Meet Susan Windley - Daoust, Parish Advocate
by Genevieve Kineke
Dr. Susan Windley-Daoust taught theology for 20 years at St. Mary’s University in Minnesota before becoming Director of Missionary Discipleship for the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. She founded the Mark 5:19 Project to equip pastors and lay leaders to foster thriving, evangelizing parishes in 2024. Her book, The Four Ways Forward, was published in 2022. She and her husband Jerry have five children and work together to help Catholics live out their baptismal call to share the good news of Jesus Christ with all the world.
Genevieve: In a previous conversation, I learned that you were hit by a two-by-four and I want the details.
Susan: Indeed! And just so everybody else knows, it was a metaphorical ‘two-by-four.’ There were no hospital visits! [laughs]
In one of my courses, I assigned students to write their own spiritual auto-biography and they loved it. When I first started teaching there in 2001, about 60% of the students self-identified as Catholic. And the rest of the students, another 30% self-identified as Christian. The last 10%, still identified with a religion. We didn’t have a whole lot of people identifying as ‘none of the above.’
But that changed over time. And I basically got to see the rise of the ‘nones’ in real time—and I didn’t recognize it at first. I just began seeing there’s more students who are identifying as seekers; there’s more students who are saying, “I don’t consider myself to be a member of any given church.” And then it began to be impossible to ignore. And I kept seeing more sadness in these spiritual autobiographies.
They were opting out of religion, but that wasn’t making them happy. They were self-reporting a lot more mental illness, a lot more trauma in their lives. Many of them had a lot of tragedy in their lives, but they did not see Jesus as being part of the way of handling that tragedy.
Genevieve: Wow. That is really hard to hear.
Susan: Truly. One year, I started counting the ‘nones,’ and by the time I got to the tenth one in a row, I just stopped grading and I began praying. I said, “Lord, what is going on here?” And I got this vision of the Good Samaritan story. And I went, “Okay, I don’t know what that means, Lord.” And then the Lord very clearly said to me, “You’re leaving them bleeding on the side of the road.” Which is not the sort of thing you actually want to hear God say to you!
Genevieve: No, it’s not. [laughs]
Susan: Well that was exactly how I responded. I just stood there. “Wait what? No, no. I’m not leaving them bleeding. I’m available to these students and I’m teaching them the truth. I just don’t understand why they can’t take the difficulties of their lives—which are real—and walk 500 yards from my classroom to the chapel and bring them to You, right?”
And right away I heard the Lord say, “They’re far too wounded to get there on their own.”
Genevieve: Oh, my goodness.
Susan: Right? So after a number of conversations with students, with administration, with some priests, I decided this was more than just a revelation. It was a call to leave the academy and to actually do evangelization, because what they needed was an encounter with Jesus Christ.
After talking with my husband, we agreed I was going to switch tracks and work in evangelization, but I had zero idea what that was going to look like. But then, the Vicar General of our diocese called me. He said, “I’ve got a really strange question, that the Lord’s put on my heart. I’m wondering if you would ever be interested in becoming the director of missionary discipleship for our diocese?”
Genevieve: Wait! That Holy Spirit, doesn’t He just choose His time!
Susan: He was just as shocked when I immediately said, “Yes, actually, I would!” I was the on-call parish consultant for parish evangelization. In Minnesota, often if you’re not Catholic, you’re Lutheran. Suddenly we’ve got towns and cities where a lot of people are “none of the above,” right? So how do we reach out to those people? Why did they leave? What do they need and what’s going to draw people back?
It was a great learning experience. Working with parishes was my strength and it seemed to be what really moved the needle in terms of parish evangelization. And after seven years, I had the idea to continue to do the work with parishes, even go outside my diocese and help parishes make this cultural shift. Basically, that’s what the Mark 5:19 Project is.
Genevieve: Beautiful. So who is on your team with the Mark 5:19 Project?
Susan: I’m the only person who’s doing this full time. But my husband, Jerry Windley- Daoust has a lot of experience in family faith formation and also the social mission of the church—so he is certainly my partner in life. We are married together, we raised five children, but he’s also doing a lot of work, much more behind the scenes because he’s a behind-the-scenes kind of guy.
And my friend Heidi Indall and her husband Tim also provide consultation on Catholic schools and religious education. I just feel like the more people that I can work with and collaborate with, the better we all serve parishes.
Genevieve: As I read what younger people are writing, I see them as so utterly foreign to my experience. Obviously technology has changed their lives considerably, but the culture in general has been in freefall. We’re in different places in the faith, but we...don’t even share the same culture. Do you find that to be an obstacle in the parish?
Susan: You hit the nail on the head! This is the most challenging thing in many parishes. Many leaders were formed within one culture, and a lot of younger people were formed in a different culture. It is almost like a bilingual parish. There’s no question it’s a difficult task to be one human community when you’ve got people who not only have two different languages, but they have two different cultures.
But having taught young people all those years, I have found that I have a better ear for the concerns of younger people, and for their language and what they’re thinking, and I can translate that back to parish leaders.
The younger generation has different concerns that need to be seen, acknowledged, and addressed. And they often aren’t. We’ve seen a more dramatic shift in our culture—with broken families and social media and many families not even living near one another. So the way we “do church” needs to change, too.
Genevieve: Because many parishes have a lot of older couples who raised families successfully, can they mentor the younger ones?
Susan: We need more of that. But see, here’s the thing. It used to happen naturally. And now the reality of broken families makes that hard. And most people don’t even live near family. So we have to be more intentional about that in parishes, to build those connections.
