3 minute read

Planting Seeds of Faith

Nancy Bandzuch, ’05, always thought teaching the Faith to her children would come naturally. “I thought it would be a really organic process, that I would just have the kids gather around me and we would talk about the Scriptures, or the liturgical season, or whatever it was, and it would just happen. But it was really hard.” She was in the habit of having them listen to a two-minute daily podcast while they brushed their teeth with quick facts about random things. “I remember thinking one day as they were brushing their teeth, ‘it would really be great if instead of learning about animals, they were learning about their faith.’ “I am the kind of person who just jumps into things, so I decided to do it,” Bandzuch said. What started as a daily five-to-seven-minute podcast has grown into Catholic Sprouts, a resource that provides support, materials, community, and inspiration for Catholic parents. Bandzuch and her husband, Bill, still do the podcast, and have expanded to offer worksheets, books, crafts, and more to help parents teach their children about Catholicism. For a long time, Bandzuch thought that her ministry was for children. In 2020, she was applying for a grant from Our Sunday Visitor that forced her to dig deeper into who her audience was and who she was serving. She also began to research what demographics weren’t currently being served by the Church in the way they need to be. “And we realized our ministry was for parents. As Pope St. John Paul II and the Church remind us, parents are the primary educator of their children’s faith. After that research and talking to tons of people out there in various ministries, we realized that we needed to continue to create content that was easy for parents to use in the home,” Bandzuch said. This inspired her and her husband to create the Domestic Church Project, which includes a six-week bootcamp for families to sit down at dinner each night and listen to a short, five-minute audio lesson and discuss it. “One of the things we found in the research is that the most important thing that a parent can do to transfer the Faith to the next generation is to just talk about the Faith in the home,” Bandzuch said. “There were generations-long studies that found the differentiating factor between a family where all the kids left the Faith and a family where all the kids stayed in the Faith was if they were talking about faith at home.” Their overall mission is to help renew the Church and help people fall in love with their Catholic faith. They believe that by teaching parents how to speak about Jesus in the home, more children will remain Catholic as they get older. “We have to focus on the little church at home to renew the big Church,” Bandzuch said. Bandzuch shared that the bootcamp is flexible and can be done around each family’s schedule. It is parent-led, self-paced, and completion focused, whether that takes six weeks or ten. “I set out in Catholic Sprouts to speak to kids like my own,” she said. “But almost every day I get a message from a parent about how much they are getting out of it. We set out to minister to children, but really, we are ministering to parents. By helping these parents, we are helping their kids.” Bandzuch shared that it has taken a lot of prayers to get her family and her business to this point. “I started this very small ministry. Sometimes I wonder why I am still doing it and how it got so big,” she said. “I realized the key is consistency, doing it every day. There is a temptation to quit sometimes. It is fun at first, but then continuing to do it when you do not feel like doing it, getting through roadblocks, it gets hard. I have to remain grounded in discernment and always go back to the mission that the Holy Spirit gave us and make sure God is still calling us to do this. “During my time at the University of Mary, Sister Thomas was such a model to me of perseverance and leading through kindness and service. She championed the idea of servant leadership, which has always stuck with me, especially now that I run my own business,” Bandzuch said. In the end, she always reminds herself that Catholic Sprouts and the Domestic Church Project are God’s work, not her own, and it is up to Him to make it successful. “I try to focus on being faithful, not successful,” she said.

Catholic Sprouts has a program where children do a challenge and receive a patch when they complete it.

This article is from: