Does the Catholic Church Still Send Missionaries? (Guest: Saul Keeton)

[00:00:10] Speaker A: Do Catholic missionaries still exist? And if so, who becomes a missionary today and why do they do it? That's what we're going to talk about today on Crisis Point. Hello, I'm Eric Samuels, your host, editor in chief of Crisis magazine. Before we get started, I want to encourage people to hit the like button. Subscribe to our channel. You also subscribe to our email newsletter. Just go to crisis magazine.com, fill in your email address, and we will send you our articles every morning, usually two articles per day. Write to your inbox. It's the best way to keep up with what we're doing. You can also follow us on social media. Just go to at Crisis Maggot all the different social media channels. All the ones that matter, I guess. Okay, so we are. Our guest today is Saul Keaton. He is the director of Mission advancement for Family Missions company. So what we want to do today is we want to talk about missions. This is something interesting to me, and I think it's something that, honestly, I think most Catholics aren't even aware of any missions going on. And so I wanted to bring Saul on. I've actually known about family missions company for 15 years or so now. So I want to bring him also what bring him on to talk about. So welcome to program Saul. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Eric. It's good to be with you today. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Why don't we start just by giving us your background, like, you know, credo, Catholic convert, what kind of how you grew up, why you got involved with missionary work. [00:01:33] Speaker B: Absolutely. Thank you. Well, I am a convert. Like a lot of people here, I've been Catholic since 2001. So Pentecost 2001 was when I came into the church in Houston, Texas, and I was a newlywed as well. My wife was wonderful about it. Becoming Catholic was not part of our agreement when I got married, but the Lord led me there through her gentle witness. And when I got into rcia, it was. It was true. But I had trouble articulating why. Like, you know, you recognize truth when you hear it. You recognize certain things when you see them, even though you might not actually be able to say out loud why these things are true. But I just was drawn to it immediately. And it filled a big hole in my heart. And so I became Catholic then. And I think, like, I just became kind of a regular, everyday Catholic. And I my faith in those early years, even though I had the zeal of a new convert, I don't know that it was, you know, as vibrant maybe as I wish it had been. Now, but we were living in Houston, close to my wife's family, and a few years later, we moved away to Tennessee for a professional opportunity. And it was while I was there, kind of away from the influence of her family, that I really kind of stood on my own two feet as a Catholic. And there had been a transition in the papacy from John Paul II to Benedict, and that led me down many rabbit holes, you know, reading magisterial documents, chasing all the footnotes, you know, seeing the beauty and how our popes were teaching us today how to apply the gospel to our lives now, 2000 years down the road from the Incarnation and the story of salvation. And so my faith really came alive then, and we continued to move around. We found ourselves in Mississippi in 2013 for another opportunity. And we were there for about five years before the Lord really put the call to mission on our heart for the first time. And both of us were just really having a kind of a general sense of dissatisfaction with modern life. We had six kids, and we were living the American dream and had a big suburban house, you know, big garage with a garage gym in it, full of CrossFit gear from Rogue Fitness. And, you know, by all appearances, everything seemed to be wonderful, but we just didn't feel like we were. You know, we felt like we were called to something more, and we just didn't know what that was. And my wife and I have this friend from college who persistently was inviting my wife to go on mission trips with her to Haiti. She had a school there that she was supporting for many years. And every time that invitation came, my wife was either seven or eight months pregnant or nursing a baby. And so she finally, after it happened for the fifth or sixth time, just thought to herself, I'll never get to go on a mission trip unless we all go. And so she did what so many people here at FMC have done, which is open Google, type, some combination of keywords, Catholic family, mission trip or missions. And FMC is almost always at the top of the returns for that sort of a thing. There aren't many people, aren't many organizations that are even attempting to do this. And so we were living in Mississippi at the time, saw that FMC was just right next door in Louisiana, just three and a half hours away. And so that was kind of the beginning of a romance with the call to mission. We joke in my house that my wife, like, was sold way earlier than I was, and she was binge watching all the YouTube videos that FMC had at the time, while I was snoring. And she proposed to me one day, hey, what do you think about us going on a mission trip as a family? And she was shocked that I just instantaneously said yes. I didn't push back on her at all about, you know, the difficulties of taking six kids on an international flight to Central America. But I was just open to it immediately because I had that unrest in my own heart. And long story short, I ended up taking three of my six kids to Mexico on that mission trip by myself without my wife, because we had a stomach bug running through our home at the time that the mission trip rolled around. And so she sort of pushed me out the door to Mexico with our three oldest kids and thinking to herself, if we're going to be missionaries, my husband has to, like, he has to see it, he has to want it. He has to be able to envision how our family can exist like this. And so she sat back home for a week, not communicating with me. I was in the field, like, every day, getting my socks knocked off by everything I was experiencing. And it was really sensory overload for me, experiencing missions for the first time, seeing the grinding poverty that's present in the third World. Like, you hear people say all the time that, you know, you just think you know what poverty is here in America till you see it in the Third World, but that's really true. You just can't fathom what poverty looks like until you go see it somewhere else. Our poor people just don't know how good we have it. And so I was confronted with that on the mission trip. And just. And the thing that made it so attractive to me personally was that all these people that I was encountering all week long, the