'We are not meant to do life alone': How a Broomfield Parish Walks with Families Long After the Baptismal Font
Family ministries at Nativity of Our Lord Parish in Broomfield are leading couples and children closer together and nearer to Christ.
On weekday mornings, whether it is 20 degrees or 80, Mike and Erika Oakes carry their coffee to the front porch of their home and spend 15 minutes in prayer before the day begins. When their two children were younger, the couple would catch small fingers parting the window blinds, two little faces watching their parents pray.
“That was the realization for Erika and me, that the kids are actually learning by seeing us do it,” Mike Oakes said.
The Oakeses have kept that ritual nearly every weekday for five years, a habit that took root through the Families of St. John Paul II, a ministry at Nativity of Our Lord Parish in Broomfield that is reshaping how the parish accompanies couples and families before, during and long after the waters of Baptism.
Father Matteo Invernizzi, F.S.C.B., associate pastor at Nativity, helped develop the ministry in March 2020. He and his brother priests of the Fraternity of St. Charles Borromeo, the religious community that serves the parish, noticed that young families moving to Colorado kept arriving at their doors “searching for guidance about how to establish and build their family: friendship, companionship and support,” he said.
Their answer was a slim booklet titled simply The Rule, written by the fraternity’s priests for the ministry they named after the pope who believed the life of the Church would be renewed through the family. Drawing on Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the saints, The Rule centers on the married couple, asking each to commit to daily prayer anchored by the Angelus, a weekly hour of silence, a weekly calendar meeting and a monthly couple meeting.
Couples live it out in small groups of four to six families that gather monthly in one another’s homes. Each meeting follows the same rhythm: a simple shared meal, an hour of “highs and lows” in which each person shares where they saw God in joy and in difficulty, and a discussion of a common text rooted in the teaching of St. John Paul II or in the theology of marriage and family. The witness extends beyond the couples themselves, as children growing up alongside other families in the ministry absorb what it looks like to live a Catholic marriage from the inside.
“Super easy, super basic,” Father Invernizzi said.
The whole ministry gathers quarterly for a half-day of teaching, food and music, and once a year, each small group goes on vacation together, often with a priest or a religious sister along.
For the Oakes family’s small group, that means renting a cabin at YMCA of the Rockies, where 24 people, ages 4 months to college, share one roof for several days of morning Liturgy of the Hours, Mass on the mountaintop, dinners cooked together, campfires and a closing Mass at the St. Catherine of Siena Chapel at Camp St. Malo.
“It’s a lot of work, but it’s so important,” Oakes said. “You really become family when you live with somebody for three or four days.”
The formula has proven durable. Roughly 75 families across 11 small groups now participate at Nativity, and word of mouth has carried the model to parishes in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and North Carolina. Almost no one leaves, Father Invernizzi said, except families who move away, and several of those have started groups in their new cities.
“There is nothing like beauty to attract people,” he said.
Father Invernizzi believes the ministry hit a sweet spot: demanding but possible. Mutual accountability, one step at a time, keeps the bar at the right height.
“You become realistic,” he said. “You realize that we are all poor people trying to do our best to raise our children.”
Beneath the practical wisdom is a theological conviction.
“God is the communion of three persons,” he said. “We are made for communion, because we are made in the image of God. To live communion, to live friendship, is the way we discover and experience something of who God is.”
For many families, the ministry has answered a loneliness they could not always name. Rachel Bradley, who entered the Catholic Church with her husband, Nick, in 2017 and joined the ministry in 2020, remembers the isolation of early motherhood, and she sees it constantly in the young mothers she serves through Fiat, a Nativity moms’ group whose name stands for “Friends In All Times.”
“You have the Internet, and you have AI, but you need people,” Bradley said. “There’s no way around it.”
Elizabeth Devaney, a mother of four who joined after moving to Colorado knowing no one, said simply: “We are not meant to do life alone. It’s going to give you companionship, role models for your kids, and it’s going to help you grow in unexpected ways.”
The couple, not the child, is the ministry’s starting point. The priests “would say the main focus actually is the couple,” said Jacquie Colby, who joined with her husband, Ryan, in 2022, “making sure the marriage and the vocation to marriage is taken care of, and the family flows from there.”
That focus, families say, is precisely what equips them for the promise made at the baptismal font: to be the first educators of their children in the faith. The Rule’s foreword names the family as the place where children “receive the gift of Baptism and the growing life that comes from Baptism.”
“It’s helped me to see my faith not as one thing among many things that I’m doing, but to make it the core, and everything else flows from there,” Colby said. “Instead of just teaching them by saying ‘do this’ or ‘don’t do that,’ it’s made it more of a living thing for us.”
The fruits reach beyond member families. Father Invernizzi said between 40 and 50 adults asked to be baptized or received into the Church at Nativity this year, and he pairs each with a mentor drawn from the ministry’s nearly 200 adults.
“You always have someone who can walk with the newcomers,” he said.
The accompaniment extends to the parish’s smallest members. Five years ago, Bradley and a friend began gathering young children in their backyards during the parish’s Totus Tuus week, when older kids attend the popular catechetical summer program. Today, Totus Tuus Littles serves children from infancy to age 5, drawing 55 children, including babies, from 30 families this year, up from 35 children last summer. Its curriculum weaves Montessori-based catechesis with St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
Bradley knew it was working when a friend’s daughter, home from a day spent making lemonade and marveling at creation, held up her cup and announced: “God loves lemonade.”
“If we only think God loves the saints, and God only loves the things that are in church, we’re sunk,” Bradley said. “But if we see that God meets us as incarnate people, it’s so profound.”
For Devaney, the hope is that what began at the Broomfield parish continues to spread.
“My dream is that there’s a JP2 ministry in every parish,” she said. “It really fills a void in the Church for couples and for families.”
Colby’s hope is closer to home.
“It really helps us center our lives around Christ,” she said. “The priests teach that continually: that as long as our lives are centered around Christ, everything will take shape and order itself accordingly.”
