Tim Francis comes to Diocese of Green Bay to present ‘Signs from God: Miracles and Their Meaning’
Story and photography by William Van de Planque | On Mission
MARINETTE, WI — Tim Francis, an Ohio native and founder of You Shall Believe Ministries, has been on the road virtually nonstop for the last 15 years to bring Catholics back to the Church and revitalize belief in the true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
After coming to St. John the Baptist Parish, Howard, in October, Francis will return to Wisconsin to Holy Family Parish, Marinette, to give the same presentation four times from Sunday, December 7, to Tuesday, December 9.
The presentation, centered around Church-approved miracles and the messages behind them, is the same one he has been giving at Catholic parishes and schools across the United States.
Long before Francis founded You Shall Believe Ministries, an evangelization and catechesis organization, he found himself straying from the Catholic faith his parents had raised him in when he started attending Ohio State University.
He grew up one of six children in New Carlisle, Ohio, a small town between Dayton and Springfield, going to Mass every Sunday, but didn’t take the Catholic faith seriously, he said.
“All I really cared about was sports,” Francis said. “We were very competitive as a family.”
“I was always the life of the party,” he said. “I was the one at every (family) function holding the camcorder, filming everybody, always want(ing) to have fun. That bled over to the social life in college. It was just one big party.”
When Francis went to Ohio State University, he was introduced to social drinking early on.
“I started going to Ohio State with my older brother, and I used to use his ID to get into the bars,” he said. “Back then, for my mom and dad, it was kind of ‘out of sight, out of mind;’ we didn’t really discuss those things.”
During college, around 1989, Francis’s mother gave him and his siblings a VHS tape of the conversion story of Scott Hahn, a Catholic author and apologist.
“I didn’t really care at the time,” he said. “I was in college. I cared about where the next party was, where the next football game was.”
Francis considers his mother to be like Mother Teresa.
“She was just a prayer warrior,” he said. “Over time, she got more and more into her faith.”
He talked about the expectations parents or friends might have when they seek to bring someone close to them to the Church.
“A lot of people think they are going to send their kids something, and it’s going to change everything,” he said. “It really depends where they are in life. It can be the greatest conversion story in the world, but depending on where they are in life, it’s just not going to have any impact.”
Toward the end of his time in college, Francis was introduced to cocaine, which led to severe addiction. He goes into detail about his recovery and journey back to the Church in his book, “From the Crack House to God’s House.”
After graduating from college, he moved to Texas to pursue a business opportunity and met the woman who would become his wife, who at the time had no religious background.
The two got invited to attend a service at Fellowship Church, a non-denominational megachurch in Grapevine, Texas. Francis had never heard of or been around a large non-denominational church.
“Growing up in New Carlisle, Ohio, I had never even thought about or discussed with anybody the differences in people in different faiths,” he said. “It was just never a conversation that came up.”
By 1999, he was heavily involved with Fellowship Church. He regularly attended the megachurch’s Sunday and Wednesday services. He and his wife even hosted a Bible study for new members in their home. They were also regularly listening to Protestant radio programs, such as Jack Graham’s.
“But one thing struck me: I wanted to make sure that what I was doing was not based on emotionalism,” he said. “It feels good, but how do I even know the Jesus thing was true?”
He started reading books by non-Catholic Christians that provide historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, such as “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” by Josh McDowell and Sean H. McDowell and “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel.
“I was very impressed that there was historical evidence for Jesus,” Francis said. “That mattered to me. It wasn’t just emotionalism. It wasn’t just doing something because everybody’s doing it.”
On this journey, through reading and listening to Christian apologist debates, he discovered not only evidence for Jesus’s existence but also for the Resurrection. He came to the profound conclusion that Christianity is true. At this point, Francis took Christian faith more seriously and realized its gravity, he said.
“So then, if Christianity is true, what version of Christianity most represents historic Christianity?” he said. “That’s kind of how I approached it.”
Francis’s next step was to seek out and analyze the different Christian perspectives.
He connected with and invited Fr. Mitch Pacwa, an American Jesuit priest with multiple shows on EWTN, and two leaders of Denton Bible Church, a non-denominational megachurch in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, to his house for a debate or dialogue. Another time, Francis invited the same two leaders to debate with Tim Staples, a now senior apologist for Catholic Answers.
Francis started listening to debates online from popular Catholic and Protestant apologists.
“I literally learned the Catholic faith by listening to debates,” he said.