missionaries and the poor people that they were serving and my fellow mission trippers, everybody was experiencing this peace that, like, was otherworldly. And I saw these people in the midst of all this material deprivation that were happy and, like, I wasn't happy. I mean, I was a senior vice president at a bank and again, you know, quote unquote, living the American dream. But I. I had a good time. And I might have told dad jokes at work every day, but I wasn't happy the way these people were happy. And I wanted whatever they had. And so we came from home from that trip, applied to be missionary, sold our house, gave away a bunch of our stuff. And then very shortly thereafter, my little boy at the time was 4, was diagnosed with autism. And so we weren't able to go into the field. And we ended up Buying another house in Mississippi and putting our roots back in the ground there to try to learn how to love him and care for him the way he needed to be loved, to promote his flourishing. But I'm not kidding, Eric. Three months after we moved into that second Mississippi home, I get a phone call from a guy here at fmc, and he's like, hey, you know, since you're not going to be a missionary in the field, why don't you move down here to headquarters and help us run the company? Could you have called three or four months ago before I bought? [00:08:24] Speaker A: Yeah, right. That's not the best financial decision to sell a house three months after you've bought it. Closing costs are going to kill you a lot. [00:08:31] Speaker B: I know. Well, so I ended up selling the house two years later and moving down here. And so, yeah, the. The Lord called me to mission a second time, called my wife and my kids to mission a second time, and it looked very different than the first time. And so two years ago, we were not having a lot of peace in our hearts, my wife and I again, and laying in bed at night talking about the future and, you know, how we wanted our lives to turn out. And we thought that the Lord was still asking big things of us, and we just weren' finding fulfillment. And so we decided to, like, really get serious about this opportunity. Came down here, met the leadership team, all the people that I would be working with to help, you know, run this side of the business, to make sure that our missionaries are equipped with everything they need. Yeah. And so I've been here now about two and a half years as the director of advancement, and it's been. It's an. It's a journey, man. It's an adventure working in this world, I bet. [00:09:27] Speaker A: One thing you mentioned, I want to touch upon. You said, you know, you're a convert, and you said a lot of the people involved are converts. I'm a convert as well. And I remember in my Protestant days, missionaries were very common. Like, every church I knew about, my church and my Methodist church, and every protest I knew about sponsored a missionary. You know, some couple, usually. Usually a young couple or individual who would go to some foreign country and, you know, be a missionary. But then when I became Catholic, it seemed like nobody even knew what a missionary was, practically. I mean, obviously, the Catholic Church has the deepest, best history of missionaries. I'm not, you know, obviously we, we. We invented it. [00:10:09] Speaker B: Right. [00:10:10] Speaker A: But at the same time, modern. Particularly last, you know, few decades, it seems like missionary work has become just something that not really thought of very much by Catholics. Has that been your experience with. Has there. Has your experience been dealing with Catholics, you know, who are interested in missionary work, that a lot of them are converts, or is it just pretty much a balance, or how has that kind of worked out? [00:10:34] Speaker B: Well, it's a real mix here. The people that are called to mission and say yes to that radical call. I mean, it's a kind of an eclectic bunch, and there are a good number of converts here, but there's also a good number of cradle Catholics. So it's hard to paint with a broad brush on that. But what I can say is that my experience as a Protestant, I didn't just grow up in one Protestant church. As a child in Mississippi, you know, we dabbled. I went to Southern Baptist, Methodist. I was baptized in a Methodist church. I also spent my real formative teen years in an Episcopalian church. Very high Anglican liturgy that was altar rail ad orientum, incense, you know, smells and bells. But as an Anglican and, you know, so when I became Catholic in Houston, like, you couldn't find a liturgy like that in 2001 in Houston, Texas. And it was a little disorienting. But the missionary part of that is true as well. One of the beautiful things about our Protestant brethren is that they really have a lay mission in their DNA. It's, like, coded hard into their culture. And when there's a missionary vocation that springs up from a church, from a local flock in the Protestant world, that local flock thinks of that missionary as their missionary. And so they support that missionary with their prayers and with their contributions. They send that missionary out. They commission them, and they're sent out from that flock. And that flock continues to love them and care for them. When they're in the field, you know, they. They go visit them in person. They see what the work that they're doing in the field. They write them letters, they send them care packages. When that missionary needs to come home for any reason, that local church receives them. They make sure they have a place to stay and a car to drive, you know, and then after a life of missions, maybe 25, 30, 35 years later, that missionary comes home. They still have a place to land because that church has been standing behind them all that time. And it's really. They have a culture of sending, you know, in the Protestant world and in really loving and revering almost their missionaries. