A CATHOLIC COMMUNITY BUILDING ENDEAVOR
To weather the storms of the current era, we must rely on the strength of our relationships: first and foremost, our relationship with Jesus the Nazarene and, secondly, our neighbor. Our Local Parish’s mission is to help build deeper relationships within our local Catholic communities. To accomplish this, we utilize contemporary and traditional media to capture Christ-centered stories and to promote Catholic-owned or operated businesses.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
The Armor of God men’s movement, which began in Fort Wayne, Indiana, begot the Belt of Truth podcast, which then begot Our Local Parish. All the ministries before and alongside the Armor of God men’s movement are begotten from the Holy Spirit. Ministries like Christ Renews His Parish, Rekindle The Fire, Cursillo, ACTS, Kingdom Builders, LifeTeen, and Damascus Catholic Youth Summer Camp have guided the faithful closer to God and neighbor.
Karl Grab and Josh Bach, co-founders of Our Local Parish, met at an Armor of God men’s retreat in 2021. The five pillars taught at Armor of God helped Josh and Karl become more authentic in their Catholic faith and lit them on fire to do more for God, Our Father.
On May 4, 2022, with the burning desire to “do something” Josh, Karl, and a few other men from Armor of God met at the Oratory of St. Mary Magdalene in Fort Wayne across from St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church. Following the guidance in a Fr. John Riccardo podcast, they decided to start the business meeting not following an agenda but in eucharistic adoration. During adoration, they’d ask the Holy Spirit to create their agenda. This simple yet powerful choice set the trajectory for Our Local Parish.
During that time in adoration, while Karl was deep in contemplative prayer, he felt a pulling towards the altar at Our Lady, Patroness of American Center in Rome City, IN, widely known as the apparition site of Our Lady of America. While deep in contemplative prayer, having mental visualization of the altar in Rome City, and in complete silence and peace, Karl asked Our Mother, “What do you want me to do?”; He received back the inspired thought of “Do something” to which Karl chuckled and replied, “But that’s what I’m asking.” He then received the inspired thought of “What do you have?” Karl only had the people who agreed to be part of this initial meeting. He named each person and received an inspired thought for each of them that would guide the creation of Our Local Parish. For Josh Bach, he received the inspired thought of “follow him.” When Karl told Our Mother he was a part of this team, he heard the inspired thought “coordinate.”
In the business meeting that followed eucharistic adoration, jaws dropped as the men in the business meeting heard the inspired thought that Karl received for each of them. Our Mother’s guidance meant something to them, especially to Josh.
A couple of years prior, Josh left a successful secular media company he had helped create. He left that business because he felt a calling to serve the Lord and do professional work that served Christ Jesus. Unbeknownst to the group, Josh had much of the inspiration that would eventually become Our Local Parish. All these new ideas for a business burst forth from Josh at that meeting after he heard Our Mother’s command to “follow him.”
That night, since Josh lives in Indianapolis, he spent the evening with Karl and his family. Before that day, Karl and Josh did not know each other very well. They would find that they have similar life paths and are trying to live similar lives today, which include many homesteading practices. Coming out of COVID and a contentious presidential election, they both were trying to make their worlds smaller. Both had canceled cable TV and were focusing on the local. They intentionally spent more time with other people and families from their home parish and started shopping more with smaller / local companies. The next morning Karl asked Josh what he thought about the company name “Our Local Parish.” Josh loved the company name, and it has stuck since.
Both Josh and Karl found they work incredibly well together. Josh would call Karl with all these great ideas, and together on the phone, the two would bring into focus the vision. Josh is creative, while Karl has been living the inspired thought of “coordinate.” Together they have brought to life the Catholic community-building enterprise, “Our Local Parish.”
MEET THE CO-FOUNDERS
-
Josh Bach
CO-FOUNDER
Married in 2000 to my wife Cara and blessed with six beautiful children. Became Catholic in 2003 and an active parishioner at Holy Rosary in Indianapolis, IN. We live on a quiet, peaceful homestead outside of Indy with two dogs, five cats, two goats, and 35 chickens. I will update as more children and/or animals are added to the family.
