College students plan cross-country bike ride to spread the Gospel message
By Joyce Coronel | May 20, 2009 | The Catholic Sun
TEMPE — Two college students are embarking on a 3,000-mile bicycle ride to raise money for St. Paul’s Outreach, a lay ministry that works with fellow students to promote the Gospel and Catholic values.
Daniel Tansill and David Edwards, two 19-year-old Arizona State University students, have been living in one of the SPO households for the past year, along with three other men and a group leader.
These are not your average college students.
Residents of the home, which sits across the street from the Gammage Auditorium on the Tempe campus, promise each other and God, in a written covenant, to live according to ministry’s requirements.
That means no alcoholic beverages in the home, daily community prayer, sharing common meals, assigned chores and more. The obvious dissimilarity to the iconic “Animal House” of John Belushi fame, far from creating an uptight atmosphere, lends itself to a refreshingly fun — and virtuous — home life.
Visitors to the home only get the grand tour after pulling five chin-ups on the metal bar braced in one doorway. (Full disclosure: this reporter only managed three.) Weekly “men’s nights” typically attract 20 or more college guys for prayer, dinner and games of Ultimate Frisbee, football or basketball.
A large painting of the Blessed Mother holding the infant Jesus hangs over a mantle of Bibles and Christian books. Plans for a cross-country bike ride to spread the Gospel don’t seem all that unusual in such surroundings.
Tansill and Edwards will begin their journey June 7 and hope to reach SPO home base in St. Paul, Minn., by Aug. 7, in time for a two-week training course that brings together about 200 college students as well as priests and SPO mission directors from across the country.
The Tempe students’ mission director, Todd Covarrubius, thinks those who encounter Tansill and Edwards will be inspired by their sacrifice and faith. He said that as society has become more urbanized and secularized, missionary zeal has become rare.
“You don’t see young colleg men doing something like this for the Lord, and giving to an organization that seeks to evangelize university students,” Covarrubius said.
The goal of SPO, he said, is to address the spiritual needs of college students who must contend with an atmosphere that is hostile to Christian values. “Not everyone can afford to go to Steubenville or the University of Dallas,” Covarrubius said.
“The university environment encourages you to forsake Christian values, principles and moral standards, to forget everything you know. That turns into ‘forget who you are and who God is,’” he added.
Tansill and Edwards have been training for the big ride for months and have plotted their course to pass through about 40 areas with Catholic churches. They hope to be able to speak to parishioners in the towns they visit and collect donations for SPO.
They’re also hoping that along the way, Catholics will be inspired by their quest to serve God. A homemade meal and place to sleep would be nice too, but they say they are putting the whole endeavor in God’s hands.
And if they find no one to take them in or offer a little support along the way? Joe Tansill, Daniel’s father, who himself took a similar cross-country trip in the 1980s to raise money for the Glenmary Home Missions, is confident the boys will land on their feet. “They’ll be fine,” he told his wife, Karen.
“My whole life, I’ve been hearing him talk about that trip,” Daniel grinned.
“It’s a Spirit-led trip,” Covarrubius added. “These guys are stellar. The zeal they have — God will honor it.”
Tansill and Edwards are also seeking local sponsors for their trek and hope to raise $30,000 for the organization.
Edwards said that after finishing the SPO training course in St. Paul, he’ll be taking a year off school to work with the National Evangelization Team, known as NET. He’s also discerning a vocation to the priesthood.
Tansill plans on returning to ASU to finish a degree in business.