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I was just going to say that I experienced the exact same thing. I remember about once a year, our missionary would come back and Give the sermon and kind of we'd meet with them and you know, any needs he had and things like that. And of course, that doesn't really exist in the Catholic world. And I think you're about to address this. But I do think that something I can understand a little bit of a concern among Catholics in the sense of traditionally, priests and religious were the ones who did the missionary work. And now of course, we have a lot less priests and religious. And so lay people have had to step up in a lot of areas, Catholic education and other areas, and missionaries another one of those areas. But I think a legitimate question a Catholic might ask is really, shouldn't we be more though, encouraging priests? Because what can a layperson do in missionary work? They can't bring the sacraments. You know, they can't. And so, like, what, what is the purpose of lay missionary? I think that's where I imagine you probably get these questions a lot, the organization. So how do you, how should Catholics look at the kind of the lay role versus the priestly role when it comes to missionary work? [00:13:56] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we love the priesthood. Right. We believe in it wholeheartedly and we are great advocates of it and we can't live without them. The sacraments empower us and fuel us and give us strength for the journey. And everywhere we work in the field, we work at the invitation of a bishop. We don't, we're not rogue agents out there just, you know, talking about Jesus to anybody and everybody without collaborating with the church. Now, that being said, we are a lay run organization. Our bishop here in the diocese of Lafayette gives us his blessing to do what we do, but it's not really an approval, you know, because we don't have clergy on our board and we don't have a clergy who are missionaries. We don't have any clergy who are staff. And it's 100% lay, Ryan, 100% lay mission. And so what's the place of a lay missionary kind of in the world today? What I like to imagine is like, what is. Yeah, because you touched on this a minute ago in saying that we have so many fewer priests, so many fewer religious today. So if we're going to have missionaries, the lay people are going to have to step up by necessity. But I think in the process of doing that, we're going to discover over time and maybe, you know, 100, 200 years from now, the people alive then are going to look back at the era when all the missionaries were priests and religious. They're going to think that was kind of naive. Like lay people are so well equipped to be missionaries because of our secular nature, because of our secular interests, because of the jobs that we have, because of the civic organizations that we belong to, to take the gospel into all the corners of the communities that we live in, even the dark corners of the world. Right. Which my pastor, your pastor, like, would struggle to reach in the same way that you could. Right. And so I think that lay people particularly are suited for this vocation of mission. And my prayer is that like when we are thinking about vocations as Catholics, that we're not just praying, you know, in October for vocations to the priesthood and religious life and we need those vocations, we should pray for them. But like, I think you can appreciate it as a convert like me, we should also be praying for missionary vocations. And you know, laypeople are called to this specifically. You look at the teachings of the church, particularly since the Second Vatican Council has been very clear about the lay people being listed. Like in the document at Gentes, when the council fathers wrote about who the missionaries are. Excuse me, wrote who the missionaries are, like they listed the layman right alongside priests and religious. You know, it wasn't like they were second class citizens. So I think the church, through the council, through Paul VI with Evangeli Nunciandi, John Paul II with Redemptoris Missio, through all the writings of Benedict, Pope Francis Evangeli Gaudium, even his most recent encyclical, De Lexit Nos about the Sacred Heart, he wrote some beautiful paragraphs at the end of that document about the missionary call and how the love of the Sacred Heart impels everyone to go out. And this is all of our responsibility. You know, God has a mission and that and the church is part of that mission and that trickles down to each one of us. And when we're baptized and confirmed into this, like it's not just something that we're invited into. This is something that God wants us to do, he expects us to do it. It's not just an invitation, it's actually a duty. And duty is kind of a bad word. You know, you want to talk about obligations and things we have to do. Americans don't like that. You know, that kind of gets our, makes us stand up a little bit straighter and fur our brows. What are you talking about? I gotta do something. You don't tell me what to do. Right, Yeah. [00:17:45] Speaker A: I mean, it's kind of funny because I've been involved with evangelization for many, many years, I was director of evangelization for diocese. I wrote a book called the Old Evangelization. I mean, I. And you know what a thing I discovered is that if you, if you say the word evangelization, Catholics, they just glaze over their eyes and ignore it. I mean, seriously, I stopped using the word in articles or podcasts because I knew nobody was going to read it. Nobody's going to listen because they just, they don't really. So many Catholics don't understand. But you're right, I mean, the fact is we're called to be missionaries. Every single one is called missionary in a certain sense, like to your neighbors, to your family, you know, to your community, all that stuff. So even beyond even, we're not called to go to a foreign country, right? We're all called to be missionaries, practically speaking. Then when your missionaries go to another country, do they then just. Are they set up with the local parish to like funnel people? Not funnel people, that's probably crude way to put it, but bring people to the local priest and things of that nature. [00:18:48] Speaker B: It really varies from place to place, missionary to missionary, diocese to diocese, where our people go. It depends on the needs of the place that they're going to and the, those individuals that live there, the people they're entering into. You know, there are 3 billion people at least, there's probably closer to 4 billion people today alive who've never heard of Jesus in a meaningful way. They've never heard anyone propose the gospel to them in a cogent way. But at Family Missions Company and we burn to like go share Jesus with those people. But that's not our only mission. We also are, you know, in a lot of places where the Catholic faith is already present but it's died out. For example, we just sent some missionaries to Ireland, right? Ireland has a long history of sending missionaries to us, right? We just sent a family to Ireland earlier this year, first time we've had missionaries there. One of our directors told us after the fact she's been praying for us to send missionaries to Ireland for years. And she hadn't been telling anybody. And here's this family who hears the call, ironically heard the call to missions to Ireland through a Matt Fradd podcast. He was interviewing some guy, Tony Foy from Net Ireland, and he's like, we need families in Ireland. And that family was like, we should be that family. [00:20:15] Speaker A: My son in law actually was two years with Net in Ireland. [00:20:20] Speaker