. Think about it. If we all just give a little bit of our time and effort to evangelizing, soon the whole world will hear the basic gospel message proclaimed!

So many people contributed in different ways. Some contributed by their hospitality. Others contributed by their music, others by their welcoming and friendly attitude, others by their organizing, and others by preaching the gospel!

I can’t think of a more rewarding project to give my time to. We were blessed to have Michael Dopp as our speaker. Like I told him at the end, it is rare that I can listen to someone talk so much in such a small amount of time and not go crazy! Well, not only am I not crazy (or am I?) but I am super motivated to evangelize!

One of Michael Dopp’s themes is that our earthly life is short. No one is going to care in two hundred years who won the Stanley Cup this year, who has the best job or who Justin Bieber’s next girlfriend will be (I would if I were still alive). So instead of being so focused on worldly things, why not be focused on God?  Why not spend our life preparing for eternity and building up God’s kingdom instead of things that won’t really matter in the end? We should put our focus, especially in our parish life, on evangelization. Evangelizing is at the heart of the Church’s identity and so we should be focused on that, in our personal lives and in our parish activities. That’s what Michael Dopp reminded me of this weekend. What a message!

What always blows me away is how fulfilled I feel when I evangelize. Sure, I get nervous and uncomfortable. But the more you do something, the easier it gets! God has a plan for each of us and that includes sharing the gospel!

There’s so much more I could say....it was so great seeing my good friends, Angele, Marc-Andre and Mary-Claire again. What a job they are doing! It was great getting to know Angele's parent's, Vince and Nicole too! Props for building such a great house and for filling it with such loving people! And I’m happy to report that Espanola looks so much greater than it smells. Indeed, what a fine paper town it is.

Godspeed,

Zak

Retreat Times

Hey everyone :)

              So I have the honour of writing this week's blog. It's luck of the draw actually, but we'll call it honour. Sooo much has happened this week. Guess I should begin with the retreat..
We had our 4 day School of Evangelization Retreat with Michael Dopp this weekend. It was way more awesome than I even remembered from last time I did it. Michael Dopp is a truly gifted speaker and his witty cracks and hilarious analogies leave you looking at your watch wondering where the hours went - seriously.              
Some highlights for me.. He spoke about how important it is that WE have a relationship with God before we try to go our evangelizing other people. We can't give what we don't have and we need to understand what it is that we're calling other people to take a part of in at least some way before inviting them. He also talked about how us Catholics need to stop catechizing people who aren't evangelized, like how we tend to focus on teaching people about the sacraments or the gifts of the Holy Spirit in things like Confirmation and RCIA programs, which are good things, but aren't of much use to someone who isn't really interested in the faith because they don't know God - so we need to focus on that first. And how all of our ministries exist in order to evangelize - so even though its easy to get caught up in what colour to paint the Church or what time to have the rosary, EVERY SINGLE MINISTRY's focus should be to PROCLAIM CHRIST. That is why they exist. The CWL, the Knights of Columbus, the Baptismal Prep and Youth Committees, the choir...everyone. That was pretty cool to remember, because I know its easy to get sidetracked with that stuff. Because as Michael put it, yes those other things need to get done too. But we can't lose our focus of why we're doing all of this. Michael also taught our group how to write their own testimony, how to share the basic gospel message clearly, essentially that we were created by God purely out of love, and so that we would have a relationship with Him, that relationship is broken (once by  Adam and Eve, and continually harmed by us) by our sin, so God sent His only son, Jesus, to die to repair this brokenness by taking on the punishment for our sin, and we are all called to respond to this act of love, to say yes to this offer at a mended relationship with God and live it out in our lives.
       And our lovely friends from Ottawa (Carole, Zak, Dan, Joe, Jeremy, and my brother Pat) were here to help out with the retreat, which was really cool. They're great people. I laughed a lot this weekend guys so thank you for that :). And thanks for all your help, your beautiful witnesses, and general awesomeness.
   I also had my last day of volunteering at Sacred Heart today, which was actually pretty sad. I guess I grew kind of attached to some of the kids there, and the teachers too. I'm going to miss them. Hoping to see some of the older ones around when our Youth Group starts next week though :)
Anyway, that's our life lately. Our friend Zak who was here for the retreat wrote something to share too so I'll let him do some talking. Au revoir and please pray for us.!
                            -Mary

Disco Lesson 5, High School Outreach, and Father's Day!

Hello everyone!!

Marc-André here again posting about past week on the Revive mission, and boy, was it ever an eventful one!

