While vocations to the priesthood and consecrated religious life are widely recognized, lesser known, perhaps, are lay missionary apostolates, which are organizations dedicated to evangelizing.

Members of six missionary apostolates – the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS); Damascus; Hard As Nails; Missionary Servants of the Word; St. Paul’s Outreach (SPO); and Urban Encounter Ministries – gathered Oct. 30 for Mass and dinner at Columbus Our Lady of Victory Church with Bishop Earl Fernandes.

The apostolates, which consist of lay missionaries evangelizing to various demographics, shared their organization’s charism, or spiritual gift, with the bishop and other missionary groups.

Seminarians for the Diocese of Columbus were also present and shared their missionary role as they study for the priesthood.

Blake Matson, who is in his fourth year as a FOCUS missionary, spoke about the apostolate, which is serving students at Ohio State and Ohio Northern  universities. 

The apostolate serves college students across the country. At Ohio State, FOCUS has seven lay missionaries serving about 67,000 students.

“We’re a collegiate outreach apostolate that serves college students on over 190 college campuses across the country to here in the Diocese of Columbus … mainly working to win students over in friendship, then over to Jesus in the Gospel, working to build them up in faithfulness and zeal for other people and sending them out on mission,” Matson said.

Four FOCUS missionaries serve students at Ohio Northern’s campus in Ada. 

Anna Sepanic, a FOCUS missionary there, said eight Bible studies have been formed. An additional 10 students were asked into discipleship, which is the second stage after a Bible study has concluded, when students are invited to see who God might be calling them to evangelize to.

Based in Centerburg, Ohio, Damascus is a missionary movement seeking to revive the Catholic Church in America. Members serve thousands of young adults each year. 

Damascus offers Catholic Youth Summer Camp (CYSC) and retreats for youth, as well as for adults throughout the year. They have an additional campus in Michigan, known as CYSC Great Lakes.

Gina Whiteman, 31, said Damascus is a place where children encounter Jesus in the Eucharist and realize that He is present, body, blood, soul and divinity.

“It’s so much more than a program; it’s so much more than a place,” she said. “Damascus truly is a people. … We’re a missionary body who seeks to be Jesus centered, joy filled, obedient, mission focused and then toilet plungers, … which just means that we’re not afraid to get messy because Jesus wasn’t afraid to get messy with the people that He served and loved and walked with and lived with.”

Whiteman, who serves as the formation coordinator at Damascus, first attended CYSC in sixth grade. There, she said, she encountered the love and joy of Jesus, and she went on to serve as a camp counselor. Whiteman is now a wife and mother who serves on Damascus’ missionary staff.

“Families are missionaries, too; it doesn’t go away when you serve in your vocation, you’re still a missionary,” she said. “So, that’s a beautiful thing.” 

In her role as formation coordinator, Whiteman said, she oversees finding new and creative ways to form the missionaries who serve at Damascus.

There are 63 full-time missionaries and 80 people on the missionary staff. Damascus also has eight missionaries who serve youth across the United States. This past summer, 300 summer missionaries served the youth at CYSC.

Hard As Nails Ministries, based in New York, is another community of lay young adult evangelists and missionaries. They travel across the United States, offering events and retreats, and some of their missionaries recently came to the Diocese of Columbus.

“The vision of Hard As Nails is to make a world where no one suffers alone,” said Nick Ganis, a missionary with the organization.

Hard As Nails missionaries in the diocese are focused on high school outreach. They are currently serving at Newark Catholic and Columbus Bishop Hartley and St. Francis DeSales high schools.

Two missionaries, Julio Perez and Octavio Mendoza, from the Missionary Servants of the Word shared their organization’s charism. 

“Our mission is to spread the Word (of God) to everybody that we encounter, and the way we do it is with the Bible,” Mendoza said. “We go really house to house. We knock on doors, and then, when they open the door, we will speak to them with the Word because this is what the bishop said today: No, we have to go and spread the Word. If we don’t do it, we’re not doing our mission.”

Missionary Servants of the Word evangelize to the Latino Spanish-speaking population in Columbus. Latinos can get lost when they come into a new country, Mendoza said. When exposed to newness, they can turn down a wrong path and leave their faith.

The missionaries lead Bible studies, Mendoza said, beginning with the Book of Genesis through the Book of Revelation.

John Packer Stevenson, who serves as a chapter supervisor for SPO at Ohio State, shared how SPO missionaries work with students on campus.

“They’re meeting people,” he said. “They’re starting those awkward first conversations. They’re breaking into people’s lives, knowing that they’re not just themselves, but they’re carrying the Lord with them out of the Holy Spirit, and they’re taking students with them.

“And they’re training students how to go into their classes and how to talk to people, even professors, and how to start these encounters and conversations to find the next step, the next invite.”

