Guest
Saul Keeton is the Director of Mission Advancement for Family Missions Company.
Links
- Family Missions Company
- Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom (book)
- “Go! You Are Sent” (podcast)
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
Do Catholic missionaries still exist? 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 Sammons, 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.
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Okay, so our guest today is Saul Keeton. 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 Catholic’s 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 wanted to bring him on to talk about it. So welcome to the program, Saul.
Saul Keeton:
Thank you so much, Eric. It’s good to be with you today.
Eric Sammons:
Why don’t we start just by giving us your background like cradle Catholic, Convert, how you grew up, why you got involved with missionary work.
Saul Keeton:
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. 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.
When I got into RCIA, it was true, but I had trouble articulating why. 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. It filled a big hole in my heart. And so, I became Catholic then.
I think I just became a regular everyday Catholic, and my faith in those early years, even though I had the zeal of a new convert, I don’t know that it was 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. It was while I was there away from the influence of her family that I really stood on my own two feet as a Catholic. There had been a transition in the papacy from John Paul II to Benedict, and that led me down many rabbit holes, reading magisterial documents, chasing all the footnotes, seeing the beauty in how our popes were teaching us today how to apply the gospel to our lives now 2,000 years down the road from the incarnation and the story of our salvation. And so, my faith really came alive then.
We continued to move around. We found ourselves in Mississippi in 2013 for another opportunity. We were there for about five years before the Lord really put the call to mission on our heart for the first time. Both of us were just really having 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, big garage with a garage gym in it full of CrossFit gear from Rogue Fitness.
By all appearances, everything seemed to be wonderful, but we just didn’t feel like we would … We felt like we were called to something more, and we just didn’t know what that was. 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. 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 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 the beginning of a romance with the call to mission. We joke in my house that my wife was sold way earlier than I was. She was binge watching all the YouTube videos that FMC had at the time while I was snoring.
She proposed to me one day, “Hey, what do you think about us going on a mission trip as a family?” She was shocked that I just instantaneously said yes. I didn’t push back on her at all about 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.
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 pushed me out the door to Mexico with our three oldest kids thinking to herself, if we’re going to be missionaries, my husband has to … 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 every day getting my socks knocked off by everything I was experiencing. It was really sensory overload for me experiencing missions for the first time, seeing the grinding poverty that’s present in the third world. You hear people say all the time that you just think 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.
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 troopers, everybody was experiencing this piece that was otherworldly. I saw these people in the midst of all this material deprivation that were happy, and I wasn’t happy. I mean I was a senior vice president at a bank and, again, “living the American dream”. I had a good time and I might’ve told dad jokes at work every day, but I wasn’t happy the way these people were happy. I wanted whatever they had.
And so, we came home from that trip, applied to be missionaries, sold our house, gave away a bunch of our stuff. Then very shortly thereafter, my little boy at the time was four, was diagnosed with autism. And so, we weren’t able to go into the field. 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, 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 the house?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. 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.
Saul Keeton:
I know. Well, so I ended up selling the house two years later and moving down here. And so, yeah, 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.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Saul Keeton:
And so, two years ago, we were not having a lot of peace in our hearts, my wife and I, again, lying in bed at night talking about the future and how we wanted our lives to turn out. We thought that the Lord was still asking big things of us, and we just weren’t finding fulfillment. And so, we decided to really get serious about this opportunity, came down here, met the leadership team, all the people that I would be working with to help 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. It’s a journey, man. It’s an adventure working in this world.
Eric Sammons:
I bet. One thing you mentioned I want to touch upon, you said … You’re a convert and you said a lot of the people involved are converts. I’m a convert as well. I remember in my Protestant days, missionaries were very common. Every church I knew about, my church, my Methodist church, and every Protestant church I knew about sponsored a missionary. Some couple, usually a young couple, or an individual who would go to some foreign country and 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, obviously. We invented it.
Saul Keeton:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
But at the same time modern, particularly last few decades, it seems like missionary work has become just something that not really thought of very much by Catholics. Has your experience been dealing with Catholics who are interested in missionary work, a lot of them are converts, or is it just pretty much a balance, or how has that worked out?
Saul Keeton:
It’s a real mix here. The people that are called to mission and say yes to that radical call, I mean it’s an eclectic bunch. There are a good number of converts here, but there’s also a good number of cradle Catholic. 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. 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, a very high Anglican liturgy-
Eric Sammons:
Oh, wow.
