Cultivate a community of faith

Young adults gathered for a Rosary for Hope hosted by the diocese's Pastoral Juvenil Hispana in Trinity Park in Fort Worth on May 17, 2025. (NTC/Christina Benavides)

My name is Ali Hoffman, and I’m a full time Catholic evangelist. I’ve known Jesus pretty much my entire life, and from a very early age, I knew that He wanted a personal, deep relationship with me. 

Growing up, the name of Jesus was everywhere in my house. My parents modeled to me what an authentic relationship with Jesus looked like and how to live out that relationship in a broader community. 

We were part of small groups of people from our church that worshiped regularly, recreated, went on trips, and shared the struggles of life and faith. To this day, my parents’ closest friends stem from those groups. 

I never would have guessed that my current life would look like it does now. I travel the globe full time, going into different Christian Catholic communities to encourage the people of the Church to remain steadfast in Christ with firmness of heart. 

Most people look at my life of constant travel, from going from one city to the next, through flight delays and missing home, to not having a stable income and relying on the Lord for everything as a radical way of living. But in reality, I’m doing what thousands and thousands of people have done before me. In fact, when we read the Book of Acts, this was considered normal in the Church. 

One of my favorite passages is found in Acts 13:1-3, where it says, “Now there were in the church at Antioch prophets and teachers. … While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.’ Then, completing their fasting and prayer, they laid hands on them and sent them off.” 

This newly formed Christian church in Antioch was a place where Christian communities were growing rapidly. In these communities, the Apostles were going out to preach the Gospel and being thrown in prison, or beaten, or left for dead for doing so, but they always came back to share what the Lord had done. The community, in return, would praise and worship the Lord, pray and fast with one another, and await instructions on where to go next.

In the above passage, I find it so intriguing that in the middle of their worship, the Lord spoke. And then it says, AFTER their prayer and fasting, they went out. A couple of things stand out to me. 

1. A small group of people gathered in community to worship God. It wasn’t during their prescribed “church time,” they were just people who did life together, loved the Lord, were serious about their walk with God, and came together to pray, fast, and worship. They were committed to each other and to God. 
2. Their worship informed their mission, not their mission informed how they worshiped God. They didn’t know that the Lord would anoint Paul and Barnabas for the next mission. They didn’t know that this mission and the impact it would have would be talked about thousands of years later. 
3. Even after hearing directly from God, they still finished their prayer and fasting before setting out, almost as if those things were the spiritual gas and oil they needed to accomplish anything the Lord has asked them to do.

Reading about the early Church in Acts has convicted me once again how important Christian community is and why we need each other. 

We’re not meant to live alone or even do the works of God by ourselves. We need people who stand with us, pray with us, fast with us, champion us, and remind us to keep the faith, to remain steadfast in the faith and to not give up. I pray you have those people, and I pray that you are that to someone else.