Francis spoke about the importance of practicing Catholics knowing their faith well and being able to defend it.
“When people ask people, ‘Why do you do what you do?’ and people don’t know, it just reaffirms to non-Catholics that (Catholics) don’t know their faith,” he said.
“They are doing a disservice, first to themselves, because the more you learn, the deeper your faith grows,” he said. “Biblical faith can be interchanged with faithfulness. It’s an action; it’s a verb.”
Over time, he became convinced that, when tracing the roots of Christianity, the early Church more accurately represents the Catholic Church than the Protestant church, he said.
Soon after, his mother sent him another VHS recording of a documentary that aired on FOX in 1999 called “Signs from God: Science Tests Faith.” The program featured a skeptical Australian journalist, Mike Willesee, and an Australian lawyer, Ron Tesoriero, investigating the miraculous experience of a woman, Catalina Rivas, who had the stigmata — the wounds of the Passion of Jesus Christ — in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
During his parish mission presentations, Francis speaks extensively about the documentary, which is unlike anything filmed before, and shows clips from it because of its impact on him.
The documentary provided evidence for him to believe in Jesus deeper than before.
“So there’s historical evidence for Jesus; it looks like there’s supernatural evidence for Jesus,” he said. “The Resurrection of Jesus, there’s historical evidence for it, but now there (are) people experiencing the Passion of Christ. I was excited about that because seeing is believing for me.”
Many of his Protestant friends did not care about the discoveries Francis was making about Church history, and in fact, they thought he was causing problems.
His journey back to the Catholic Church was also hurting his marriage. His wife and three kids started going to the Protestant megachurch and the Catholic Church on Sundays.
“At one point, my kids are saying, ‘Are we going to the fun church or the boring church?’” he said.
Francis was convinced that he should be Catholic; however, he was frustrated and shocked by the stark difference in excitement about Jesus and the Bible between the Catholic parish and the non-denominational megachurch.
“Intellectually, I see that this is the truth, but experientially, I’m confused,” he said.
During the early 2000s, Francis lost the tape his mother had sent him, and in 2004, she passed away.
Five years later, he found the tape and discovered a book about Rivas, the stigmatist, and Eucharistic miracles. The book, “Reason to Believe,” was written by Tesoriero, the lawyer involved in filming the documentary.
For Francis, reading the book helped him understand why Catholic parishes lack the excitement he experienced at the Protestant megachurches.
“It cleared up the confusion for me as to why the megachurches seemed on fire and the Catholic Church didn’t,” he said. “It’s because a massive percentage of Catholics are completely unaware and not taking advantage of the gifts called the sacraments, especially the Mass and confession, that Jesus left the Church.”
He connected with Tesoriero and invited him to speak at one parish in Texas and one in Ohio about his experiences with the supernatural and the miraculous.
After hosting two events at packed parishes, Francis knew where God was calling him next.
“I get it. I am going to take the ball on this, and I am going to share to the best of my ability in the United States with parishes because they have a lot of inactive Catholics,” he said. “I’ll bet you anything, if they heard what I heard, it would wake some of them up.”
Francis’s goal then is the same as his goal now: “ …that if millions of people were interested and read Ron’s material, it would change the world. I believe that 100 percent,” he said.
The first out-of-state parish mission Francis did was in Rhode Island about 15 years ago.
“I drove my wife and three kids from Texas to Rhode Island, which was 30 hours, and did a three-night mission,” he said. “That’s how the whole thing started.”
In September and October of this year, Francis did about 23 presentations across the country.
Francis said that one of his main goals is for practicing and non-practicing Catholics alike to learn impactful things about the riches of their faith that inspire them to act.
“If they actually grow in their education — they don’t have to go to seminary; they don’t even have to read a book — if somebody comes to the presentation that I’m fortunate to be able to do, their faith grows and their belief grows to where they actually do more with the sacraments,” he said. “If somebody has the ability to go to Mass twice a week and they’re only going once, and they get a jolt that goes, ‘Wow, why don’t I feed my soul a couple times a week now?’ Well, that’s huge to me.”
This Sunday, in Marinette, for the first time in years, Francis will bring his children with him to Holy Family Parish for the presentations.
“I’m always excited to go to a parish, but I’m really excited to bring my whole family again,” he said. “It’s how God has blessed me with more time with my family.”
Click here to find out more about the upcoming “Signs from God: Miracles and Their Meaning” presentations at Holy Family Parish: onmiss.io/francisholyfamily