Last Thursday, we had Lesson 5 of the Discovery faith study where we look at how we must personally choose to have a relationship with Jesus and that we are all called to participate in this intimate relationship. We start the lesson with a question, perhaps the greatest question you will ever face. If you were to die today, and God asked you, “Why should I let you into heaven?” what would you say?

When I first heard this question, I just listed a bunch of good and virtuous deeds I had done; the fact that I had never committed any really bad sins; and that I always strived to be a good person. I hoped that that would be enough.

The truth is, no matter how righteous a person is, this cannot overcome the infinite barrier between us and God because of our sin. In order to overcome an infinite barrier, we must place our faith into an infinite being. That being is Jesus. He is the reason why we can return to our Father in heaven. And Jesus does not care about what we’ve done or who we are. As long as we are repentant of our sins and humble enough to place him at the centre of our lives, we experience God’s grace in a way like no other.

Lesson 5 is what led me to have a relationship with Jesus and to know God personally. I am sure it has led many of our participants’ lives to encounter Jesus in a personal way, perhaps for the first time!

We also challenged our participants to lead their own faith study group when we begin our second round in July. As you read this, the Holy Spirit is entering the hearts of our participants and making them become leaders in the New Evangelization and the renewal of the world. What a grace!

Also, this past Friday, we had a presentation at the Espanola High School for our youth group starting in July. We weren’t very sure what to expect at this school; it is the only non-Catholic school where we were planning on presenting at, but it is also the biggest school in Espanola. We served free pizza to attract students, and they came, about 15 – 20 of them. We presented a small sample of what youth group would look like. We played a game to start off, and then we asked them a number of faith questions, such as, Who is God to you? Do you think religion is relevant? If you could know God personally, would you want to?

After these questions, we led a couple of praise and worship songs. It was all our first time leading worship, so we were definitely a bit nervous, but it all went really well! Angèle led us wonderfully, and hey, even some of the kids sang along!

After the music, Angèle shared her testimony of how she came to know Christ. This was her old high school, so her story was pretty relatable to the students there. She spoke of how, on the outside, her life may have seemed perfect, but on the inside, she always felt empty during high school and her first year of university. It was only when she let Jesus into her life at a retreat that she felt truly filled, inside and out.

Some, if not all, of the students were definitely struck by her testimony; one of the students talked to me about how he could relate to her story a bit. We ended up getting seven phone numbers of interested students for our youth group. Not bad, considering we have three more schools to go to, all of which are Catholic!

And finally, today at the mass, God graced us with some notable events! Before the French mass, Angèle went to ask one of her faith study participants to see if she would like to share her experience of the faith studies. At first, she said no, but about five minutes later, she approached us and said that the Holy Spirit was telling her that she should go speak after mass. And so she did, and it was awesome! She shared about how the faith study allowed her to deepen her own personal faith and encouraged others to join the next round! We need more people like her at the parish for when we leave in August!

Also, today being Father’s Day, we had a soup luncheon after the 11 am mass for all of the fathers at the parish and also as a fundraiser for our mission. We had about 80 people come have soup and raised about $500! This money is going to help us with our youth programs for the months of July and August. It was also a wonderful event for parishioners to socialize and build community.

Well, that’s it for this past week, but stay tuned! This coming week, we have three school presentations, the last lesson of Discovery, and Michael Dopp is hosting a “School of Evangelization” retreat this coming weekend! God’s done so many wonderful works on this mission so far, and much more has yet to come! Thank you, God! And thank YOU all for reading this blog!

God bless,

Marc-André

Revive, week 5!

Hey there!

Trying to recount the past week has made me  quickly realize how jam packed this summer has been so far, which seems to cause the days to run into each other.  “What do you do with your days?” you might ask.  Well let me tell you! 

Revive is such a peculiar mission.  Maybe that’s only my perspective, but I’ve never done anything like this before!  Last summer the path was laid out for us and it was clear what kind of mission work we had to do for Impact, but this summer is quite different.  It’s like blazing a trail in uncharted territory, using skills that you only recently acquired.  Sort of makes me picture an inexperienced hiker trekking through the jungle.   But actually, an inexperienced hiker would, I’m sure, have a much more difficult time then us because we have a secret weapon: the Holy Spirit!  Revive has been peculiar, and different because each day we wake up and pray for guidance.  When you’re experienced it’s sometimes easy to know in which direction to go, but when you’re in this kind of situation, you’re walking blindly by faith, and it’s sort of awesome.  That’s probably the biggest thing I've learned so far this summer, is that if you rely completely on God for guidance and direction, He will not let you down.