Saul Keeton:
… that was altar rail, ad orientem, incense, smells and bells but as an Anglican. So when I became Catholic in Houston, you couldn’t find a liturgy like that in 2001 in Houston, Texas. 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 lay mission in their DNA. It’s like coded hard into their culture. 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. They go visit them in person. They see 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. 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. It’s really … They have a culture of sending in the Protestant world and really loving and revering almost their missionaries. And the-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
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 we’d meet with him, any needs he had and things like that. Of course, that doesn’t really exist in the Catholic world. 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. Now, of course, we have a lot less priests and religious, and so laypeople have had to step up in a lot of areas, Catholic education and other areas, and missionary’s 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. And so, what is the purpose of lay missionary? I think that’s where … I imagine you probably get these questions a lot at your organization. So how should Catholics look at the lay role versus the priestly role when it comes to missionary work?
Saul Keeton:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we love the priesthood. 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 through the journey. Everywhere we work in the field, we work at the invitation of a bishop. We’re not rogue agents out there just 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 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. It’s 100% lay-run, 100% lay mission. And so, what’s the place of a lay missionary in the world today?
What I like to imagine is 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 laypeople 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 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 naive. Laypeople 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, which my pastor, your pastor, would struggle to reach in the same way that you could.
And so, I think that laypeople particularly are suited for this vocation of mission. My prayer is that when we are thinking about vocations as Catholics, we’re not just praying in October for vocations to the priesthood and religious life. We need those vocations, we should pray for them, but I think you can appreciate it as a convert like me, we should also be praying for missionary vocations.
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 laypeople being listed … Like in the document ad gentes, when the council fathers wrote who the missionaries are, they listed the laymen right alongside priests and religious. It wasn’t like they were second-class citizens.
So I think the church through the council, through Paul VI with Evangelii Nuntiandi, John Paul II with Redemptoris Missio, through all the writings of Benedict, Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, even his most recent encyclical, Dilexit nos, without 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.
This is all of our responsibility. God has a mission, and the church is part of that mission. That trickles down to each one of us. When we’re baptized and confirmed into this, it’s not just something that we’re invited into. This is something that God wants us to do and he expects us to do it. It’s not just an invitation, it’s actually a duty.
Duty is a bad word. You want to talk about obligations and things we have to do. Americans don’t like that. That makes us stand up a little bit straighter and furrow our brows. “What are you talking about I’ve got to do something? You don’t tell me what to do,” right?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. I mean it’s funny because I’ve been involved with evangelization for many, many years. I was the director of evangelization for the diocese. I wrote a book called The Old Evangelization. You know one thing I discovered, is that 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 like that because I knew nobody was going to read it. Nobody’s going to listen because 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 is missionary in a certain sense, like to your neighbors, to your family, to your community, all that stuff. So even if we’re not called to go to a foreign country, we’re all called to be missionaries.
Saul Keeton:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
Practically speaking then, when your missionaries go to another country, do they then just … Are they set up with the local parish to funnel people … Not funnel people. That’s probably a crude way to put it. But bring people to the local priest and things of that nature.
Saul Keeton:
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 those individuals that live there, the people they’re entering into.
There are three billion people at least. There’s probably closer to four 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, we burn to go share Jesus with those people. But that’s not our only mission. We also are 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?
Eric Sammons:
Oh, wow.
Saul Keeton:
Ireland has a long history of sending missionaries to us. 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. 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. He was like, “We need families in Ireland,” and that family was like, “We should be that family.”
Eric Sammons:
My son-in-law actually was two years with NET in Ireland.
Saul Keeton:
Okay.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah.
Saul Keeton:
Well, so we send people all over the world and they enter into wildly diverse environments and landscapes. 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 he wants them to do, and the needs of the local church that they’re entering into, if there is a local church.
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 “closed”, where the legal structure is such where it’s maybe dangerous to be a missionary, 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, where there’s a lot of people in Mexico who have a dying faith who need to be brought back to life.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. So I want to talk a little practical about Family Missions Company. 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. I remember I Googled something like Catholic family missionary or something like that, and sure enough, Family Missions Company came up top of the Google even back then. I looked into it and I did some research because we were interested.
I will say that we decided not to. We didn’t do anything with it. It was partly because we had four young children and other things, stuff going on. I think some of it was just like … I mean it’s funny. I have this innate desire somewhat to be a missionary, but I also hate traveling. So it’s like we kind of-
Saul Keeton:
Maybe you just travel one place and then stay there.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, exactly. I don’t like being away from my house, though. I’m a homebody. But at the same time, I think that the biggest thing, I’m sure you get this a lot, but 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 dads … Let’s talk to the dads for a minute. We want to be responsible. We want to make sure we’re taking care of our kids. We don’t want to put them in a dangerous environment, whether … Dangerous in the sense of violence, but just dangerous as far as health, because we have a great health system in … I mean I have a lot of criticisms of it, but in general in America, you’re not going to die from a basic disease or anything like that. You’re going to have good healthcare for that. If you get in an accident, you’re going to get taken care of pretty well.
So all these things, I think a lot of us, that’s the first thing that comes to our mind, like, yeah, it sounds nice, the idea of serving Jesus in this way. But practically speaking, you just get inundated with all this stuff. I mean obviously it’s worked for … How long has FMC been around?
Saul Keeton:
We’re almost 30 years old.
Eric Sammons:
So obviously people have been doing it for at least 30 years, and I don’t think you’re going to-
Saul Keeton:
Longer than that because our founding family, they were missionaries in the foreign field for 20 years before they founded FMC.
Eric Sammons:
I don’t think any of them have died or anything. I mean I hope not.
Saul Keeton:
In all that time we’ve had one missionary die on the field, and it was accidental drowning.
Eric Sammons:
Right. And so, that can happen in America, too.
Saul Keeton:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So walk through that logic of how that all works out then.
Saul Keeton:
What logic?
Eric Sammons:
Right, exactly. That’s why I said the word.
Saul Keeton:
Right?
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. I mean, it’s not always logical to follow God.
Saul Keeton:
No, it’s not. People are going to think you’re insane.
Eric Sammons:
Not seeing the logic at least.
Saul Keeton:
People think you’re crazy, and it’s wonderful. That’s the great thing about being a Christian. The world is content for there to be Christians. The world doesn’t like there to be serious Christians. When you hear the Lord whisper in your ear that he wants you to enter into this life with him and you turn around and say yes, you’re taking your faith very seriously.
The great thing that we can rest in, Eric, is that as families, the Lord doesn’t just call the husband. The Lord doesn’t just call the wife. He calls every … If he’s calling me, he’s calling my kids, too.
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.
We’re trying hard to help these new missionaries coming in to 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.
Not everyone can be the tip of the spear. Some of us need to be the shaft of the spear. The shaft of a spear is usually very long because it takes a lot of weight to penetrate that spear. 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.
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. That happens a lot. Families end up down here with 4, 5, 6, 10 kids that have heard this call to mission.
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 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.
I don’t know why, honestly. I don’t know why I’m here. I mean I was an average Catholic. 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 all things considered. But I received that call, and it didn’t make sense. 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 called to this life.
Because we weren’t going to go into … 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 the reaction is universal, “This is absurd,” right?
Eric Sammons:
You’re like, “You’re right.”
Saul Keeton:
“You’re right.” But you know what? 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. I believe that he loves me and I believe he loves you. I believe he’s real. He gave us the church as an extension of his incarnation to perpetuate his presence in the world, to teach us and guide us.
I understand right now that that same God is active in my heart and calling me to this work. How can I say no to that? I mean I’m scared. Do I know what’s going to happen? How am I going to deal with taking cold showers for the rest of my life? Or am I going to just get one shower a week and I won’t care if it’s hot or cold? 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 a huge component of our work at Family Missions Company is colored by our charism of gospel poverty, which is … I don’t know if you’ve ever read Happy Are You Poor by Father Thomas Dubay?
Eric Sammons:
Oh yeah. I think I was reading it when I was thinking about going on the mission or something like that. Yeah, Father Dubay.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah. 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.
Eric Sammons:
Just real quick, I highly recommend it. I don’t even know if it’s still in print.
Saul Keeton:
It is.
Eric Sammons:
Father Thomas Dubay. 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 all, how rich we are materially. I don’t care what your situation is, we’re rich if you’re in America, basically. It just really does make you think about it. So yeah. It’s a great book.
Saul Keeton:
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 … We’re born into the families we’re born into. We don’t choose them. We just 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. If you make good grades in college, then you’ll get a good job. 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. If you save a little money along the way and work hard for 35 or 40 years, if you live through that, then you can enjoy your life at the end for 5 or 10 years before you die.
