Sebastian Gonzalez
Staff Writer
This semester, a new ministry has taken off within the Franciscan University of Steubenville community that seeks to aid faithful Catholics to grow in devotion to the Holy Spirit.
Sophomore Ben Rose-Fish, who initiated the Enflame Worship Ministry, participated in NET Ireland for two years from 2018-2020, where he had the privilege of fostering a love for worship music and a heart for evangelization.
Several other members of the Enflame team, including seniors Sarah Laman, Alexandra Landrigan and Kendall Caulfus, also served on NET previously.
Rose-Fish said not a lot of people, even at Franciscan, have the opportunity to grow in the Holy Spirit. Besides the Born of the Spirit retreat, he hadn’t known of many opportunities to help students flourish in the Holy Spirit on campus.
During the brainstorming process, Rose-Fish said, “We had this idea of creating a space. … We wanted to do something different, dare I say deeper, than just (Tuesday night) praise and worship, … moving to a place of learning and growing in our relationship with the Holy Spirit.”
Rose-Fish said that Enflame Worship aims to encourage people to grow in their spiritual gifts, specifically charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit.
“(The goal is) allowing everything we do to be led by the spirit,” Rose-Fish said.
Before this semester, Enflame Worship was a ministry primarily built around an online presence. Recently, its Instagram page has been grown very popular, largely due to its reels.
These reels mostly deal with worship music, which is very important to Rose-Fish. During his time with NET, he fostered musical talent where the desire was to create good, solid Catholic music.
Rose-Fish wanted to create Catholic music with sound doctrine because he knew many people who were attracted to beautiful worship music from Protestant megachurches. He said he wanted to help form worship in the Church that would be faithful and show the world that Catholicism holds beauty in its music.
One of the Enflame Worship songs, “Ruach,” which translates from Hebrew into “breath,” quickly became the most popular reel on the Instagram page and will be released on Spotify in March.
Thanks to vocals from sophomore Theresa Renna, another member of Enflame Worship, this song became what it is now.
This semester, the ministry has grown beyond an online presence and has hosted in-person sessions.
“We also think it is essential to have community … to help you grow and encourage,” Laman said.
The night sessions include a community time where people are encouraged to talk and share, a time of learning from talking about a particular spiritual gift, a time for worship and a workshop, where people have hands-on practice in the spiritual gifts without fear of judgment.
Enflame Worship meets Thursdays off-campus from 7-8:30 p.m. and is open to all. More information is available on their Instagram @enflameworship.