B: Okay, well, you know, so we send people all over the world and they enter into wildly diverse Environments and landscapes. And so there's. So the work that our people do, it's really just dependent on the call that the Lord has put on their heart, what the Holy Spirit has told them that they want, that he wants them to do, and the needs of the local church that they're entering into. If there is a local church, we, you know, we have a growing awareness of the urgency of reaching out to all those people on earth who've never heard of Jesus. And so as a leadership team, we're trying to create a stable environment administratively so that if there's a family or a single person who hears the call to go into one of these countries that's quote, unquote closed, you know, where the legal structure is such, where it's maybe dangerous to be a missionary, there are, there's different risks involved in being a missionary. We want to provide fertile ground so that we can support them administratively well, keep them healthy, equipped, spiritually supported, so that if they get that call from Jesus, that they can feel free to say yes and they can answer yes in full freedom. And so that would look wildly different going to one of those places than maybe going to Mexico, right, where there's a lot of people in Mexico who have, you know, a dying faith who need to be brought back to life. [00:21:47] Speaker A: And so, yeah, so I want to talk a little practical about Family Missions Company. Okay. So I was chuckling at your story about your wife Googling, because I did that about the same time, probably it was about 20 years ago or so. And I remember I Googled like something like Catholic family missionary or something like that. And sure enough, you know, Family Missions Company came up top of the Google, even back then. And I looked into it and I did, I did some research because I, you know, we were interested. We. And I will say that we, we decided not to. We didn't do anything with it. And it was partly because we had four young children and, you know, other things, you know, stuff going on. And I think some of it was just like. I mean, it's kind of funny. I have this innate desire, someone to be a missionary, but I also hate traveling. So it's like maybe you just travel. [00:22:43] Speaker B: One place and then stay there. [00:22:44] Speaker A: Yeah, right, exactly. I don't like being away from my house, so I'm a homebody, but. But at the same time, I think the biggest thing, I'm sure you get this a lot, but like the idea of a family with six kids, for example, going on a mission trip, even for a week, much less for two Years. I mean, let's be honest. It sounds insane to most people, and probably rightly so on some level. I mean, people, dads. Let's talk to the dads for a minute. We want to be responsible. We want to make sure we take care of our kids. You know, we don't want to put them in a dangerous environment. Whether, like, dangerous in the sense of, like, violence, but just dangerous as far as health, because, you know, we have, you know, a great health system in. I mean, I have a lot of criticisms of it, but, you know, in general, in America, right, you're not going to die from a basic disease or anything like that. You're going to have good health care for that. You know, if you get in an accident and, you know, you're going to get taken care of pretty well. So all these things, I think a lot of us, that's. That's the first thing that comes to our mind. Like, yeah, it sounds nice, you know, the idea of serving Jesus in this way. But like, practically speaking, you just get inundated with all this stuff. So what does. Like how. I mean, obviously it's worked for. How long has FMC been around? [00:23:56] Speaker B: We're almost 30 years old. Okay. [00:23:58] Speaker A: So obviously people been doing for at least 30 years. So, I mean, and I don't think. [00:24:02] Speaker B: Longer than that, because our founding family, they were missionaries in the foreign field for 20 years before they founded FMC. [00:24:10] Speaker A: And I don't think any of them have died or anything. I mean, I hope, you know, I hope not. [00:24:14] Speaker B: In all that time we've had one missionary die on the field, and it was accidental drowning. [00:24:19] Speaker A: Right. And so that can happen in America, too. Right. Okay. So kind of, you know, walk through that. That logic of how that all works out then. [00:24:30] Speaker B: What logic? [00:24:31] Speaker A: Right, exactly. That's why I said the word. Exactly. I mean, it's not always logical to follow God. I mean. [00:24:37] Speaker B: No, it's not. People are going to think you're insane. At least, you know, people think you're crazy, and it's wonderful. And, and that's the great thing about being a Christian, you know, the. The world is content for there to be Christians. The world doesn't like there to be serious Christians. You know, and when you hear the Lord whisper in your ear, you know, that he wants you to enter into this life with him, and you turn around and say, say, yes. You're taking your faith very seriously. And the great thing that we can rest in, Eric, is that as families, you know, the Lord doesn't just call the husband, you Know, the Lord doesn't just call the wife. He calls every. If he's calling me, he's calling my kids, too. And you have to have faith that he is going to supply what you need and that he's going to surround you with a team of supporters and benefactors and prayer warriors that are going to keep you materially equipped. They're going to keep you spiritually equipped through buildup of grace, through all that prayer support that they give you. And, like, we're trying hard to help these new missionaries coming in to, you know, kind of understand this perspective that all the people that you ask to join you in this work, all your friends and your family, you're inviting them into a partnership where you are the vehicle through which they are executing their Great Commission responsibilities. Right? Not everyone can be the tip of the spear, Right? Some of us need to be the shaft of the spear. Right? And the shaft of a spear is usually very long because it takes a lot of weight to penetrate that spear. Right? And so the people in the field are like that very tip. But all their supporters are standing behind them, giving them the support that they need to go out. And so it takes all of us to make this work. And how do you walk through this logic as a father thinking about entering into this world with young children? Well, there's a family here with 10 kids right now who's in formation to go out. They're going to be new missionaries with us. They'll be commissioned in March. And that happens a lot. Families end up down here with 4, 5, 6, 10 kids that have heard this call to