That’s sort of like the American dream. When you step back, 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. 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. 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, people were going out to see John the Baptist. He was upbraiding them, “You broods of vipers.” He convicted their consciences. They asked him, “What should we do?” and he said, “If you have two coats, give one away.” 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.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Saul Keeton:
You think about all the billions of people who’ve ever lived and the percentage of them that have lived in this country and have even known what the word retirement is, retirement means. It’s a foreign concept to people. Most people are worried about throughout history, can I find work within walking distance of my hut? Here in America, we have this really impossibly high standard of living.
And so, gospel poverty is just beautiful because it opens your eyes. 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. 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, it gives you such great freedom. You get to live in freedom. Then when the Lord calls somebody like that, they can say yes and no. They’re ready to serve. It doesn’t matter what you call them to do.
It’s like the Jews on the night of the Passover. They had the staff in their hand and their loins girded as if they were ready to go on a journey right now. The person who lives like that is sort of like that.
Eric Sammons:
I know you have missionaries in a lot of different countries doing … And, like you said before, they’re very different depending on what country it is. But walk us through a typical family. They decided to do a two-year mission, because that’s … If I remember correctly, that’s your … I know you have the week missionary trips for people introduced to it and help out and stuff like that.
But the two-year mission, so let’s say a family has four kids or something like that, and they’re like, “We’re going to do this,” and they’re accepted and everything goes through. Walk through the process from the time they get accepted, what do they do here? Do they sell everything they own, like their house and stuff like that? Then what’s it like? Where do they move to? Do they move into … Do you have housing or is it just a house in a neighborhood? 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? Walk us through … I know it’s very diverse over 30 years, I’m sure it is. But just the overview of what that’s like.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah. Our intake process has evolved over that time, over those 30 years. 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.
Usually people find us on Google or they meet another missionary. Usually the call to mission from the Lord comes from an encounter. 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, that convicted my heart so deeply. And so, that encounter is really powerful.
So people find out about us, they have an encounter. The Lord taps them, shakes them awake. Then what? Then they usually call us. We have a vocations team here that receives those phone calls and where they start to just 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.” 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?” Our discernment process on the front is very … It’s deliberate and long. 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 prepare their life for mission if they are not really being called here, because this is a really hard life.
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 certainly wouldn’t be good to the people that you might be sent to serve if you didn’t have a legitimate call. So the discernment on the front end is pretty robust.
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 that will support them through their contributions and their prayers. 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. They’re here for six months to do that. 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. It’s our international headquarters if we had one.
Most of the people who’ve been 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.
In intake … You can’t take anything for granted today. So at the beginning of intake, we start out with discipleship formation. People come to us, they’re being called out of the world. They come from a variety of backgrounds. 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 a tech fast for one year. It sounds scary, but, man, I wish I could do it now. 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. And so, getting that order correct is important. I’m sorry about that.
Eric Sammons:
It’s okay.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah. So they enter here into that formation. Then while they’re here, there’s a period of discernment about where they’re going to serve. And so, this is a new thing. It used to be that the leadership decided where everybody was going to go, but as we’ve 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. Again-
Eric Sammons:
So a new family, if they’re assigned somewhere, there will be other Family Missions Company people there already who have an established mission. They just become part of that then.
Saul Keeton:
Correct. They become-
Eric Sammons:
And so, the only time you set up something new is with people who are veterans, people who are … Been with you for a long time. They might go set up something new, but not a new family.
Saul Keeton:
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, selling your house and getting rid of all your stuff, you can’t conceptualize how hard that is. I couldn’t imagine doing that, and then just coming back two years later. 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. 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 posts we were going to be in, because if we were in a place like Costa Rica or Mexico, 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. 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 longstanding presence in the Philippines. Like I mentioned earlier, 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 we tend not to publicly advertise.
But 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, “Lord, are you calling me to this life forever 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, that creates a culture of being very responsive to the Holy Spirit. 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 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.”
One of the guys who’s on staff with me, he and his family live at one of the retreat centers that we own down here in Southern Louisiana. Before they were on staff with us, they were missionaries in the field for four years. Their first year was in Mexico, and they loved it. He’s a Taekwondo instructor and they created a Taekwondo studio to reach the young single men in this town where they were living.
