PATRON SAINT: ST MAXIMILLIAN KOLB OMI

We have humbly placed the Soul Provider Trust under the patronage of St Maximillian Kolb OMI.  He is the Patron Saint of Journalists, the Family, the Pro Life Movement, Prisoners and the Chemically Addicted.

Maximilian was born in 1894 in Poland and became a Franciscan. He contracted tuberculosis and, though he recovered, he remained frail all his life. Before his ordination as a priest, Maximilian founded the Immaculata Movement devoted to Our Lady. After receiving a doctorate in theology, he spread the Movement through a magazine entitled "The Knight of the Immaculata" and helped form a community of 800 men, the largest in the world.

Maximilian went to Japan where he built a comparable monastery and then on to India where he furthered the Movement. In 1936 he returned home because of ill health. After the Nazi invasion in 1939, he was imprisoned and released for a time. But in 1941 he was arrested again and sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

On July 31, 1941, in reprisal for one prisoner's escape, ten men were chosen to die. Father Kolbe offered himself in place of a young husband and father. And he was the last to die, enduring two weeks of starvation, thirst, and neglect. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1982. His feast day is August 14th.

THE MISSION

The sole purpose of The Soul Provider Trust is to make God Visible in the World. 

It is committed to that most complex and demanding missionary task of evangelizing within the culture of secularity.

It strives to set forth the authentic teaching on divine revelation and its transmission through the most effective media available, in a non-denominational way.

It wants the world to “hear the summons to salvation, so that through hearing it may believe, through belief it may hope, through hope it may come to love” (St Augustine).

OBJECTIVES
1. To bring the Word of God to Christians from different cultural backgrounds and communities, who may not necessarily have access to a church or church related services due to a number of varying circumstances, for example living rural communities, the armed forces, prisons, expatriates etc.
  

2. To provide inspiring, high-quality, faith-based communications that deliver timely, relevant and practical tools to help subscribers understand more fully and effectively practise their faith in daily life.

3. To work with people of the world’s six leading faiths :- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism to produce greater understanding between these faiths through meaningful encounters.
  

4. To reach people who may be influenced by the powerful forces of the secular culture yet who inwardly desire a deeper understanding of the Christian faith and a more authentic relationship with Christ.
  

5. To provide faithful commentary on the passing cultural scene that educates and inspires people by means the modern means of communication.

 

THE GUIDING PRINCIPLES
With this mission in mind, The Trust has adopted certain principles that we believe will guide us into the future:

 1) SOWING
Secularity is not the enemy. It is our own child, sprung from Judeo- Christian roots.

Like any adolescent child, suffering from an understandable youthful grandiosity, it’s not bad, just unfinished. Our relationship to it shouldn’t be adversarial but one of solicitude.

The “soil” of secularity is defined by Jesus in the parable of the Sower - some ground is good, some hostile, some indifferent - but the fact that some ground is hostile or indifferent does not absolve us from the mandate to keep on sowing – continually sowing by using any means we have at our disposal.

 

2) MEDIA
We are at a new place today in terms of the faith. Adaptation of what has worked in the past may not be enough.

We need to re-inflame the romantic imagination within Christianity by using the modern media of mass communication. This means email, the internet, SMS, social networking pages, viral marketing campaigns, radio and television in addition to the pulpit and lectern.

 

3) SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality is peoples’ birthright. The secular culture hungers for spirituality, but is largely spiritually illiterate.

In the Western world, as we know, our churches do pretty well with those who walk through our doors on Sunday, but, and this is the problem, less and less people are walking through those doors.

We seem to know what to do with people once they come to church but we no longer know how to get them there.

People go where they get fed.

 

4) STRUCTURE
There are four aspects of the church that people still do accept: the church as an agency to serve the poor, the church as delivering the rites of passage, the church as a voice within ethical discourse, and the church as a “beautiful heritage”; but we must be careful to not let ourselves be identified with only these.

We need to ask ourselves: Do we need new structures, beyond and outside the parish, new “missiological” structures to supplement what parishes can do? Can we dream of new “ecclesial houses”?

 

5) LANGUAGE
Given this self-emptying God, we remind ourselves that sharing in the mission of Christ does not always mean using words about Jesus.

God can give us permission, when necessary, to take a holiday from religious or pious language.

 

6) TRADITION
Recovering the tradition is a great labour. We must seek to recover the core, the heart, of our tradition, beyond its encrusted accretions, and then put our own passion to that heart.

We must work at finding our own faith-voice and then speak in an invitational way. Part of this must be the rigourous self-denial of listening.

 

7) EXILE
As a faith community we are in exile - from the power, possessiveness, and prestige of the past - but we should remember that all transformation happens in exile because that is the only time God can get at us.

We need to stay with the pain, the exile and hold the tension long enough until it changes us.

 

8) ECUMENISM
There are human foundations, solid ones, for moral progress within our culture and we need to accept this and widen the pool of sincere people with whom we form one body to work for a better world.

Excessive stress on denominational identification can narrow the body. Interreligious dialogue must lead us back to a common humanity.

We need to commit ourselves not just to the baptized, but to all people of sincerity and good-will.

 

9) CHARITY
The gospel is ultimately about God rescuing the poor. Part of evangelization is the movement to eliminate poverty.

The church is a big international body and it could do a lot, internationally, as regards poverty.

But, if we want to work for the poor, we must free ourselves from too much reliance on dogma and rely more upon human solidarity.

 

10) IMAGE
A potentially fertile image of Christ for our time might well be as the kenosis (the doctrine that Christ relinquished His divine attributes so as to experience human suffering) of God.

This perhaps can be the place of contact with the secular world.

Christ, in his self-emptying, expresses a love which gives itself and seeks nothing in return, incarnates God’s presence without pretence, reveals a God of total non-violence and vulnerability, a God of pure invitation, and a God who accepts the provisionality of everything.

Jesus’ essential message is a universal message of vulnerability that all people need to hear.