mission. And how do you. How do you make sense of that? Well, it's otherworldly. So unless you have eyes of faith and an open heart, you're going to struggle to even begin to comprehend it. But it's. You can't comprehend it without having the vocabulary of faith. You need to understand that the Holy Spirit is the principal agent of evangelization. The Lord calls everyone into this. Not everyone hears him, because all of us are just overwhelmed and distracted with noise every day. But even of the ones who do hear him, very few say yes. And, you know, I don't know why. Honestly, I don't know why I'm here. I mean, I was an average Catholic, right? In 2018. I was in the middle of my secular career, making twice the money I'm making today and doing well. Had a great home and appeared to be happy, you know, all things considered. But I received that call, and it didn't make sense. And I was quitting my job and talking about moving my family into mission. I didn't know what mission post we would go to, but I just knew we were being calling to this. Being called to this life. And because we weren't going to go into my. My particular case, we were not going to enter formation until 2019. I hadn't quit my job, and I hadn't started telling all my friends, hey, we're going. Before my son was diagnosed. But I did tell my mom and dad. I did tell a few people. And, you know, the reaction is universal. You know this is absurd, right? And you're like, you're right, you're right. But you know what? The. The Lord. I believe that there is a God. I believe that he created everything that I can see and everything that I can't see. And I believe that he loves me. Right? And I believe he loves you. And I believe he's real. And he gave us the church as an extension of his incarnation to perpetuate his presence in the world, to teach us and guide us. And I understand right now that that same God is active in my heart and calling me to this work. And how can I say no to that? I mean, I'm scared. Do I know what it's. What's going to happen? Do I know how? Am I going to deal with taking cold showers for the rest of my life? Right. Or am I going to just get one shower a week and I won't care if it's hot or cold? Like, I don't know how any of this stuff is going to work out, but I knew that the Lord was inviting us into this, and there's great freedom in that. Yes. The other thing I'll say is like a huge component of our work at family Missions company is colored by our charism of gospel poverty, which is if you. I don't know if you've ever read Happy are you poor? By Father. Oh, yeah. [00:29:42] Speaker A: I think I was reading it when I was thinking about going on the mission or something like that. [00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And when you talk to the missionaries here and you ask them about the books that have just affected them the most deeply, I mean, aside from scripture, Happy are you poor Is almost always the next book out of people's mouths. [00:29:56] Speaker A: And I just. Just real quick. I. I highly recommend it. I don't even know if it's still in print. Father Thomas Dube and just anybody. I just recommend everybody read it. I mean, honestly, it's very radical. It's very difficult in a lot of ways, because it really does. It's very difficult for an American Catholic to read it, I think, because you read it as an American and you realize first of how rich we are materially. I don't care what your situation is, we're rich. And if you're in America, basically, and it just really does make you think about it. So, yeah. [00:30:35] Speaker B: I couldn't make a better endorsement than you just did. It is very difficult to read, particularly as an American. All of us in this country, you know, we're born into the families we're born into. We don't choose them. And we just sort of kind of marinate in this American culture, which tells us when we're young, that if we make good grades, we'll get into a good college. And if you make good grades in college, then you'll get a good job. And if you get a good job, well, you can marry a pretty girl and have a few kids and a house in the suburbs and a two car garage. And if you save a little money along the way, then, you know, and work hard for 35 or 40 years, then if you live through that, then you can enjoy your life at the end for, you know, five or ten years before you die. And that's sort of like the American dream. And when you step back like that, just. It doesn't really seem like a dream when the Lord calls you into this work, because it's very oriented toward consuming, toward gathering unto ourselves and not living for other people. And the thing about gospel poverty, the radical nature of it is that living this way doesn't mean that you live in destitution. Gospel poverty, understood by us, understood by Father Dubay, is having the things that you need, but then whatever you have beyond that, you share with others, right? And we can see this has been present in the faith in the Old Testament. It's present at the beginning of the New Testament. John the Baptist, you know, people were going out to see John the Baptist. He was upbraiding them. You broods of vipers. He convicted their conscience. Consciences. They asked him, what should we do? And he said, if you have two coats, give one away. Right. Like gospel poverty has been with us from the very beginning. And so this is deeply ingrained in who we are. But as American Catholics, our standard of living is impossibly high. Judged against the rest of the world, and particularly judged against history. Right. You think about all the billions of people who have ever lived and the percentage of them that have lived in this country and have even known what the word retirement is. Retirement means like it's a foreign concept to people, right. Most people are worried about throughout history. Can I find work within walking distance of my hut? Right? And here in America, like, we have this really impossibly high standard of living. And so gospel poverty is just beautiful because it opens your eyes and it's a call to live a lifestyle that is sparing, where you have the things that you need. You don't worry about gathering unto yourself anything extra that you have, you give away, you share with others. It's a sharing lifestyle. It's not a theoretical poverty. It's an actual poverty. And that can be really scary for a lot of people. But the beautiful thing is that when you live that way, Eric, and you know this like it is, it gives you such great freedom and you get to live in freedom. And then when the Lord calls somebody like that, they can say yes and go. They're ready to serve. It doesn't matter what you call them to do. Like, they're, it's like, you know, the Jews went, you know, on the night of the Passover. They were, they had the staff in their hand and their loins girded as if they were ready to go on a journey right now. And the gospel, the person who lives like that is sort of like that. [00:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, the. So I know you have missionaries in a lot of different countries doing. And they're like you said before, they're very different depending on what country it is. But walk us through, like a typical family, they decide to do a two year mission because that's that if I remember correctly, that's your. I know you have, you have the week missionary trips for people kind of introduced to it and help out and stuff like that. But the two year mission. So if, let's say a family has four kids or something like that, and they're like, we're gonna do this and they're accepted and everything goes through. Walk it through the process of. From the time they get accepted, like, what do they do here? Like, do they sell everything they own? I like our house and stuff like that. And then what's it like, where do they move to? Like, do they move into like, do you have housing or is it like just a house in a neighborhood or. And kind of what's their, what's their lifestyle like with the kids? Because the kids obviously still have to be educated and things of that nature. Are they homeschooled usually or what kind of walk us through. And I know it's, it's very diverse over 30 years. I'm sure it is, but kind of just the overview of what that's like. [00:35:06] Speaker B: Yeah, and sort of our intake process has evolved over that time, over those 30 years. You know, we've learned from mistakes. Intake used to look very different. It was a lot shorter. Now our preparation for new missionaries is six months long. But before we talk about that, I would even back up. You know, usually people find us on Google or they. Or they meet another missionary. Usually the call to mission from the Lord comes from an encounter. You know that when I went on that mission trip and I saw how this family that was hosting us, how they were living and how happy they were even in the poverty of the place that they lived with these people like that convicted my heart so deeply. And so that encounter is really powerful. So people find out about us, they get, they have an encounter. The Lord kind of taps them, shakes them awake. And then what? Then they usually call us. And we have a vocations team here that receives those phone calls and where they start to just like peel the onion one layer at a time with these people who have a thousand questions, like a lot of the ones that you've asked. This doesn't make sense. How do you do this? I have a bunch of kids like it just. And it happens. And so we walk with them through the slow awakening process to, hey, the Lord is calling me to this and what is this going to look like? And our discernment process on the front is very. It's kind of deliberate and long. You know, it requires visiting us in person, multiple phone interviews with different people to get to know us better, but also to let us get to know you better. You hear different perspectives from people at fmc because, man, the last thing we want people to do is to like prepare their life for mission if they are not really being called here. Right. Because this is a really hard life. And to uproot everything, particularly if you have a family and come down here, we don't want that. That's not good for anyone. It's not good for us. It's not good for you. It's not. Certainly wouldn't be good to the people that you might be sent to serve if you didn't have a legitimate call. And so the discernment on the front end is pretty robust. And then once you are accepted, then you need to enter into a period of preparation where you do create a mission support team. Usually our missionaries will gather a team depending on the size of the family or if it's a Single person. It might not take as many people, you know, that will support them through their contributions and their prayers, and you will get fully funded before you come down here for formation. And so in the fall, every year at the beginning of September, our new missionaries arrive for intake, which is our new missionary formation. And they're here for six months to do that. And they spend one of those six months actually in our Mexican mission post in General Cepeda, where our founding family, the Summers family, bought a property there that we still own today. And it's sort of our international headquarters, if we had one. Most of the people who've been with on a trip with FMC have been there. And so they go spend three weeks down there basically on a long mission trip experience within their formation, where there's a lot of application of the things that they've been learning thus far in intake. And intake, you know, you can't take anything for granted today. So at the beginning of intake, we start out with discipleship formation. You know, people come to us, they're being called out of the world. They come from a variety of backgrounds. They come from. They all have trauma. I don't know a single person who lives in this modern world who doesn't have some sort of trauma that they're dealing with. And so there has to be a period of just silence and prayer and detox from the modern world. And so they enter into tech fast for one year. And it's. It sounds scary, but, man, I wish I could do it now. And just a time of deepening prayer, really strengthening their relationship with the Lord. We focus on the thrust of intake after the discipleship formation section is really on relationship, identity, mission, helping everyone understand that their mission comes from the Lord, who is their father. You are in relationship with him, and everything that you do or you don't do in mission is his work, not yours. Right. And so getting that order correct is important. I'm sorry about that. [00:39:38] Speaker A: It's okay. [00:39:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And so, so they enter here into that formation, and then while they're here, there's a period of discernment about where they're going to serve. And so this is sort of a new thing. It used to be that the leadership kind of decided where everybody was going to go. But as we've, you know, developed and evolved as an organization, we're bringing our new missionaries more and more into the discernment of what their mission post is going to be. But one thing that we always do is we always send our missionaries to an existing mission post. We don't send new missionaries out somewhere new where there aren't veterans already there to receive them. You can imagine transitioning into life in a mission post is not easy and it takes a while. And so it's really important to have some experienced people around who can help them settle in. [00:40:28] Speaker A: And again, so a family, a new