So this past week’s highlights…drumroll!!!!  Lesson 4 of Discovery!  It went so well.  I ended up having a “smaller” study, with only 12 women this week, so there was lots of sharing, and I was really feeling a sense of community.  In the lesson we looked at an analogy from St. Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue.  St Catherine describes that God intended for a perfect relationship between Himself and humanity, this would look like a bridge.

But then, we sinned.  This sin washed away the bridge, and created a huge divide between humanity and God, between you and God.  This divide is so huge, and raging that no matter what you do, YOU CAN NEVER GET TO GOD IN HEAVEN.  Sin causes SEPARATION and DEATH.  I know when I think of being separated from God for ever I feel pretty miserable, but we know this isn’t the end of the story!

God is loving, so loving that when He saw what we had done, He knew He had to fix it.  So He became man to take on our sin.  As a man, Jesus took on your sin, and suffered.  He paid the price.  By dying on the cross, Jesus bridged the gap between us and God, so that we might have eternal life and come to the same joy as the angels (paraphrased from St. Catherine of Siena).  AWESOME, right?!  Without Jesus, we’re damned, but with Him, we are offered eternal joy and fulfilment with God.

(don't mind my pitiful drawings)

A few days after this awesome lesson, we got to celebrate Marc-André’s 20 birthday!  If you don’t know Marc, I’ll fill you in on some insider info.  He is really wonderful, and we’re very blessed to have him on the Revive: Espanola team this summer!  It’s hard to believe he’s only 20, Mary and I joke that he’s actually a 40 year old man stuck in a 20 year old’s body…haha.  So for his birthday we had a pizza party at a friend’s place (thanks Larissa!) before going to a concert!  Brian Houston, a Christian artist, was playing at the Lighthouse in Espanola.  He was really great!  We then went to Marshall’s (the local bar and grill) for some pool and fellowship!  It was all in all a really great day!  Thank God for Marc-André’s existence!

Today we went to mass and Fr. Ed had a really amazing homily!  He spoke about how God can raise us from the dead not only physically, but spiritually as well, AKA Revive!!!  We also had many people register for our retreat, which is June 20-23^rd!  We’re all getting very excited for the retreat and can’t wait to see how many people the Lord will call to come! More info about the ministry at www.missionoftheredeemer.com

I think that’s pretty much it for this week, thanks for reading!

God Bless!

Angele

Hey guys!

Mary here...another week has flown by in Espanola. One of us has probably said this already but it feels like we’ve been here for so much longer than we have. Things always seem to go that way though, so I should probably stop stating the obvious and get to telling you what exactly God’s been filling that quickly passing time with...

I had my first day volunteering in one of the elementary schools here last week (we started volunteering when we’re not working to get to know the kids here) and I must say, it was a bit intimidating. I guess it’s been awhile since I’ve been around kids – and that many, that I felt slightly out of my comfort zone. But that’s okay, because the more this mission goes on the more I am realizing that it doesn’t matter if I feel inadequate or ill suited for what I’m doing, God can use it. In the words of my spiritual director “Just do what He asks of you the best that you can. The results are His business.” Besides, the kids I’ve been working with are hilarious and fun to be around. Even if I spend the day around the kindergartners – who are obviously too young to know or really care about our mission or why I’m in their school, it’s good just being there and getting to be with them.

            Our adult retreat is coming up in just over 2 weeks and we’re pretty pumped. Michael Dopp is coming to do the talks. I went to this same retreat in January when I was at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy in Barry’s Bay and it was really cool. Michael goes over a lot of stuff, about our relationship with God and evangelization and just relating to other people in general. I always remember especially one thing he talked about, how everyone draws close to God by either Beauty, Goodness, or Truth, often a combination of the three but usually one moreso than the other two; and how quoting the truth of the gospel or Catechism to someone who has been hurt by the lack of goodness in someone in the Church will often not be heard, and how describing God’s beautiful creation or divinely inspired art to an atheist mulling over discrepancies in the Bible have little weight. It just really made me think about how I talk to the people around me, whether Catholic, Christian, or neither. What I expect them to understand and how I can be aggravated when they don’t understand me or me them. And how even within a small group of practising Catholics, we each relate to God in a different way, on different levels, from different places.

I think each of us has a bit of worry in the back of our minds about the upcoming retreat. There’s always that fear of failure. The worry that no one will come. Those moments where you don't trust God so much and start thinking it's about how good YOU can do, what results YOU can pull off. No wonder things can get a little daunting and bleak at those points.. This is us we're talking about..
;)
But then we remember that it’s God doing this, not us. So there is nothing to fear.
:)