-
Karl Grab
CO-FOUNDER
Catholic convert since 2012, "married up" in 2007, blessed with three amazing kids. I am a beginner deer and turkey hunter, a "failing forward" homesteader. My home parishes are St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Fort Wayne and Immaculate Conception Church in Kendallville, IN.
WHAT IS OUR LOCAL PARISH?
Our Local Parish is a Catholic community-building enterprise. As we live in a lost and confused culture and fragile economic times, it has never been more clear that the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings hold the answers to these problems. As Catholics, we must follow the lessons taught in history and live the Truth and guidance found in Holy Scripture and the Catholic Catechism.
In the gospel according to St. Matthew 22:34-40, Jesus taught us to “Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Loving God and neighbor is at the heart of our mission. This clear commandment, from Jesus the Nazarene, is essential to live by. There is no better place to live “the greatest commandment” than at your local parish; it is time we all came home to our local parishes.
We understand that so many of us have become isolated and the thought of breaking into a new community can be daunting. A significant component of Our Local Parish is the individual storytelling at each local parish. We believe that if someone is outside the Church or is practicing but wants to go deeper then knowing the individuals who are the clergy, office staff, laity leaders, or elders of the Church will help them draw closer. Contemporary and traditional media tools can be that icebreaker. Each parish will start with a “Childhood to Priesthood” episode with the pastor of the Church. Knowing our priest’s life journey can help us better appreciate their humanity and, hopefully, they can move from the stranger up on the altar to someone we understand just a little bit more.
A vital part of Our Local Parish is the CATHOLIC BUSINESS DIRECTORY section. In these economic times, as industries are consolidating around one or two giant corporations, buying from local businesses is even more critical. Our communities are full of Catholic brothers and sisters who need our support. Many of us have no clue that fellow Catholics own these businesses. Our hope is that when someone is trying to decide where to shop, eat, or have a service performed they will first check the Our Local Parish platform to find a local Catholic business.
Finally, since our inception, we’ve met several incredibly creative Catholic professionals. These Catholic professionals want to serve the Lord, not the secular creative world. These men and women could move to New York City or Los Angeles and do exceptionally well in their fields BUT they choose to stay in the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese and serve our community. They each are bursting with ideas that will grow the Kingdom and all they need is a little financial support to complete their projects. Our Local Parish wants to help their ideas become a reality. When you support Our Local Parish, you are helping advance the content you already see on the platform and will also help bring all these other micro-projects to life.
Overall, our prayer with Our Local Parish is that the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese will feel just a little bit smaller and become stronger by growing closer to God and one another through our local parishes and by shopping with local Catholic businesses.
Help us advance this mission
We thank you for your support. God Bless.
Josh’s Witness
“When we TRUST in our Lord, SURRENDER ourselves to Him, RELEASE all that binds us, then we allow ourselves to RECEIVE His LOVE.”
Trust, Surrender, Release, Receive, and Love were the five words I heard from the Holy Spirit in the Oratory of St. Mary Magdalene with Karl and the others before forming Our Local Parish in the spring of 2022, but I will expand upon this later.
I was born in 1975 to my mother and father in a small rural town near Muncie, Indiana. My parents were married for around five years and had two full-term miscarriages before I was born. My mother said that everyone in the town called me the miracle baby for that reason. I was blessed with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and a community that loved and cared for me. I was baptized in a Methodist church and remember attending church and Bible school with my grandmother. When I was five, my parents ended their marriage, and my younger sister and I went to live with my mom, spending every other weekend with my dad. I won’t go into all the reasons why my parents divorced, but I am confident of one thing, they did not place Christ in the center of their marriage, and therefore, the marriage failed.
Both my Mom and my Dad got remarried to wonderful people, and they are still happily married today. We started going to church again with my mom and stepfather, and when I got older, I became involved with our church youth group. This opened my eyes to a deeper relationship with the Lord and created a more solid foundation as a teenager before I went off to college. With this foundation, my choices were similar.
