The Francis Institute

Who We Are

Living among and serving the poor. Proclaiming the Gospel. Strengthening the local Church.

We Don't Just Send Missionaries. We Raise Them Up.

The Church is missionary by her very nature. Every baptized Catholic shares in that mission—not as a select few sent to distant places, but as an entire Body called to go out.

At the center of everything we do is a simple conviction: mission takes root when the people who live in a place become missionaries themselves. A local Catholic already carries what an outsider never fully can—the language, history, culture, and relationships of a community. When we enter a new place, our goal is never to build something dependent on us. It is to form missionaries who can raise up more missionaries, so the local Church can send her own.

We form and send Catholic missionaries—singles and families—to live among the people, proclaim Christ, serve the poor, and help the local Church become missionary herself.

Our Missionary Model

How We Live Our Mission

Out of an interior life of prayer and community, every Francis Institute missionary lives out four commitments in the world.

PROCLAIMING THE GOSPEL

We don't just want to help people live better lives—we want them to know Jesus. Every visit, conversation, and act of service is an opportunity to make Christ known by name and invite people into the Sacramental life of the Church.
SERVING THE POOR

We serve the sick, hungry, lonely, and forgotten—not as a project target, but as family. When we serve the poor, Christ tells us plainly that we serve Him.
BUILDING COMMUNITY

Our missionaries live in solidarity with the people they serve—in the same neighborhoods, sharing meals on the same streets. Distance is the enemy of real love.
MAKING DISCIPLES

A missionary's task isn't finished when a mission is planted. It is finished when a local Catholic is formed, sent, and raising up missionaries of their own.

Meet Our Missionaries

Our Story

A Family Sent to Mission

Robert and Tami Erisman first met while serving with NET Ministries in 2002–2003. Afterward, they spent several years in St. Paul, Minnesota, striving to live in community with other Catholics. They were married in 2006 and continued to build their family around that same desire for a life of faith shared with others. That experience would eventually shape the way they approached missionary life.

In 2018, Robert and Tami left their home in Minnesota with their seven children and joined Family Missions Company as full-time foreign missionaries. They were sent to the Amazon region of Peru, where they began their missionary life as a family.

Living and serving among the people of Peru, they preached the Gospel and walked alongside families through practical acts of service—including providing food and medicine, helping improve living conditions, and creating opportunities for work.

As they settled into missionary life, however, they began to see a larger need.

They wanted to see missionary communities where people could live the faith together. They also wanted to see local men and women formed and sent as missionaries among their own people - people who already knew the language, culture, and realities of the communities they were called to serve - rather than relying only on missionaries coming from other countries.

One of the first people who helped make that vision real was Wellington, a young man from Ecuador who had been living with the Erisman family even before the Francis Institute existed. Wellington had a desire to serve the Church and become a missionary, and his story helped Robert and Tami see what could happen when local people were given the formation and opportunity to become missionaries themselves. The vision was becoming bigger than one family or one mission post.

The Francis Institute was born from a desire to build missionary communities where people could encounter Christ, grow as disciples, and be formed to carry the Gospel to others—including men and women raised up from within the very communities they were called to serve.

Rebuild My Church

These are the words that Jesus spoke to St. Francis of Assisi in 1205 as he prayed in the rundown chapel of San Damiano. At first, St. Francis thought that Jesus was speaking about the chapel he was praying in, and so he obediently tried to repair it. But over time, St. Francis realized that the Lord wasn’t asking him to rebuild a physical church building. God was entrusting him with the great task of rebuilding the faith of the Catholic Church: the entire People of God! St. Francis faithfully lived out this call the Lord placed upon his life and brought Christ’s light to a dark world.

Today, just as it was in the time of St. Francis, the Catholic Church is in need of reformation and renewal. The Church is in need of a People of God living in the world but set apart from the world. In the footsteps of our patron, St. Francis, the words commanded to him, “Rebuild My Church,” resound through the centuries with a renewed sense of urgency in our day. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit has been so profound that it beckons us to lay aside concern for our own welfare and lives, abandoning ourselves completely to the Providence of the Father and taking up with our Lord Jesus the work of renewing His Church.