The Jeff Cavins Show (Your Catholic Bible Study Podcast) - Identity and Evangelization (SEEK24 with Mike Gormley - Part 1)

Episode Date: February 23, 2024

This special episode of The Jeff Cavins Show was recorded at the SEEK24 conference this past January. Jeff Cavins is joined by Mike “Gomer” Gormely to discuss topics such as identity, evangelization and so much more. Enjoy the first part of this lively conversation! Snippet from the Show Allow the Holy Spirit to stand out in front of you. Allow him to guide a conversation and give you the words to say. Email us with comments or questions at [e-mail]. Text “jeffcavins” to 33-777 to subscribe and get Jeff’s shownotes delivered straight to your email! Or visit ascensionpress.com/thejeffcavinsshow for full shownotes!

Welcome to the Jeff Kaven Show, where we talk about the Bible, discipleship, and evangelization, putting it all together in living as activated disciples. This is show 364, Seek 24 with Mike Gomergormley, Part 1. Welcome to the show. You know, we have been talking about Seek 24 for a couple of weeks now, and just a great. great experience for 24,000 people who came together in St. Louis, focused on focus missionaries, really, in their formation. And Ascension Press had a magnificent booth there. And oftentimes when you'd walk by, you would see Gomer there, Mike Gormley, and answering people's questions. And we snagged him, brought them into the podcast area of the conference, and had a marvelous discussion. And so today is the first of two podcasts.

where we're talking to Mike Gormley, and we're going to be talking about a number of different topics that perhaps you've never heard him talk about before. A little, a warning, it's a big room, it's loud at times. We're talking with excitement over the crowd and just picture yourself in a great big room of everything Catholic in the room. And we're talking about the good things that God is doing in his life. So I give you Mike Gomer Gormley, part one. Welcome to the special episode of this podcast recorded live at the Spoke Street Media Booth during Seek 24 in St. Louis. My name is John Michael Lucido, and to find more shows recorded at Seek, search for the Seek podcast in your favorite podcast app. Enjoy.

Want to welcome, everybody. How are you doing? We're going to start a show. Jeff Kaven Show on Ascension Presents, and I'm going to be talking to Mike Gormley. So, right here, better known as Gomer. Hey. Welcome, Gomer. So good to be here with y'all. So good to be here.

Wake up. I'm here. Let's do this. All right. I want to welcome you to the Jeff Kaven Show on Ascension Presents. We are at Sikh 24 in St. Louis. And we have somewhere under one million people present in the crowd right now. Yeah.

And I gave them all free stickers over at the Ascension Press booth. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. So I want to welcome you to the show. Yeah, thank you. You and I've been friends. And I want to talk about a number of different things while we're here. We have such a beautiful audience that's joining us here today.

Very attractive. These are very attractive. I want to talk about some of the issues that are facing young adults today in the world. And, of course, you know, you know, Mike, from catching foxes. How many of you have listened to catching foxes? Dozens in the entire arena. Somewhere under a million. Yes, that's good.

And also every knee shall bow. You heard that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I want to talk to you, Mike, about some of the issues that these young people here at C-24 are facing in their life. But before I get to that first one, which is identity and what people are going through, what are you up to lately? Yeah, so I just left.

parish ministry after 17 years of doing youth ministry, young adult ministry, campus ministry, and adult faith formation. I just left it after 17 years. That was hard. But now I work for that man as you. Paradisysis Day is the main organization. But I travel around the country giving talks, doing parish missions and stuff like that full-time. And I do the podcast thing.

Sure. Yeah. Fantastic. So you get to meet a lot of young people when you're traveling around the world. And if you turn on the news these days, you're going to. to hear about identity and people trying to, I guess I would call it branding themselves. And it's determining who they are,

what their purpose is and so forth. What are you hearing in the world right now about this? How do you see it? Yeah, so that's interesting. I think the biggest thing that I'm seeing culturally across the board is we often, people struggle with not having a sense of themselves. And when you're at this age,

The big thing is, like, what am I going to do with the rest of my life? What do I want my life's purpose to mean? There's that purpose stuff. But then even deeper than it, there comes this element of, well, I'm still trying to figure out who I am. And so I do, I also do prison ministry, which we'll talk about a little bit later. But one of the big things in prison ministry is these are a group of men who were almost entirely not raised by parents. Right. So single parent families where the moms were more or less, either.

work in a bunch of jobs are just absent. And so for me, my big thing with these men is they don't know who they are. So they joined gangs. They didn't have fathers. So they joined gang to have brothers. And they gave them an identity, but it's one that just chewed them up. And so a big thing that I see, and it's kind of fascinating is bringing people into a relationship with Christ gives them a non-performative identity.