family, if they're assigned somewhere, there will be other family missions company people there already who are, who are kind of have an established mission there and they just get, become part of that then. [00:40:45] Speaker B: Correct. [00:40:46] Speaker A: The only time you set up something new is with people who are veterans, people who are kind of been with you for a long time, they might go set up something new, but not, not a new family. [00:40:55] Speaker B: Right. And so we ask for a two year commitment for all of our new missionaries, whether you're single or families. I would just speak personally as a father and middle aged father at that, that when I was called to this six years ago, Eric, like selling your house and getting rid of all your stuff, like you can't conceptualize how hard that is. I couldn't imagine doing that and then just coming back two years later, like if we were doing this, this is a forever thing. I'm not going to turn my life upside down and go to all this effort to just turn around and come home two years later. So I was looking at it as a forever, this is a new thing we're setting off on as a family. And my kids were on board with that. You know, my wife and I were on board with that. We had some family members that weren't terribly excited about it, but they were interested to see what mission post we were going to be in, you know, because if we were like in a place like Costa Rica or Mexico, like it would be within pretty close distance, it'd be easy to come visit. We have other mission posts on the other side of the world. You know, I mentioned earlier, we've got a family in Ireland, we have a single missionary in Italy serving the poor in Rome. We have a long standing presence in the Philippines. And like I mentioned earlier, we have more and more families are going into these closed areas. And so we have two Asian countries where we have missionaries on the ground that, you know, we tend not to publicly advertise. But you know, there's lots of different places around the world where the Holy Spirit could call you to serve. And so at the end of your initial two year commitment, we invite people to pray, you know, lord, are you calling me to this life forever? You know, or just for another Two years, is it here in this mission post where we already are? Do you want me to do something new? Do you want us to consider a different thing? And so, you know, that kind of creates a culture of being very responsive to the Holy Spirit. And we try to be docile when we are called to do these things, just like we were when the Lord called us originally to the, to the missionary vocation. If the Lord says, hey, you've done a great thing here in this mission post, but I have something new for you. I would like for you to go to this place. Perhaps like one of the guys who's on staff with me, he and his family are live at one of the retreat centers that we own down here in southern Louisiana. And before they were on staff with us, they were missionaries in the field for four years, and their first year was in Mexico, and they loved it. And he's a Taekwondo instructor, and they created a Taekwondo studio to reach the young single men in this town where they were living. And everything seemed to be going great in their mission, but, you know, they entered into a period of discernment about what the Lord's will was for their family's life. And he very clearly told them, not just the husband, but told them all, I want you to go somewhere where people have never heard about me. And so they picked up their whole family and relocated to Asia for three years. And yeah, and so it's a. [00:44:07] Speaker A: So when a family gets to a, let's say their first two year commitment, does the. Does like the dad have a job? Or is it more like his job is somehow some missionary job? Does the. Does the mom, does she do work like this? How are the kids involved? Do they homeschool the kids? Are the kids doing the missionary work? And kind of, I mean, I understand they're being supported financially by the donation. So it's not like, I'm not saying the dad has a job, like a paying job, nowhere to keep them going, but like, basically, then what are they doing, each member of the family? Like, what are they doing on a regular basis? [00:44:48] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, that kind of decision is more or less driven by the educational choices that the family makes for their kids. You know, if they're homeschooling, if they're in a place where homeschooling is easily done, if you have a reliable Internet connection, you know, you can homeschool from just about anywhere and not really skip a beat as far as that is concerned. But, you know, a lot of families feel called to put their kids into the local schools. And they do that. Lots of people do that. And that's wonderful. And if they do that, then the parents availability during the day to do certain things is going to look different than if they have their kids with them all day long. And so like it's really hard to paint with a broad brunch brush on that. We say here that kids are often the best missionaries on the field because the kids have no inhibitions. Kids aren't afraid to walk up to a poor person and just strike up a conversation or, you know, we often hear stories like families arrive to their new mission post, young 4 year old kid meets villager. They start playing together. The next thing you know you are invited to a birthday party the next day. All because your kids started playing with this kid. Right. And they create openings for you as a family to get fully immersed into your new surroundings, your new community and getting to know these local people who were ultimately there to serve. So do they have jobs? You know, for the families that are in open countries where they have a lot more freedom to move about and be openly missionaries, gospel workers, there's not pressure to have, you know, like a formal job. But in these closed countries, we're finding where, where we're having an increased presence, we definitely are needing to have legitimate business reasons to be there. These countries are getting a lot more strict about, you know, not letting people like us into their environment if they think that we're there primarily to spread the gospel. And so we definitely are. We're learning a lot about that right now. In fact, next week I'm going to a conference a week from today on business as mission, starting businesses that create Christian subcultures within a foreign country to further the evangelization of a people. And these are people who are interested in starting these businesses. Like they look at rates of return differently. You know, you can't just look at it as a percentage of the monies that you've invested. It's also counted in the number of