When his marriage to his first wife fell to pieces, Jomel Trinidad felt like a failure.
“I felt failure not only in my marriage, but in my person, in my self-worth,” said Trinidad, a member of St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Vancouver. The heartbreak put him in a dark place.
“I lost trust with God. I was angry. I was lost,” he said. “I was about to give up. I didn’t want to live anymore.”
In that darkness, Trinidad felt he heard God’s voice speaking to him: “Jomel, I have not forsaken you.”
That glimmer of hope began his journey to healing. Sometime later, he signed up for the Faith Study Series by Catholic Christian Outreach, which was being offered at St. Anthony’s. The small group setting, where parishioners gathered to share their stories, faith journeys, and personal struggles made a huge difference for Trinidad.
“It helped me to rebuild my self-worth,” he said. “It’s like a renewal for me. I needed that renewal of trust, renewal of faith, renewal of myself.”
In the last five years, more than 600 people have participated in faith studies at St. Anthony’s, and they’re continuing to come as the sessions take place online during the pandemic.
Director of discipleship Jacquie Chau said participants have gone on to discern religious vocations, start small groups, and become leaders in the parish community. Like Trinidad, many have also had deeply personal transformations.
“My faith went from lukewarm to fully alive because of the faith study journey I went through with my group,” said Chau.
She had been a teacher at a Catholic elementary school and a new member of St. Anthony’s when she signed up for faith studies. Having taught about the sacraments for years, she thought the series would be a breeze.
But “all the things I thought I knew, I had a very shallow understanding,” she said. “There is a lot more to know in your faith and until your faith has grown to a more mature level, we don’t become who we are called to become.”
Sara Ho, chairperson of the school’s Parent Education Committee, has also seen the great benefit of small groups of people gathering regularly to talk about their faith. It’s why she urged St. Anthony’s to continue running them online after pandemic restrictions shut down in-person church activities in 2020.
“A lot of parishioners, at first, they were just regular Sunday Mass attendees. They weren’t really involved in other areas. But with faith studies, we met every week. We were in small groups, and that kind of tight-knit connection helped build a small group, a community. With that, it developed into friendship and a sense of belonging,” she said.
Once they feel embedded in the parish community, participants often become active in other areas of church life, as PEC members, lectors, ministry leaders, and facilitators for future small groups, she said.
“Faith studies are, I think, the backbone for parishioners to want to be involved, to want to be part of the change.”
This February, the parish launched its 20th round of faith studies.
“It is something to celebrate and praise God for,” said pastor Father Justin Huang.
Father Huang has worked hard to weave the Faith Study Series into daily life at St. Anthony’s, incorporating it into marriage preparation, baptismal preparation, and the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults program. Running the series three times a year means anyone interested in learning about Catholicism or deepening their faith does not have to wait long for the next round to start.
But success stories can come with a bumpy start. Father Huang said four missionaries introduced faith studies to the parish in 2015, and he had to call in many favours to get the program going.
At first, he asked volunteers to help lead two sessions of faith studies on Tuesday nights, one at 6:15 p.m. and the other at 8:15 p.m. “That simple offering of two sessions meant that leaders could run two sessions in one night,” and there were more options for people with busy schedules.
Father Huang started building a core team and spent an entire month promoting faith studies at Mass. Leaders ran faith studies four times a year – and started burning out.
Now, the parish runs the Faith Study Series three times a year. Since the pandemic hit, they have been running them online, a bit of a blessing and a curse.
“There are hiccups. It’s not as good as in person,” Father Huang said. But there are advantages: “People don’t have to drive anywhere. They can do it with their kids in the background. There is no set up.”
Ho added running these studies online has attracted wider interest: participants have signed up from Calgary, Halifax, Montreal, and Seattle. She’s also noticed more seniors signing up for the first time and guesses not having to drive to the church after dark may be part of the reason why.
The number of participants has remained fairly steady through the pandemic.
“It has to be known that this isn’t just because we have a great group of people here,” said Father Huang. “This can be replicated very easily, with God’s grace and people following these practices we’ve learned from other churches.”
Those best practices include promoting faith studies with personal testimonies from former participants and capping small groups at six people, including the leader.
“We would love to see this happen in other parishes,” said Father Huang, adding he’d welcome calls from priests interested in running faith studies in their communities.
For Trinidad, participation meant not only strengthening himself personally, but building up his current marriage and empowering him to share his story with others.
He said after spending a year doing everything in his power to repair his first marriage, his ex-wife still insisted on divorce. “The harder I tried to save the marriage, she didn’t want to,” he said. “It was a terrible decision.”
Years later, after receiving an annulment, he became engaged to his second wife. Both were getting married for the second time, and both wanted to do it right.
“We didn’t want a repeat of having a broken marriage,” he said.
They both entered faith studies, which “brought us not only knowing about our faith and knowing the Lord. It gave us the deeper meaning of our marriage and union together, the importance of having God at the centre of our marriage. That was the number one goal for us: to have God at the centre of our marriage.”
The pair has since celebrated their fourth anniversary and completed all five levels of the Faith Study Series. “What God promised to me before was realized through faith studies,” Trinidad said.
He is now training to lead his own small group. “Personally, for me it was part of my goal to make sure to learn from the past mistakes and have a better life in the future. Faith studies brought that to me personally. It gave me a sense of purpose, mission, and looking ahead. God has this mission for us, mission for me, to continue and now share what we learned to other people.”
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