Meaning, and I think this is what like a lot of the crisis morally in our culture is people are looking for an identity that I can receive that is like adherent to who I am without having to earn it like I'm an athlete well you got to earn it you tear your ACL who are you now right that kind of thing and I've had friends that have been plunged into despair because they were college athletes who had a serious injury that they can no longer play or or they lost the scholarship for academic reasons and all of a sudden they they don't know who they are right so there's this element where it's like they're pushing back on that kind of American productive you are what you produce kind of performative identity, but they're getting lost in things that are non-essential,

right? These externals, and they so easily grab hold of these things and say, you tell me who I am. Sometimes it's people, it's relationships, it's dating, and that puts people in a relationship crisis because you put your identity in the hands of a human. Have you met people? They're the worst. So you do that, and then all of a sudden they break up with you or you have a thing. And then, yeah, so this identity thing is so, it's kind of in the, it's like the background wallpaper of the room that everyone's in, you know? One of the things that I've noticed about the whole identity issue is that people like, the wonderful people here at Sikh 24, when it comes to engaging other people, there is almost

a fear of talking because you don't know exactly how you should proceed. Now, when I was growing up, you'd just come up to someone and say, hey, let's talk or whatever. But now there's this protocol almost, and I shared this in my talk here at Seek 24, that when I got into an Uber, and I talked to this guy for 10 minutes in the car about the Lord and what I was doing, at the end I said, hey, I said, I'll remember you in prayer. And he said, I would appreciate it if you would ask for permission. I've never heard that before. I thought I heard it wrong, so I said, excuse me? And he said, I would prefer that you ask for permission to pray for me. And I said, okay, will you grant me permission to pray for you?

And he said, yes, thank you for asking. And I thought, just a protocol to, it's like we're going to set the rules here before we engage. Man, that is intense. That's an intense level. I feel like this is also the weirdness of capitalism. Sometimes everything in our life becomes commodified, you know? It's like, you want to interact with me? Okay, let's set up a contract.

We're going to have these negotiable positions. But this is, it is funny. It's like the, in a weird way, it's like the consent culture for everything, you know? Do you think that people are so afraid to talk to other people because of these so-called ground rules and so forth that they just avoid it. They just avoid talking to people. And if they do, what's your advice to people who want to talk, but they don't want to walk in fear? Oh, man. Okay, I'll say this, number one. So I'm an extrovert. Are you an extrovert? Raise your hand if you're an extrovert. Raise your hand, but only halfway if you're an introvert. Yeah, some of you didn't even want to do that.

It's fine. It's fine. I'm judging you. Yeah, like, I am an extrovert. So I always think it's my priority to start the conversation, because I know a lot of people aren't. And if in my zone. That's like my job. That's my gift to them sometimes. Sometimes it's the worst thing that could possibly fall on an introvert. But I don't know what exactly it is. I think also the idea of, I mean, isn't it so much easier to communicate via text, right? Like just to be like, hey, what are you doing? What's up? What's going on? Blah, blah, blah. That you already establish the ice breaking via text that you don't have to do it in person first. And then when you do it in person, you're like already in the middle of a conversation. Yeah. But to start one raw, that's a little

that's a bit much. So my thing is, you said, what would you say? How do it without walking in fear? Yeah. I would say walk in fear, but be courageous and let the courage outrank the fear. Like, you just have to do it. And so by doing it, it becomes so much better. And here's my pro tip. Whoever you're talking to, if you're uncomfortable having conversations, especially with people, you just meet, just talk about them and have them talk about them. People can do that for days, especially me. Well, you know, and John says in first, first john he says perfect love casts out fear and when you walk in love and you you really love that person forget about yourself and love them a courage comes comes at that at that point it really does

i want to i want to move into something that we talked about earlier a little bit and we've talked about it many times in our life and that is witnessing sharing the faith with with others how many of you struggle at times in sharing your faith? You struggle a little bit. Quite a few. Just Mariah. Just Mariah. Okay. I think more people struggle with sharing the faith. The most important thing in your life, the thing that you would die for. How many of you would die for Jesus if it really came down to it? Now, this is interesting because for those of you that are listening to the show, somewhere under a million hands, I won't use that anymore.