people that you've reached with the gospel. And so we're finding in these closed countries that we're having to be a lot more precise and creative about positioning our missionaries for success with legitimate businesses. These aren't tip fakers, these are tent like, you know, you heard that phrase as a process. [00:47:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:43] Speaker B: And so, yeah, so that's becoming more and more important thing part of what we do. And interestingly enough, like even countries that aren't quote unquote closed, more and more of them are taking away the missionary option. You know, on your visa application. So you actually have to have legitimate reasons to go more and more places. And so finding missionaries who don't just love Jesus, but also have the willingness and the desire and the skill set to launch small businesses in communities around the world like that, this provides a really interesting pathway for people like that to serve the Lord in a really creative and beautiful way to take, you know, maybe a guy like me who's in the secular world, who's got business skills and he loves the Lord and the gospel, he wants to share it, to do something new, just, you know, help underwrite a business in, you know, a closed country would be a beautiful sacrifice to make for the gospel. [00:48:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that sounds. That sounds very interesting because it's very natural and it's just, it's a way that you can really have interactions with people, genuine interactions with people that can hopefully help them out, especially when they're not able to be explicitly a missionary. So that's exciting. Okay, I'm. I think we're going to wrap it up here, but I just want to make sure is there. Okay, first of all, put a link to the family missions company in. In the show notes so people can do also probably try to find a link to the happy. Are you poor? Just so I can, you know, promote that a little bit. [00:49:11] Speaker B: Yeah, share that with everybody. Man, that's dynamite. [00:49:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:49:16] Speaker B: And then I would also just encourage everybody to check out our new podcast. We have a new podcast called you are Sent. It's named after the first book that was written by Jeannie Summers, who was one of our co founders. And we literally just put our first episodes up yesterday. And this podcast is going to be sort of a peek behind the curtain at everything that is involved with foreign missions, from discernment to formation to learning how to give a testimony, share the gospel effectively, how to disciple a people, how to assess and mitigate risk. You know, all that stuff that we talked about that's inherent to this life of mission. We're going to be sharing lots of call to mission testimonies from our current missionaries, as well as stories of transformation from the people that we serve. And the last thing I'll mention is that we're sharing miracle stories that we have seen with our own eyes. The Lord working in our presence a lot of times through us to affect wild things that your average everyday Catholic might struggle to believe. I'll just say that when you hear some of the stories that our people have seen, Eric, boy, it's a. It. It makes the hair on your Arm stand up. When you hear about food being multiplied and broken feet being healed and you know, stuff like that is still happening now. [00:50:37] Speaker A: And I think that that's what happens when you really open yourself up. What you were talking about earlier where you just tell the Lord, okay, here I am, send me. And then it's like when that happens, that, that is when miracles typically are more likely to happen. Because, I mean, and our Lord in his own ministry here on earth, you saw that. I mean, he explicitly says it's a faith other people that help bring about miracles. And so that, that's, that's fascinating. Yeah, I, I'm glad you brought the podcast. I'd forgotten to mention that because I did. I listened to the first episode and it's great. And so I'll, I'll put a link to the podcast as well so people can, can follow. I assume it's going to be on all the regular podcast platforms and stuff like that. So. [00:51:22] Speaker B: It is. [00:51:22] Speaker A: I'll find one of them and link to that and people can, you know, once they know that they can find it on their own platforms. [00:51:27] Speaker B: Eventually. We're going to have video, but we're audio only for now. [00:51:30] Speaker A: That's okay. I mean, I, I always, young people, they love the video, but I'm old enough that I only listen to audio podcasts. I cannot, I cannot watch it. I mean, the funny thing is we do video here because I find that most, and it's funny, we do both audio and video and I find most people, you know, younger. The video attracts younger people and the audio tracks older people. So it's good to have both. But for now, you know, it's good to have audio so I'll link to that as well. So. Awesome. This is great. I really, I'm glad you reached out to me actually, when you tell me about the podcast so we, I could get you on here and I just encourage people to pray about this, to pray about the idea of being a missionary. Find out about family missions company because even if you don't feel called a missionary, you can financially support missionaries through that. You could do a week long missionary. It's not like they're not going to ask you the first day, just so, you know, give me two years at least or. [00:52:17] Speaker B: Right. [00:52:18] Speaker A: You know, they're, it's, trust me, it's gonna, they're gonna be a soft sell, you know, they. Because like you just said, you want to make sure it's like, it's, it's a, it's both. It's just like a vocation to the priesthood, where the young man might feel called a priesthood, but the diocese might be like, no, I don't think you do have it. And you guys would be the same way. I assume when somebody comes to you, it's a. It's a. It's. Both sides have to kind of agree to this. So. So don't be intimidated is what I'm trying to tell people who are, you know, kind of thinking about it just very casually, even. So. Yeah. [00:52:46] Speaker B: And I would just, yeah. Encourage people. If you have the famous inkling that the Lord has put this on your heart, just give us a call. Ask for me. Go to our website, familymissionscompany.com look at our mission trip page, our becoming a missionary page. We would love to meet as many of your listeners as possible and introduce people to this beautiful thing. [00:53:06] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much, Saul. I appreciate you being on the program today. [00:53:09] Speaker B: All right, Eric, thank you very much. [00:53:11] Speaker A: Okay, until next time, everybody. God love.