My wife Cara and I met on April 17th, 1994. We dated throughout college, and after we left Ball State University, we moved to Indianapolis before getting married in 2000. I started a career in insurance with State Farm, and Cara chose a career in international adoption. We had high hope of starting a family and living the American dream. After multiple miscarriages and failed attempts to carry out a pregnancy, we decided to look into the adoption options. It was a relatively easy decision for us because Cara knew this world inside and out, and we had close family members that had adopted. We both felt adamant about adoption, regardless of whether we became pregnant. I had changed careers to real estate investing, and we decided to adopt from Russia. We brought home our beautiful 10-month-old baby girl in the winter of 2005.
Looking back, we were building our own kingdom that would soon crumble. Although I was baptized as an infant and was raised with Christian ideals, I was not living a Christ-centered life, and I certainly was not the spiritual leader of my house. A few years later, real estate had been booming but came to a screeching halt during the mortgage meltdown of 2008-2009. By kicking my legs fast, I could keep above water for almost 2 years before being pulled under. I lost my business, dozens of homes, and automobiles, weeks away from our house being foreclosed, and our marriage was hanging on by a thin thread. My daughter was 3 then, and sadly, most of my memories during those 2 years are still cloudy at best. Things got so bad that our heater and well broke, and I had no money to fix them. We took showers at the YMCA and made weekly trips to a natural spring with 5-gallon jugs once a week. We had electric oil heaters throughout the house to make it through winter. It was insane. I was in a paralyzing depression and had no way out of this deep dark hole alone. I came home one afternoon, and when I noticed my wife and daughter were not home, I decided to sit in my car. I started to pray out loud. I asked God, “What am I going to do? What is happening to me?” Tears began to run down my face, and my heart started opening up to Him. He took me on a journey that began with the forgiveness of some business associates I felt had betrayed me. I was so angry with them and absolutely did not want to forgive them, but I instantly did. Just like that! He took me back further to other individuals who caused me financial harm. For 30 minutes, The Lord took me back further and further to some of my earliest memories of hurt, and He instructed me to forgive every person until I had no one else to forgive. After a short time, God let me know I had forgotten one person. I reached the rearview mirror and pulled it down to look right at the person I had beaten up, belittled, and abused for the last 2 years. God instructed me to forgive myself and give all of it to Him. EVERY BIT!!! And I did. I cried and released 1000 tons of guilt and shame I had been holding on to for the position I had put my family in and the foggy absent-minded depression I had “let myself” slip into. I gave it all to Him, and He took all of it! Wow! So much love and grace, and although I didn’t deserve any of this, He delivered this gift to me at the lowest point in my life because I Trusted Him to help me. I then Surrendered to Him and allowed Him to take the lead. He asked me to release my burdens to Him, and I Received His Love and grace that pulled me out of the dark hole I was in.
I immediately started to face life and the incredible financial challenges I had been avoiding. I opened up to my wife and shared what had happened. My wife had her husband back, and my daughter had her dad back.
Don’t for a second think that the following steps were easy. It wasn’t easy at all, but I chipped away, one by one, each challenge I had to overcome over the next several months. God was by my side every step of the way. We lost our home to foreclosure, I finalized bankruptcy, and I began to rebuild my marriage, my relationship with my sweet daughter, and my life in general. This time with Him leading the way.
The new life that was given to me involved a lot of growing pains and changes. This miracle in my car with our Lord could not be denied, but I felt like a toddler learning to walk for the first time. As I started to find myself in situations or challenges, I had to retrain myself to seek God for strength, wisdom, and courage. I reminded myself of the burdens Christ took from me and to not fall back into old habits of selfishly building my own kingdom instead of helping Him build His. I also started to receive a powerful ability to discern, along with creative visions, when I began learning to place Christ in the center of my life. I fell down more than one could imagine, but God always picked me up.
My financial background and experience navigating through challenging emotional hardships relating to money opened up many doors to serve others in this capacity. God used those experiences to expand my financial literacy. So, I founded a 501c3 that taught people coming out of homelessness, drug addiction, and sex trafficking how to budget money, save, and make it grow through biblical principles. For over a 10-years, our nonprofit helped hundreds of people become better stewards of money.
