From Listener to Host

When I say that I never aspired to host a podcast, I mean… never.

But here I am, co-host of Go! You Are Sent, FMC’s second ever podcast, and currently the #1 show across all platforms in the narrow, but vitally important “lay Catholic foreign missions” category—you can imagine the competition we have.

The show is named after the book of the same title, written and published by FMC’s co-founder, Mrs. Genie Summers. And like the book, our primary mission is to give our listeners a peek behind the curtain at everything entailed in foreign mission work, with the ultimate aim of mobilizing lay Catholics en masse to engage in the Great Commission and “Go!” in whatever way they can, given their state of life.

As of this writing, we are 14 episodes into Go! You Are Sent, and I still can’t help but laugh at God’s humor that I am a podcast co-host now. It’s an obvious God-wink, because my family’s initial call to mission occurred in large part through FMC’s original podcast eight years ago.

Like so many others, we found FMC through an internet search, marveled at the unexpected beauty of the lay missionary vocation, and binge-watched every FMC video on YouTube at the time. Providentially, we also stumbled onto The FMC Podcast, which had just launched in 2017, and so we also listened to each episode, some multiple times.

And after months of prayer, spiritual direction, podcast consumption, and conversation, my family attended FMC’s Come & See weekend at their Big Woods Mission in Louisiana as the last step of our discernment in June 2018.

And the highlight of the week, for me at least, was seeing podcast co-host Matt Spizale walk into the community house during one of the first events. I leaned over and very inconspicuously whisper-shouted to my wife, Jan, “There he is!”

I had not yet met Matt, but podcasts are a funny thing. By that point, I’d listened to his voice (and that of his co-host, Jonathan Kiehl) for dozens of hours. He not only made me laugh, but through his experience and missionary spirituality, he gently invited me and all other listeners to reassess many things we took for granted in our faith. Episodes like “Jesus, the Lord of Risk,” “Justice is Not Optional for Jesus,” and “A Spirituality of Almsgiving” were deeply impactful.

So it was no small suffering for my family when, after just 20 episodes, FMC stopped producing the podcast in 2018.

While it happened that we also couldn’t join as missionaries that year, our lives were forever impacted, a missionary flame having been ignited. So when I joined FMC in 2022 as the Mission Advancement Director, one of my hopes was to resurrect the podcast in some form or fashion. And here we are!

Though I do miss dreaming about my family serving in a foreign mission post, I’m deeply grateful that the Lord has me right here at Big Woods, supporting the bigger mission in this unique way. And I am honored to be one of the vehicles through which Go! You Are Sent has come to life.