Mission
Echo Community (formerly Dumb Ox Ministries) works with teens, young adults, and families; cultivating their authentic masculinity and femininity through the Theology of the Body, helping them to prepare for, discern, and pursue their unique vocations to love.
Vision
Recognizing that the cause of a lot of hurt and confusion in our world stems from a profound lack of knowledge and security in our identity as created in God’s image and likeness, we at Echo Community proclaim Christ’s power to free, heal, and restore every person to knowing, understanding, and living in this true identity through His body, the Church.
God invites each individual to share and live in His love in a unique and unrepeatable way. It is through answering this invitation that every person finds his or her ultimate fulfillment. Firmly rooted in Blessed John Paul II”s Theology of the Body, Echo Community seeks to give teens, young adults, and families the tools they need to live authentically the virtue of Chastity, through which they can discover, pursue, and live out their own individual call to love with Christ’s love, their vocation.
Echo Community evangelizes in this way by facilitating group retreats, parish missions, and diocesan events, ministering to people through one-on-one mentoring, multimedia, live music, and dynamic speaking.
God invites each individual to share and live in His love in a unique and unrepeatable way. It is through answering this invitation that every person finds his or her ultimate fulfillment. Firmly rooted in Blessed John Paul II”s Theology of the Body, Echo Community seeks to give teens, young adults, and families the tools they need to live authentically the virtue of Chastity, through which they can discover, pursue, and live out their own individual call to love with Christ’s love, their vocation.
Echo Community evangelizes in this way by facilitating group retreats, parish missions, and diocesan events, ministering to people through one-on-one mentoring, multimedia, live music, and dynamic speaking.
Our Patron
St. Thomas Aquinas, at the age of nineteen, felt the call to join a new and flourishing religious order called the Dominicans. However, because of his family’s nobility, the custom was to follow in his uncle’s footsteps into the local Benedictine Abbey. Nevertheless, Thomas was resolved to follow what he felt the Lord was calling him to. His family desperately tried to dissuade him from joining the Dominicans, and in a last ditch effort, imprisoned him for two years in the local family castles. While he was imprisoned there, his brothers reportedly went as far as hiring a prostitute to lure him into sin and draw him away from his vocation. However, Thomas remained faithful and was strengthened in his resolve to remain celibate. After seeing that their efforts were futile, his family arranged for his escape and he was allowed to pursue his calling to join the Dominicans. During his formation, Thomas was noted for being a large man, but with a great, quiet humility. St. Albert the Great, a Dominican saint and scholar, reportedly said, “We call him the dumb ox, but in his teaching he will one day produce such a bellowing that it will one day be heard throughout the world.”
Dumb Ox Ministries affectionately takes on St. Thomas Aquinas, “The Dumb Ox” as a patron and model in our ministry because of his passion and desire to live out the virtue of chastity and pursue God’s call in his life. Because of his fidelity and cooperation with God’s grace, the Church has received one of the greatest saints and theologians who has ever lived. |