Before starting the nonprofit, though, I became involved in Christian radio and later into podcasting before it became a thing. I was intrigued by this form of media and the tool it can be to reach an audience and connect with the community. I used this tool with the nonprofit and later formed a media company in Indianapolis with a good friend. We created a local podcast network, held large monthly community events, and started producing and directing high-level documentaries. The global pandemic had a significant effect on our media company and the direction we were going. In fact, just about everything in my life began to change. In a short period of time, our family changed churches, our children changed schools, we moved out of the city, and I left my former partnership in the media company to start a new Christ-centered media company. Our world got smaller, and our relationship with God grew deeper. We were already unplugged from a lot of the mainstream media, giving up cable tv the decade before, but we kept letting go of more worldly desires while falling deeper in love with Jesus.
Like many other organizations, the Christian men’s retreat I had attended for years quit meeting during the pandemic. While talking with a friend in Ft. Wayne, he told me that a group of solid Catholic men started a new group called Armor of God. I quickly asked how to get involved and signed up! The connection to the Armor of God mission and its members was immediate. The messages I received about stepping up to be the spiritual leader of my home and letting go of the “Shadow Life” of sin paralleled what God was guiding me to do. I was where He wanted me to be.
Three days after the retreat, I reached out to Robb Gregory of Armor of God to let him know I felt called to assist in any way to expand the mission. Months later, we launched the Belt of Truth Podcast powered by Armor of God. Many months later, Robb Gregory helped us assemble a meeting with five of us in his office to discuss some visions I had been given of a new Catholic media company. Before we met, Karl Grab was adamant that we spend some time at the Oratory of St. Mary Magdalene near St. Vincent De Paul Parish in Fort Wayne. Each of us went in and spent this time quietly with our Lord. After saying the rosary, I sat back in the pew and asked the Holy Spirit what He would like me to receive. The five words were Trust, Surrender, Release, Receive, and Love. These words were given with an incredible amount of clarity for the foundational meeting that was about to take place. If you haven’t read about Karl’s message from the Holy Spirit in the oratory, you must! It tied everything together and helped set the foundation for the company.
A lot more work than many people could imagine has gone into launching Our Local Parish, and we are just at the beginning. Every meeting and every recording begins with prayer and adoration to ensure that Jesus Christ is at the center of this. Karl Grab was placed into my life for many reasons. His enthusiasm for the Lord is explosive! His talent for bringing order to chaos and his communication skills are of the highest level. Most importantly, his brotherly love, support, and encouragement towards me and others is what I value most. I am grateful to have been called to build Our Local Parish with him and am excited to see what God has in store.
Wait! I need to update you on the expansion of our family! A year and a half after the conversation with God in my car, Cara and I fostered and later adopted two absolutely beautiful twin baby girls. A few years later, God presented us with two more beautiful daughters, and last year, He brought a beautiful four-year-old boy into our family. We are blessed with a solid Christ-centered marriage, six children, two dogs, 5 cats, 2 goats, 34 chickens, and a rooster on a private wooded homestead in central Indiana.
“When we TRUST in our Lord, SURRENDER ourselves to Him, RELEASE all that binds us, then we allow ourselves to RECEIVE His LOVE.”
God Bless,
Josh Bach
Karl’s Witness
I now see how God is with us all individually, even if we don’t see Him, care about Him, or want Him in our lives.
I am married with three kids. My wife grew up Southern Baptist and I grew up “Northeast Nothing.” Along the way, God guided my wife and me to become Catholic as adults. My life journey is one that I wouldn’t change because it led my family and me to the mother Church.
Thanks to my parents, I was baptized as an infant in the United Methodist Church in Piscataway, New Jersey. I do have fond memories with my Mom and sisters at that church. With that said and with the benefit of hindsight, I now understand more deeply the Biblical wisdom of Malachi 2:16, “For I hate divorce, says the Lord, the God of Israel.” Divorce was incredibly destructive to us all and remains destructive to this day. After my parents’ divorce, we left the United Methodist Church and became “Northeast Nothing.” God was still in my life even though I didn’t recognize or think about Him.