He said missionaries seek to save lost souls, and they adopt the “incarnational quality of Our Lord,” Who dwelt among His people.

“All these missionaries, they live with households of students, and these houses, they’re up at 6 a.m. four days a week for breakfast, 6:30 a.m. in the morning for Liturgy of the Hours with some worship afterwards, and then, three nights a week they have dinners,” he said.

“And these houses exist as places, yes, of formation, but also mission, so they can invite people to these houses that, perhaps, would never come to a missionary event right away because they’re just maybe not that open or ready yet.”

Packer Stevenson said students involved with SPO come to know Jesus and what it means to live as a child of the Holy Spirit through formation, Bible studies and living with Catholic brothers and sisters.

“They’re sent off – as they graduate – to say as big of a ‘yes’ as possible to the Lord, whether that is seminary, consecrated life,” he said. “They actually discern and take seriously full-time mission or to launch into a career with the idea of being a missionary … because families are, in fact, still called to be missionaries.”

Father William Hahn (left), diocesan vocations director, speaks with missionaries during the missionary dinner.

Jotham Allwein, 33, a missionary with Urban Encounter Ministries, spoke about the ministry that is serving the Hilltop neighborhood of Columbus. The neighborhood, on the city’s west side, has a high percentage of drug addiction and overdoses, prostitution and poverty. 

Allwein said Urban Encounter, which was founded by Bryan O’Donnell, aims to return the neighborhood to the heart of Jesus. The Hilltop has many families, he said, and the ministry’s focus is to claim the neighborhood for Jesus and bring its residents to Him.

The ministry, which has been active since 2020, has four pillars: community, revitalization, evangelization and worship. The missionaries are working for Hilltop residents to encounter Jesus Christ at Columbus St. Aloysius Church.

“We partner with St. Aloysius, which is the parish in that jurisdiction who’s responsible for all the souls in Hilltop,” Allwein said. “And so, the end is not for us to be the hero. The end is for Father Lawrence (Tabi), who’s at St. Aloysius, to be the hero.”

Missionaries with Urban Encounter attend the noon Mass at St. Aloysius every Sunday, Allwein said, and they intentionally sit behind someone new or a person they have not spoken with, to form new relationships.

“The individual people of Hilltop are incredible, and the families are incredible, so it’s really, really exciting,” Allwein said.

 Shane Gerrity, a seminarian for the diocese  in his first year of theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary of the West in Cincinnati, spoke about seminarians as missionaries. He said missionary work as a seminarian begins internally.

“Our mission for these next nine years slowly begins first within yourselves and then outward,” he said. “The mission field for the seminarian is his own heart. 

“It’s looking deeply into what part of you is broken, what part of you is not ready to receive a relationship, to find those places, to accept them, to ask God to come into them, and then, to eventually be able to be a gift for your brothers.”

As a seminarian, Gerrity said, he enjoys “apostolic missions,” or being sent out, including to participate in Bible studies with the Missionary Servants of the Word or serve the youth at Damascus. He said the greatest mission for a seminarian, perhaps, is serving “his brothers,” or other seminarians.

“The real mission has to happen in close proximity,” he said. “The true discipleship happens only through the compunction of your brothers seeing deeply into you and pointing out your faults so that you can move towards sanctity, which, ultimately, is a humble stripping away of every self-gratifying thing that I try to take on in my mission.”

At the end of the evening, Bishop Fernandes spoke about the New Evangelization. He told the missionary groups that his two priorities as bishop are vocations and evangelization.

“The New Evangelization is now directed ad gentes, to the nations,” he said. “We live in a non-Christian society, in a non-Christian environment. We are in missionary territory.”

The bishop spoke about 10 pillars of the New Evangelization, including using the gifts of the Holy Spirit in a “harmonious way” within the diocese and nationally. He said there are many charisms, but everyone is called to work on “the same team” in unison.

Other pillars, he said, include evangelizing through modern visual and digital media, and that missionary work must be long range and permanent in commitment.

Bishop Fernandes emphasized that a person never stops being a missionary. While their role might change, the work does not end, he said. It continues in every phase of life.

“We must propose God once more to the world, to a world that has never heard of God or Jesus Christ,” Bishop Fernandes said.

The bishop recalled the words of Pope Benedict XVI, who quoted Pope John Paul II, when he was inaugurated  as pope.

“He said, ‘My dear young people, Christ takes nothing from you, and He gives you everything,’ and that’s what I would say to you, and that’s what you have to propose,” Bishop Fernandes said. “The world has lots of problems. There is only one answer. It needs Jesus Christ, and we are missionaries of the Word – missionaries of Jesus Christ, the Word became flesh.”

The bishop expressed gratitude for the missionaries’ efforts, sacrifices and witness to the Gospel. He thanked them for the sufferings they endure for the “sake of the name” of Jesus Christ.