C4C’s Bonnie Srubas: Growing in Faith and Leadership Skills

Story by Shelley Wolf

Editor’s Note: This story is part of a series based on conversations with each member of the Crossroads 4 Christ National Servant Leadership Team. Now up is Bonnie Srubas, director of operations for Crossroads 4 Christ, a young adult ministry.

Bonnie Srubas joined Crossroads 4 Christ young adult ministry as an attendee and later rose to become its director of operations. Photo by Aaron Joseph

MANCHESTER – Bonnie Srubas, 30, a former school teacher and now director of operations for Crossroads 4 Christ, says she has grown in many ways through her involvement with the young adult lay apostolate, especially in knowledge of her Catholic faith and in her leadership skills.

After she joined Crossroads 4 Christ as an attendee, her faith blossomed and she took on responsibility for developing some of her chapter meeting’s 10-minute spiritual talks, eventually becoming a meeting leader.

“I wanted to learn more and eventually became a Servant Team Leader, which gave me the opportunity to grow and study about the faith. And it was fun,” Srubas says. She served as a meeting leader in the Columbia chapter, which closed during the pandemic, and in the Greater Hartford chapter that meets at St. Francis of Assisi Parish in New Britain.

Her involvement with Crossroads 4 Christ began close to its founding. Originally born and raised in Middletown, Srubas was working as a Spanish teacher a few years ago in the Milford public school system when she found herself seeking something more in life.

She learned about Crossroads 4 Christ from a friend just as it was getting off the ground and began commuting with other young adults to their weekly meetings, first in Columbia, in the Diocese of Norwich, and then later in the Archdiocese of Hartford at the Greater Hartford chapter in New Britain.

“It was an opportunity to get out of the school teacher bubble. I was craving the friendships and the ability to dive into my faith,” Srubas says. She always had faith, but Crossroads solidified it, thanks to her new Catholic friends and time spent with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

“This has been one of the biggest turning points for me in my relationship with Jesus. I never really had friends before this who talked about Jesus, the person,” she explains. “And my involvement with C4C allowed me to get in front of Jesus every single week. My relationship with Jesus is so much stronger because I know him in the Eucharist.”

In 2019, Srubas left her full-time teaching job for a full-time position with Crossroads 4 Christ’s National Servant Leadership Team, where she now works out of its office in Manchester, providing support for all chapters, planning events and retreats, and does marketing and bookkeeping.

Looking back, she says she appreciates the special retreats Crossroads 4 Christ offered its volunteer leaders, and the organization’s desire to develop their members’ evangelization and leadership skills so that they can assume greater responsibility for the group’s mission.

It’s all part of a “transitional leadership model,” Srubas says, that is built on an understanding of the passage of time and the phases of life. “We look at all of this as transitional. An individual isn’t meant to be on a Servant Team forever,” she says. “It made sense for me to step aside so a different person could come on and grow in their own leadership skills and learn how to lead a chapter.”

Young adulthood, she says, is a temporary time of life. “We really desire these chapters to be sustainable, to be there for every young adult that comes into this stage of life and comes out of it,” Srubas says. “So that means we need to have volunteers that are willing to give when the time is right for them but also invite others on when it is their time, so they can step aside and be sure that this community and these nights and these friendships will sustain for the next generation.”

Srubas credits Travis Moran, one of the co-founders of Crossroads 4 Christ, for giving her this fuller picture of her life and ministry. “It’s a huge blessing and something that Travis, when he began this, understood very well,” she says. “I think God gave him that knowledge, and that was knowledge he wanted to share with us. It’s not something that I knew when I was 24.”

Srubas encourages any young adult who has an interest in learning more about the Catholic faith to check it out.

“We aim at radical hospitality. Anyone should walk in and feel welcome. Someone always goes over and introduces themselves,” Srubas notes. To those thinking about attending a meeting, she says, “Give it a try. It can open up a whole new door to people you might not have found otherwise.”

For more information on Crossroads 4 Christ chapters and weekly meetings, visit: crossroadsforchrist.org/chapters.

In case you missed it, click here to read more about Crossroads 4 Christ and its executive director Alex Soucy.