Okay. That's the third time. A lot of hands went up, but then if you talk about, well, do you struggle in sharing him, a lot of hands remain? And so I want to talk about that. How do we start conversations? How do we witness to other people? How do we do it without standing like we're on the street corner preaching, you know,

at people? It's just everyday life. Yeah. Yeah. big thing is if I don't know a person at all, I always scale back any expectation of what I can tell them in terms of for them how to live their life, right? Because sometimes what we do as Catholics is we want to micromanage other people's sin level, right? We're like, oh, you know, you shouldn't be doing that. It's like, nice. You're no better than a vegan telling me I shouldn't

eat meat. It's fine that you do that, but I am going to choke you. But no, so the thing is what is appropriate at that level. If I'm talking to a stranger, in my head, I'm just looking for cues that makes sense organically. And usually those cues, and I, not to, not to doad on you too much, but it actually was from a conversation we had on Ebony Shabal, where it was like, I'm listening for things to say, how can I pray for you for it?

The other thing that I do, I've been taking Uber's every day to and from here. My in-laws live in Chesterfield, so it's about a 45-minute drive. So every day and every morning and every night, I'm with another Uber driver. And I always, the idea is to lead with prayer. So in my head, I am praying, I just pull out my rosary, pray the rosary. And then I ask for the Lord to make an opening, right? Because I want to be able to, I want the Holy Spirit to be a little out in front of me, at least an inch or so.

What about you? Yeah, well, for me, in sharing the faith with people, one of the, one of the holes out there that I have noticed as I've traveled the country and, you know, doing the things that I I do, is that people want to share Christ with others, but they don't know when it finally gets down to the message of the gospel in sharing that at Starbucks with somebody that you're talking with. The question is, what is the gospel? What is the good news? Because I can tell you that the New Testament tells us that the Holy Spirit confirms the message. And the question is, what's the message. What are we sharing with people? And I can outline that very, very quickly for you.

And then my comment on that, please. The good news of Jesus Christ is called the carigma. The carigma. Everybody say corigma. The carigma is, number one, God loves you and has an amazing plan for your life. Number two, sin has broken this plan. It's broke. Sin. Number three, the good news is Jesus Christ has come to die for your sin. Number four, he asks us to repent. Now, how many of you have a hard time saying to someone you need to repent? I do too. I don't use it.

I use what the catechism says. The catechism says that repentance is a radical reorientation of your life to God. How many of you could say that? Radical reorientation of your life. life to God. And then after that, number five, you are baptized and receive the Holy Spirit. Number six, you join this amazing family, the church. Number seven, you go out and make disciples full circle. That's the gospel. And if you can remember that and weave it into a conversation with other people in a natural way, you don't have to tap someone at Starbucks on the shoulder

and say, hey, God has a plan for you. And the plan got all screwed up because of you. You know, what did you do to God's plan? It was so precious and you ruined it. So do you try to weave in the truth into a conversation? The way I view it in my head, like conceptually is I am very, very good at making hell out of my own life. And when I talk about bringing people into the church or bringing the gospel to someone, I don't think of it as I'm trying to recruit them from my club at all. And I think that's part of, like, the hindrance that some of us have is, like, I'm trying to sell them on a thing.

I don't think of it that way. It's, for me, it's a radiation of blessing, right? So my mindset is always in this thing of, like, they want to hear the gospel because they want to get out of the hells that they've created. So usually, and this is different for me, I'm like chocolate. People only interact with me when they're depressed in order to feel better. so whenever that's weird I apologize

but whenever but whenever I so when I'm working with people like I have a magnet I don't know if you're like this that just people who are in a really broken spot tend to be drawn to me right so total strangers would be like

oh my gosh I'm going through a divorce I don't know what to do and you're like I fellow passenger on the shuttle to the airport let's talk you know so what I always try to do is to bring Christ into those hells Right. And so I, the script has always run in the back of my head of repentance and all this stuff. But, but in the end, it's like, I am radiating the blessing of the father to these people.