Because of instability in my home life, I attended three different high schools. Those days were incredibly hard, but as I keep saying, God is always in our lives. The Lord guided my Dad to send me to Immaculata High School in Somerville, NJ. As I look back on my entire life, that one decision by my Dad was the fork in the road. Immaculata High School radically changed the trajectory of my whole life in a good way. I am eternally grateful to the Lord and my Dad for sending me to Immaculata. Immaculata HS was a Catholic high school with several nuns, a solid foundation of devoted school teachers, and retired professionals dedicated to educating the youth of central New Jersey. The instability of my home life contrasted with the stability of many humble Catholic families at Immaculata. My new peer group at Immaculata were spiritually and emotionally stable friends whose parents lived the tenants of the Catholic faith. I am eternally grateful to the many religious sisters, teachers, football coaches, and parents who prayed for me and set a healthy example for me. They planted seeds of Christ and His mother Church deep in my soul. Those seeds would lay dormant for a couple of decades, but thanks be to God, they were planted.
After Immaculata High School, I pursued what the culture and the world tell you to…professional success and pleasure. I was not making Christ-like choices from my teens throughout my twenties and early thirties. I am forever sorrowful for the people I hurt along the way. Today, I have difficulty fully accepting Jesus’ mercy and grace. Again, God never left my side and, because of His love, planted many essential people in my life…most notably Lt. Col. Harvey M. Dick and my now wife, Angie.
Col. Dick was a towering, imposing, larger-than-life human being. When God made the patriotic Christian man, Col. Dick was the model. Col. Dick and his wife, Mrs. Margie Dick, were my “host parents’ at The Citadel and the loving, unapologetically Christian parents I needed. I attended Bible study with Col. Dick throughout my four years at The Citadel because he told me to go. I have countless memories of talking with Col. in his “I love me room.” I miss those moments and can see and feel them even today.
In August 2003, God brought Angie into my life. She was a shy, gentle beauty from central Texas. As a child, she spent many weekends with her Irish Catholic Uncle Jerry and great-grandma Nana. Her parents raised her in the Southern Baptist Church. She has her own beautiful journey to the mother Church, but there is little doubt that I wouldn’t know Jesus the way I do today without Angie.
Angie has always openly and freely spoken the name of Jesus. As we grew together, Christ Jesus was a part of our relationship. In the early days, my participation was more compliance than real acceptance. Growing up Northeast Nothing, my dogmas were logic and reason. I was misled to believe that religion conflicts with logic and reason. I could not have been more wrong.
When I realized I wanted to marry Angie, I began thinking about how to avoid the suffering I experienced because of divorce. I NEVER wanted to get divorced. If God blessed us with kids, I wanted my kids NEVER to experience what I experienced because of my parent’s divorce. So, I did what my logic and reason taught me to do. I went to the data; I looked at the science. There are numerous studies by religious and secular groups about divorce rates and marriage happiness. The data is crystal clear. Married couples who practice a religion TOGETHER have a significantly lower divorce rate AND are happier in their marriage than those who do not practice a religion together. The data is also clear that the husband and wife must practice the religion TOGETHER. The effects of a lukewarm husband or non-participating husband are damaging. I knew I had to get my head in the game and not just go through the motions.
Angie and I began to “church shop” in New Jersey. To put it nicely, all the protestant churches we attended in New Jersey were preaching the Bible from a morally relativistic viewpoint. The protestant churches we attended were not preaching Truth. Because of my time at Immaculata High School, Bible study with Col. Dick, and Angie’s Southern Baptist upbringing, we knew those churches were wrong. We reluctantly went to a Catholic Church in New Jersey and were surprised at how much we liked it and felt comfortable. We both felt there was a system of checks and balances on how Catholic priests are formed and how they can preach. We both thought the Catholic Church had the right balance of Truth, tradition, history, beauty, reverence, and worship music. We began to attend Catholic mass regularly but thought there was no need to go through RCIA…we were believers of Christ already, so who cares, right? Wrong.
