Detroit, MI
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This report comes from evangelist Mark with our National SPSE team in Warren, Michigan:
Staff from the National SPSE office have taught evangelization to seminarians for over ten years. Bob and I went to the Detroit Catholic Campus Ministry office at Our Lady of the Rosary Church. There, we met a lay campus minister and several seminarians from Sacred Heart Major Seminary. We then walked 15 minutes down the street to nearby Wayne State University. We were given a table inside the student center and talked to students that approached the table. However, college policy said that we were not allowed to approach students inside the student center, away from the table. Half of us stayed at the table while the rest went outside to approach students walking between buildings.
I spent most of the time outside with two seminarians, Br. Andrew and Gabriel. We had three good, long conversations in our one hour. Probably the best and most fruitful conversation was with a young man named Favored. He grew up in Nigeria, considers himself Christian, and feels drawn mostly to Baptist and Pentecostal churches. Gabriel shared his love and Sacred Scripture and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. I talked about the universal, “Catholic” nature of the Church and how, no matter what your spirituality is, there is a home for you in the Catholic Church and our tools to help you grow in faith. Favored then shared how he was discouraged by the division among Christians. Br. Andrew explained that division is caused by human pride, bad interpretations of the Bible, etc . I continued and said that Jesus knew that His followers would be divided, as evidenced by His prayer in the Agony in the Garden. Gabriel chimed in, noting that when you read the Acts of the Apostles, especially the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, it shows that the organized Church hierarchy was key to settling disagreements among believers.
In the end, Favored was happy to receive prayer and encouraged by our witness. We invited him to visit to the Catholic ministry at Our Lady of the Rosary down the street and gave him a link to a group WhatsApp so he could easily communicate with campus ministry.