So I never feel combative. You know what I mean? Like, there's not that hesitant. To me, it takes away the hesitancy. And just today in the Ascension app, this is not a plug for the Ascension app, but in the Ascension app, the Daily Bible thing, Lily was saying how, like, to withhold the gospel from someone is to, deny the saint that they could be. Yeah. And she's like, why would I want to do that to someone? I want to give them sanctity.

I want them to be friends with Christ. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting that the military, the military in the United States, they advertise to join them and become all that you can be, you know, in the military. And we should be able to say that in the church to people. Hey, become all that you can be. Come to, come to Jesus.

You mentioned something, and I want to take a reading out here real quick. You mentioned the App, the Ascension app. Yeah. How many of you have the Ascension app? It's free, baby. It's free. It's free. It's free.

How many of you do it? That's very good. For those of you that don't, allow me to introduce you to what I think is the first time in history where electronically the Bible meets the catechism in a seamless way. And it's free. And you can get the Ascension app by go on to ascensionpress.com forward slash app, I believe. And you can get it free. Guess what it does.

It has the entire Great Adventure Bible color-coded and tells you how to read the Bible as a story, the great adventure. And it has the catechism and they are linked to each other. Isn't that cool? And we have also a thousand and more. a thousand different videos and recordings in the text to answer your questions. And it's all free. Anyway, I wanted to say something about that

because I've never known this to ever happen before. Yeah, this is what I say. If you wanna come see me over at the Ascension Press booth, this is what I've been telling everyone. The catechism is available for free on the Vatican's website, which was designed by a toddler in 1994 and has not been updated since. And it doesn't have good search,

There's a church called St. Charles Borneo that built a search engine for the catechism, but none of that is as classy as the Ascension Press Catechism. You get for free on your phone, boom, sales pitch done. Also, you get Father Mike Schmitz and you and the Bible in a Year app. That's pretty nice. How many of you have been through Bible in a year? How many of you started Bible in a year? No one made it out of the early world.

It's stuck with Noah. Remember when we put together Bible at a year, Father Mike was doing the dailies and then I would come in as a trail guide and show you, you know, how to read the Bible and so you don't get lost. We had a lot of fun with it. And I still remember, now get this. This was during COVID. Yeah. During COVID, we launched in 2021, the Bible in a year. I had finished recording a month or so earlier. I forgot about it. I did not remember January 1st. when it was launched, and one of our producers called me and said, are you sitting down? And I said, yeah, why? And she said, you're number one in the country. And I said, number one, what? And she said, the podcast.

And I said, the Jeff Kaven show? Jokingly. And she said, no, Bible in a year. I said, you've got to be kidding. And so did Father Mike. We went to Apple and looked, and there it was. And I thought, no. Two guys from Minnesota reading the Bible is number one in the country at that point for almost all of January, and it's just reading the Bible.

Now, here's what I think was happening, and I'd like to get your take on it, is that the country was experiencing COVID. People were losing their trust in politicians, their trust in Hollywood, their trust in health care, and they needed something to build their life on. and what happened? The Bible became accessible and people from all over the world came on board and started reading it. I think we know it was the Holy Spirit moving people to that.

It was extraordinary. Yeah, it really was. No, but there was a perfect moment because in January 1st, New Year's resolution, all this stuff, and a lack of spiritual grounding and a lack of foundation, and a lack of foundation being kind of ripped out from us.

It was the perfect timing. I remember when we came together and thought, we're going to put this show on, and they said, Jeff, they say, here's how it's going to be. Jeff, with your looks and father's cleverness, this is going to be good. This is going to be great. Dino might.

Dino might. Okay, tell me a little bit of a shift here. What are a couple of hot topics right now that these lovely people would be interested in? What are a couple of hot topics that you are encountering? Well, okay, well, okay, the biggest thing that I'm encountering right now when I travel and do young adult ministry. So obviously we have gender issues, gender and sexuality. People are looking for the Catholic church somewhere between my uncle tells me we have to hate all these people and he's the only devout Catholic I know.