In 2011, my first child was born. I left my job in NYC, the borough of Manhattan, to be a stay-at-home Dad so my wife could pursue her goal of becoming a Medical Doctor. Ten days after my son was born, we drove to Houston, TX for Angie’s residency training. I found myself alone, with a newborn baby and Angie working at least 80 hours a week. My “professional success” in New York City was now gone. My days were defrosting breast milk, laundry, bottle feeding, changing diapers, laundry, getting my son on a sleep schedule, more laundry and trying to manage this sinking feeling of failure. I thought men weren’t supposed to do these things. I was a manly man; why was I doing these female things? Again, how wrong I was. God was shaping me, humbling me, and teaching me to serve. I will admit those were hard lessons to learn.
As I struggled with humiliation, slight depression, and self-medication with alcohol, I went back on my logic and reason tenants. I thought about my ancestors...how did they survive coming to the United States of America? They were all alone too. Plus, they were poor. The answer…my great-grandparents clung to God and neighbor, the Greatest Commandment taught to us by Jesus. When they left Germany, they moved to the Ironbound section of Newark, NJ, which was a heavily German neighborhood at the time. They were active and dependent, in a Christ-like way, on St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church. There was my answer…God and neighbor.
In Houston, TX we found St. Vincent de Paul Parish. This loving parish on Buffalo Speedway is a close second to Immaculata High School in terms of its impact on my life. Now I tried to pull what we did in NJ: attend mass and not go through RCIA. But God had other plans. I wanted to give the same gift of Baptism to my son that my parents gave me as an infant. Thankfully, the Catholic Church has a policy that children cannot be Baptized in the Catholic Church unless at least one of the parents is Catholic. Angie and I agreed that we wanted Theodore baptized in the Catholic Church. So, I “took one for the team” and started RCIA. That decision is the most important decision I have ever made.
Saying yes to RCIA caused all those seeds others planted throughout my life to grow. Fully entering the Roman Catholic Church was a great awakening for everything in my life. I began to see and experience everything differently. And at St. Vincent de Paul in Houston, I had the same thing that strengthened my great-grandparents in the early 1900s…I had God and neighbor. I could not have survived those four years in Houston without God and the holy friendships I formed at St. Vincent de Paul Parish. Those deep bonds and love for my Catholic brothers and sisters are still with me today. I miss and love my community at SVdP deeply.
We moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana in 2016 and ironically started attending another St. Vincent de Paul Parish.
St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Fort Wayne is diverse and bears so much fruit. The Catholic community at St. Vincents is thriving, vibrant, and welcoming. We have been incredibly blessed that my wife, three kids, and I have all formed holy friendships with so many people at both the parish and its grade school. I will always credit St. Vincent’s in Fort Wayne for helping me become more authentically Catholic.
During the COVID madness, a men’s movement started in Fort Wayne. A ministry called the Armor of God was brought to life by several bold men from St. Vincent de Paul Parish. Joseph Fish invited me to attend an Armor of God Men’s retreat at St. Felix in Huntington, IN. I jumped at the opportunity to go because so much was locked down then. At that retreat and subsequent retreats, Armor of God taught me how to get to the next phase of my journey with Jesus the Nazarene and be more authentic. We learned how to acknowledge and light up our “shadow lives,” develop a “core mission statement,” weapons to fight in “spiritual warfare,” and the necessity of “Holy Fraternity” and frequent reception of the “Sacraments.” Those five principles are responsible for where I am today in my Faith.
To bring it all together. I met Josh Bach at the Armor of God retreats. It was the second or third retreat that he stopped me on the stairs outside the basement dining room and told me, “You and I are going to do something together; I just know it.” Today Josh has become a brother to me. He is the perfect person for me to start a business with. Our strengths and weaknesses complement each other perfectly.
I thank you if you’ve read my witness to the end. I hope to continue to grow in Faith, Hope, and Charity. I feel blessed to be on this journey with Jesus and Josh through Our Local Parish. You now know so much about my journey, and I hope and pray that we will all eventually journey back home to Our Father’s Heavenly Kingdom.
God Bless.
~Karl