As St. Stephen pastor, Bishop-elect Williams takes Gospel to the streets

While taking a walk in Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis with her four children, Elisa Delgado had an encounter that changed her life. It was there in 2013 that she got her first taste of street ministry at St. Stephen in Minneapolis.

At the time, she was struggling as a single mother of four children, with her oldest, Angel Dominguez, confined to a wheelchair. She came to the U.S. from Mexico in 1996 looking for a better life. Among the things she left behind: her faith.

She had been raised Catholic, but the pressures and stresses of caring for her children crowded out the kind of spiritual nourishment she now knows she needed. As a result, for more than 15 years she had not set foot in a church.

A group of four missionaries from St. Stephen changed that. She remembers the encounter vividly. During her walk in Powderhorn, she looked up and saw them approaching her.

“I thought they were from another religion,” Delgado, 41, said through a translator. “I didn’t know what they were going to say.”

So, she grabbed her phone and quickly dialed her mother in Mexico in order to look occupied and duck the missionaries. It worked, but only once. They circled around and came back a second time.

“They were pretty stubborn,” Delgado recalled. And caring, she soon learned.

“They asked me if I was married, if my children had received the sacraments,” she said. “And, I told them that I wasn’t married, I had suffered domestic violence and I was by myself in this country with my four children.”

They invited her to come to St. Stephen, which she did. In 2014, her children were baptized and joined the Church at the Easter Vigil at St. Stephen, with Father (now Bishop-elect) Joseph Williams, the pastor, celebrating the Mass and administering the sacraments. Since then, Delgado, who got married at St. Stephen in 2019, has become a fixture at the church and today is the parish sacristan, a volunteer role that involves helping Monica Mesa, the parish’s liturgy coordinator.

“Elisa is great; she’s my right hand,” Mesa said. “She’s so responsible and she’s always available, and that shows how much she loves the Lord.”

This is exactly what Bishop-elect Williams had in mind when he decided to launch street ministry in 2008, shortly after being named St. Stephen’s pastor. He was determined to engage people in the neighborhood and invite them to the parish. Changing demographics in the area had brought many more Latinos to the blocks surrounding St. Stephen. Fluent in Spanish, Father Williams wanted to create encounters and conversations that would lead to more people in the pews.

Katy Jantscher, who was hired in August 2008 to work in Latino ministry at St. Stephen, was on the ground floor of that effort. As volunteers and staff met to learn how to take faith to the streets, she was excited and nervous. Their first attempt at this style of spreading the Gospel — a style foreign to many Catholics — came during Holy Week 2009. Parishioners went out into the neighborhood on three consecutive days starting on Holy Thursday, knocking on doors and talking to people on the streets, in parks and at bus stops.

“Doing door-to-door evangelization, you’re definitely putting yourself out there,” said Jantscher, 37. “You have to really ask for the graces of the Holy Spirit to be with you. The cool thing about Father Joseph is he just has so much trust in the Holy Spirit, and he’s definitely willing to just comply with what the Holy Spirit asks of him.”

As Bishop-elect Williams continued to lead the way, more and more people, especially Latinos, not only came to the church for Mass, but became regulars. Parish enrollment that numbered only in the dozens during his first few months soon expanded to more than 1,000. Today, there are 1,300 parishioners, Mesa said.

Jantscher, who is bilingual, worked for the parish until 2013, when she became a Spanish teacher at Benilde-St. Margaret’s School in St. Louis Park. She married in 2017, and she and her husband, Tom, have two children and belong to St. John the Baptist in New Brighton.

Looking back on her street evangelization experience, she considers this way of spreading the Gospel an “essential” part of parish life, especially given recent data showing that large numbers of adults are leaving the Church.

“What Father Joseph noticed and capitalized on was that need for going out” into the streets, she said. “We can’t just sit in our churches and wait for people to come.”

As Bishop-elect Williams and other volunteers walked the pavement and knocked on doors, they got some refusals, which they expected. But there were many positives, and even a few surprises, like the time 11 years ago Bishop Williams knocked on a door and ended up talking with an African American man who enjoyed the visit so much he left his house and went with the group the rest of the way.

“He even came back to the church so that he could do a faith sharing,” Bishop-elect Williams recalled. “It was very moving, for sure.”

