Father Anthony Cecil Jr. first heard of the Encounter School of Ministry through a priest friend who invited him to attend its annual conference in 2021. As a newly ordained priest, he said he was skeptical that he would benefit.
But his schedule was free — and he wanted to hang out with his friend — so he decided to attend.
What he found was life-changing, he said. He experienced physical and emotional healing at the conference that would lead him to become a student of the school and serve on its pastoral team, bringing the ministry to the Archdiocese of Louisville. Read more about his story of healing here.
The Encounter School of Ministry, which began in 2017, is a rapidly growing apostolate, Laura Shoulders, the campus director of the Louisville and Lexington campuses, said in a recent interview.
In less than a decade, the ministry has expanded to include 41 campuses worldwide and hosts an online school in seven languages, she said. This year, St. Raphael the Archangel Church, 2900 Bardstown Road, began hosting a new Louisville satellite campus.
“Encounter radically changed my life and my own relationship with God and my priesthood,” Father Cecil, pastor of St. Raphael, said in a recent interview.
Father Cecil, a second-year student of the school, said a “hunger” developed within him to share this ministry with his Louisville community. He attended his first-year classes through the Lexington, Ky., satellite campus.
The school — which has its main campus in Brighton, Michigan, and operates on satellite campuses internationally — follows a two-year curriculum. It teaches Christians to minister “in their spheres of influence,” from their home to the workplace — whether that’s how to discern God’s voice or how to pray with someone, said Shoulders.
Most classes meet once a week during the academic year, she said.
Each session begins with praise and worship, said Father Cecil.
“We start the class by spending an hour just honoring God for the fact that he’s God, and that he exists and that he loves us,” he said.
Then, the curriculum — which has its foundation in Scripture, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the early church fathers — follows, said Shoulders.
Each year of the curriculum is divided into four quarters. The first quarter focuses on “Identity and Transformation,” she said.
“The Encounter School starts with our identity as beloved children of God. So we start with that, and then we just gradually go through and equip just regular people like me and you to do the works that Jesus did, to be his hands and feet in the world.”
The next three quarters that follow are on “Hearing God and the Prophetic Gifts of the Holy Spirit,” “Power and Healing” and “Inner Healing and Freedom.”
For many Catholics, the course content might introduce new concepts, said Father Cecil.
“I’ve been Catholic my whole life. I’ve been a priest for six years. A lot of it (the content) is ‘new,’ but that doesn’t mean that it’s not Catholic. It’s been around, I just didn’t know it’s been around,” he said.
After the class learns a concept, they “activate it,” said Shoulders. For example, after a lesson on the theology of healing, attendees practice a “five-step prayer model for praying with people for physical healing,” she said.
The school offers a “safe environment” to practice the skills prior to using them outside of the classroom “so that it’s not just something you’re thinking about as an academic exercise,” Father Cecil added.
That’s one of the elements about the school that he likes best, he said.
“The responsibility of evangelization rests with the laity,” but the laity often don’t know how to practically share their faith with others, he said.
Encounter provides “the opportunity to learn how to do what the church is telling them they should be doing,” that is, evangelizing, he said.
St. Raphael Church hosted a summer intensive, which offered a “mini snapshot” of the school’s first-year curriculum this July, said Shoulders.
The Encounter School of Ministry will host classes mid-September through May on Monday nights. For more information or to register, visit encounterschool.org/louisville.
