Lay Catholic women embrace missionary life at home and overseas 'holding up this church'

By Kiki Hayden, OSV News

(OSV News) -- All over the world, lay women from every nation are engaged in the missionary work of the church -- whether volunteering at their local parishes or serving on mission far away from their hometown.

For Joanne Miya, 64, her own story of accompaniment, relationship and answering "yes" to God's call to mission as a lay missionary took her to Tanzania for 38 of the last 39 years.

"The women are holding up this church," Miya said, remarking that two-thirds of those attending Mass are women. "Maybe from the bottom up, but they're holding it up."

In December 1983, Miya moved to Tanzania for her first contract as a Maryknoll Lay Missioner. There, she met and married her husband and had five children. After her youngest was born, Miya and her husband served together as Maryknoll Lay Missioners together while raising their children. Miya's husband is now retired, but Miya continues to serve as a missioner.

"I think it helps to be a woman ministering to other women. And likewise they minister to me," Miya said.

She is acutely aware of both the challenges and the blessings of serving in a "cross-cultural" setting.

"I am never going to be Tanzanian," she said. "The idea is: God was here before we got here. And so we're entering into a story that does not begin with us." Miya likened serving on mission to "joining hands with others on their journey."

She described collaborating with her Tanzanian colleagues: "It's a synergistic effect; it's like one plus one equals five. And then when God is the motivation for it all, then one plus one can equal a thousand."

Between semesters in graduate school, Meghan Meros served for a summer with Maryknoll Lay Missioners. She has also served and worked with several other nonprofit and volunteer organizations. Now 36, Meros works as Program Manager of Franciscan Mission Service.

"Service and mission work is based on relationship and real accompaniment," Meros told OSV News. "There's something very religious-lifey about our formation program," said Meros. For several months, prospective missioners live in community in the organization's house in Washington, D.C., and take classes on "intercultural competency, mental health on mission, appropriate boundaries." They also learn about "Scripture and mission, theology, trauma," and "different forms of prayer," according to Meros.

Meros emphasized the important contributions of lay women in the church.

"I think there's a lot in our church that can be really male-centered," she said. "That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing -- our church serves men and women -- but I think sometimes the gifts of women are overlooked."

When a lay woman embraces the call to mission work, "I think there's something really prophetic about that," Meros said. "Sometimes the ways that a woman's gifts touch a community just can't be predicted or foreseen."

Elizabeth Joslyn has been thinking a lot about the gifts of women. Joslyn serves with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students at Missouri University of Science and Technology in Rolla, Missouri.

"On campus, it's a 75% male population," the 25-year-old FOCUS missionary told OSV News. Joslyn referenced St. John Paul II's 1995 Letter to Women, saying, "women see a system and the person in it, not just the system."

According to Joslyn, women are "deeply relational beings -- not that men aren't, but we just have a particular gift of seeing and putting the person first." Including the person of Jesus. When Joslyn sees students living lives centered around the sacraments, she asks, "can we see the person behind this? Can we see Jesus behind this?"

Joslyn felt called to minister to college women because "I had a lot of women on my heart from my sorority in college and from my classes." She saw herself in young women in college and felt a desire "to walk with them."

Joslyn encourages all women discerning mission work to ask themselves, "Do I see myself in these people and do I desire transformation for them in the same way that I have desired transformation for myself?"

Also serving with FOCUS, Melissa Chang, 39, sees herself in the women she serves at the Our Catholic Family of parishes in Nebraska. It is a grouping of three parishes with seven churches in all. A mother with young children, Chang feels she is able to "come alongside" other women. "That can be really messy but it's really beautiful," she told OSV News.

Sarita Madrid, a 26-year-old missionary with Vagabond Missions, speaks directly to the hearts of the teenaged girls she encounters in Pittsburgh. On one retreat, a teenage girl described the absence of her father in her youth -- "kind of implying it's 'whatever' now," said Madrid. Madrid looked at her, and said "'Well, you know, you did deserve somebody who was there for you, and you deserved somebody who loved you well, and who wouldn't -- who didn't leave."

Madrid described this encounter as "sitting in the ache" with this teenager. "So many women believe these things, so many young girls just think that they don't deserve love, and they're not worthy of love," said Madrid.

Madison Roufs, 20, also speaks to the hearts of teenage girls. As a missionary with NET Ministries, she lives in a van and travels throughout the Northwestern U.S., assisting with NET retreats for middle and high school students.

Sometimes, retreatants split into "men's and women's sessions," where Roufs has a unique opportunity. Roufs encourages the teenage girls to realize "the Lord values them in every single way."

"God's created us to be equal to men, and women have their own gifts that men do not have, and men have gifts that women don't have," she said. Roufs also touches on body image, telling girls, "You don't have to change yourself to be beautiful to the world's standard, because you're already beautiful the way you are to the Lord."

To lay women discerning mission work, Roufs's advice is: "If the Lord is calling you to it, caring so much more about what the Lord thinks, and what the Lord is asking -- more than what people around you are thinking and asking -- that will get you so, so far."