During a December interview with The Catholic Spirit, Bishop-elect Williams said some of his motivation for street ministry was fueled by the words of the late Archbishop Harry Flynn, who ordained him to the priesthood in 2002. The archbishop talked of the need to get rid of what he called “the come-and-get-it Church: ‘We have what you need, the sacraments. You know where to find us. Come and get it,’” Bishop-elect Williams recalled Archbishop Flynn (who died in 2019) saying at the time.

In its place, Bishop-elect Williams believes that priests and parishioners alike need to fulfill the “Great Commission” recorded in Matthew 28, which Jesus instituted with these words: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.”

For Bishop-elect Williams, the key word in this phrase is, “Go.”

“We try to canvas the neighborhoods,” he said of an effort that continues today, but with some key changes. “It starts with a human encounter, this idea that ‘we’re your neighbors, we’re from St. Stephen’s, (and) we’re just trying to get to know our neighbors.’”

Joining the street ministry team in those early days was Bishop-elect Williams’ sister, Katherine Ranniger, who graduated from college in 2008 and wanted to help her brother build a congregation at St. Stephen. She soon learned that joining the parish meant doing street ministry. With her brother’s help, she overcame her initial reluctance to take faith out into the neighborhoods.

“I never, ever had plans or even hope for street evangelization,” said Ranniger, 36, the youngest of the Williams siblings who is married with two daughters and belongs to St. Michael in Stillwater with her husband, Michael. “But he has this ability to just call you out of yourself into deeper waters where we know the Lord is.”

In recent years, Bishop-elect Williams made a shift in the program to what are now called Open Houses. People in the parish invite family, friends, coworkers and neighbors to come over to their homes, and small groups of up to seven volunteers offer hospitality, faith sharing and an invitation to come to church. A year ago, Holy Rosary, where Bishop-elect Williams also serves as pastoral administrator, joined in.

Maria Montalvo and her husband, Oscar Saldivar, of Holy Rosary have helped at the Open Houses since they started. They were single at the time, then married Dec. 11 at Holy Rosary, and now serve together.

“We had an encounter with Jesus, with the Lord,” said Montalvo, 38. “And it’s our desire that other people have the same encounter.”

The Open Houses typically take place during the summer, and were held via Zoom in 2021. Already, people are asking about the coming summer, she said, with a list forming of those who are interested when new groups form.

Angela Rodriguez is a leader of an Open House group at St. Stephen. She has invited friends and coworkers to join. Such groups are called “cells,” which they refer to by the Greek word “oikos.”

It can start with one simple gesture, like something one of her coworkers noticed at work.

“I was on my break, and before I eat, I always pray,” said Rodriguez, 38, through a translator. “I sat down, and my coworker was next to me, and she said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m praying before I eat.’ And, she said, ‘Teach me how to pray.’”

Now, this coworker and others are coming regularly to the meetings, which are starting to transition from Zoom to in-person meetings.

As these efforts continue at St. Stephen, Bishop-elect Williams hopes it can spread to other parishes. He plans to work on it as part of his new ministry as an auxiliary bishop, while also continuing to serve, at least for the time being, as pastor of St. Stephen and pastoral administrator at Holy Rosary.

“I would like to share the hope that parishes can become bases for evangelization,” he said. “It’s the base from which we go out, and the base to which we return to celebrate the holy Eucharist.”

Heather Triplett participated in street ministry at St. Stephen when it started, and said she wants to take some form of the practice to her current parish, St. Maximilian Kolbe in Delano. Married with five children, she met Father Williams while both were in the Emmanuel Community, a Catholic worldwide community of laypeople and religious that emphasizes fraternity and evangelization.

In 2008, both went to World Youth Day in Sydney, Australia. During the gathering, Triplett said the two and other Emmanuel young adult members started talking about street evangelization, and Father Williams decided to get it going at St. Stephen.

She hopes Bishop-elect Williams will continue to spread the missionary spirit he built and nurtured at St. Stephen. What she has seen over the last 13 years makes her optimistic about how he will do in his new role as an auxiliary bishop.

“He has a pastor’s heart,” she said, and “wants to go after the sheep.”