Everything seemed to be going great in their mission, but they entered into a period of discernment about what the Lord’s will was for their family’s life. 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.
Eric Sammons:
Wow.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah. And so, it’s a-
Eric Sammons:
So when a family gets to, let’s say, their first two-year commitment, does the dad have a job or is it more like his job is somehow some missionary job? 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?
I mean I understand they’re being supported financially by the donation. So I’m not saying that dad has a job like a paying job to keep them going, but basically then what are they doing … Each member of the family, what are they doing on a regular basis?
Saul Keeton:
Yeah. Well, I mean that decision is more or less driven by the educational choices that the family makes for their kids. If they’re homeschooling, if they’re in a place where homeschooling is easily done, if you have a reliable internet connection, you can homeschool from just about anywhere and not really skip a beat as far as that is concerned.
But 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. 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, it’s really hard to paint with a broad 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 we often hear stories like families arrived at their new mission posts, young four-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. 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? 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 a formal job. But in these closed countries, we’re finding 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 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. These are people who are interested in starting these businesses. They look at rates of return differently. 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 temp fakers, these are temp, right?
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Saul Keeton:
You heard that phrase as a Protestant?
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Saul Keeton:
And so, yeah, so that’s becoming a more and more important part of what we do. Interestingly enough, even countries that aren’t “closed”, more and more of them are taking away the missionary option on their visa application. So you actually have to have legitimate reasons to go more and more places.
Eric Sammons:
Interesting.
Saul Keeton:
And so, finding missionaries who don’t just love Jesus, but also have the willingness and the desire and the skillset to launch small businesses in communities around the world, this provides a really interesting pathway for people like that to serve the Lord in a really creative and beautiful way. To take 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, to help underwrite a business in a closed country would be a beautiful sacrifice to make for the gospel.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, that sounds very interesting because it’s very natural and 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.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, I think we’re going to wrap it up here, but I just want to make sure, is there … Okay. First of all, I’ll put a link to the Family Missions Company in the show notes so people can … I’d also probably try to find a link to the Happy Are You Poor, just so I can promote that a little bit.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah, share that with everybody, man.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, exactly.
Saul Keeton:
That book is dynamite.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, absolutely.
Saul Keeton:
That book is dynamite. Then I would also just encourage everybody to check out our new podcast. We have a new podcast called Go! You Are Sent.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, right, right.
Saul Keeton:
It’s named after the first book that was written by Genie Summers, who was one of our co-founders. We literally just put our first episodes up yesterday. This podcast is going to be 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 other people, how to assess and mitigate risk, 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.
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 makes the hair on your arm stand up when you hear about food being multiplied and broken feet being healed. Stuff like that is still happening now.
Eric Sammons:
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.” Then it’s like when that happens, 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 the faith of the people that help bring about miracles.
Saul Keeton:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
And so, that’s fascinating. Yeah, I’m glad you brought the podcast. I’d forgotten to mention that, because I listened to the first episode and it’s great. And so, I’ll put a link to the podcast as well so people can follow. I assume it’s going to be on all the regular podcast platforms and stuff like that.
Saul Keeton:
It is.
Eric Sammons:
I’ll find one of them and link to that. People can … Once they know that, they can find it on their own platform.
Saul Keeton:
Eventually we’re going to have video, but we’re audio only for now.
Eric Sammons:
That’s okay. I mean all these young people, they love the video. But I’m old enough that I only listen to audio podcast. 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 … The video attracts younger people and the audio attracts older people. So it’s good to have both. But for now, it’s good to have audio. So I’ll link to that as well.
Saul Keeton:
Awesome.
Eric Sammons:
This is great. I’m glad you reached out to me actually when you’re telling me about the podcast, so I could get you on here. I’d 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 to 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.”
Saul Keeton:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
Trust me, they’re going to be a soft sell because, like you just said, you want to make sure it’s … It’s just like a vocation to the priesthood where the young man might feel called to priesthood, but the diocese might be like, “No, I don’t think you do have it.” You guys would be the same way, I assume. When somebody comes to you, both sides have to agree to this. So don’t be intimidated is what I’m trying to tell people who are thinking about it just very casually even.
Saul Keeton:
Yeah, and I would just encourage people, if you have the faintest 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.
Eric Sammons:
Awesome. Thanks so much, Saul. I appreciate you being on the program today.
Saul Keeton:
All right, Eric. Thank you very much.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Until next time, everybody. God love you.