To, you know, I look online and, you know, the Pope just changed everything and now it's cool. and people are just trying to understand what is our actions, attitudes, thinking, behavior around these things. And then the other random thing that I get, I don't think it's all that random, it's a little zeitgeisty, but is AI and religion?

I have been giving a ton of crazy questions about AI religion. I mean, morality questions are always popping, but AI and religion and where do we see our faith and is it, you know, all the stuff that has to do with it. What do you think about AI, artificial intelligence? Yeah, no, I would say, I greet our new electronic overlords with a warm smile.

No, I use chat GPT all the time. I use it all the time. Anyone use chat GPT all the time to write their papers in college? All the hands went down. Don't tell your professors. No, I'm very scared. The thing that makes me scared is, as human beings, we are outsourcing our agency.

More and more and more. And we're not learning how to, like, when my kid was, when my oldest was, a toddler. We had this little V-Tech thing. It had like a fake keyboard. It had little plastic key and all this stuff. And what that did was it gives kids a feeling of agency.

Like I push this button that looks like a piano key and piano music sounds. But the problem with that is it's not. It's software that's playing a script that's running a song. So she feels like she's doing something in the world and she kind of really isn't. And then when you see iPad kids, kids raised on the, iPad, they become so absorbed in it, and this is not old man yelling at clouds.

I love technology, but you see the agency is bound to a screen, that it's not something that's out in the world, and it's increasingly becoming inside my own head. So for me, AI, my biggest fears is not, well, one is how the government's going to use it to do surveillance and track us all all the time always. But other than that is also how it's chipping away at the sovereignty over our Right, right. What about you? What do you think? Well, at first, you know, I thought it was pretty interesting. You can go and ask a question and all of a sudden, boom, something is created. And I experimented. My wife is a biblical archaeologist. That's on brand. She works over in Israel,

in Jordan, in Egypt, and she does archaeology. She's Indiana Cavens for her handle. Nice. And she's an archaeologist. So I went to chat GPT, and I said, write a song for archaeologists with love and it just spit it out and I looked at it and I thought wow and I said to my wife when she came home I said I got a poem for you nice and I and I handed it to her I didn't tell her it was it was not me and she read it and she started to cry it so touched her heart and she said that's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard about archaeology, and I said, well, thank you. Yes.

But she doesn't listen to the show, does she? Maybe, baby, it's sweet. My favorite AI, oh, sorry. It touched it, it touched her heart. Yeah. And that's the part that makes me wonder a little bit. Yeah. Is that there's, there is a protocol out there that is designed to, if I wanted to, to reach

inside of you. Yeah. That sounds terrifying on. so many levels. But no, my favorite AI story is I had a friend who was going through some marital issues, and he lost his job. So he was getting a divorce. He lost his job. And I said, have you told her yet? And he said, write a letter to, he said, I don't even have the words. I said, write a letter to my ex-wife explaining how we need to talk about finances because I just lost my job. Three seconds, boom. And then I said, write a funny letter. And then it rewrote it

like, greetings from the land of penny pinching. And it was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. And then I said, write a sarcastic letter. And then it said, in a paragraph, it said, it is inappropriate to talk about financial matters with a co-parent and a former spouse in a sarcastic and cruel undertones. I am not allowed to write this. And like, this is inappropriate for this subject matter. Wow.

And I literally went, I'm sorry. And I typed that in. And then I wrote, rewrite it in Victorian English. And then it's like, hello, you're like, hither and yon. Yeah, so it was, it was funny. It was like a surreal. There's this element of surrealness. Yeah.

And then I had to write me a Christian contemporary music album, and I did it real quick. What a beautiful time we had at Seek 24. We're glad that we could share a little bit of it with you. And we're going to close out in prayer. Next week we'll continue on with the same conversation, but pick it up where we left off. And we have a lot more to talk to you about. and we think you're going to really enjoy that. So join with me in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Lord, Jesus, thank you so much, Lord, for Mike. And I thank you, Lord, for the call on his life. And I pray that through the things that we talked about, perhaps people would be sparked in their heart to something you're calling them to, a reminder of how to live out the faith. And so we lift up everybody who has been listening to this show and ask, Lord, that you had revealed.

yourself to them in such a beautiful way and lead and guide them. In Jesus name, amen. Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. We'll talk to you next week.