Jackie LePine poses in front of a painting, depicting Jesus and the apostles during the storm on the Sea of Galilee, which hangs in the entryway of the parish office at Prince of Peace Parish in Woodbury. Photo by Shelley Wolf

By Shelley Wolf

WOODBURY – Jackie LePine’s life is evidence that not everyone claims their faith in their youth, but it’s never too late to explore the spiritual questions we all have. And there’s no knowing where it might lead.

For LePine, her faith journey took her from the Catholic Church to a Protestant church and back again, where she is assisting with the New Evangelization. She’s doing that by co-leading an Alpha faith-sharing group at Prince of Peace Parish in Woodbury. Through weekly gatherings using Zoom video conferencing, the faithful – and the simply curious – are exploring their own questions about faith and Jesus to grow in relationship with Christ.

“I love sharing, just inviting people to come watch a video and talk about it. God comes to people in all different ways,” LePine says. “It’s just inviting them so they can have their own experience of God.”

LePine loves coordinating this parish ministry, helping some participants renew their existing faith and others find it for the first time. She believes helping people learn more about Jesus can put them on a path for a lifetime of spiritual growth – through future participation in RCIA, Bible study or outreach – and have a positive ripple effect for the Catholic Church, too.

“It’s exciting to think where Jesus might take a person whose heart is open to his call,” she says.

A Curious Mind

Considering her own circuitous faith journey, LePine never would have imagined herself as a disciple of Jesus, evangelizing the faith through a ministry in a small-town Catholic parish. But the seeds that were planted in baptism eventually took root.

LePine was baptized a Catholic and spent her earliest years growing up in the Oakville section of Watertown. “I remember my first holy Communion and that being a really special day,” she says. She also recalls traveling in sixth grade to an exhibit to see a replica of the Shroud of Turin. “I remember that had a huge impact on me. I really wanted to know if God was real.”

When her parents divorced and her mother remarried, her new family switched to the Episcopal Church. There, LePine says, religious formation focused more on the history of the Anglican Church, rather than on a personal relationship with Jesus. “I just lost interest in church all together, and by high school I wasn’t going to church at all,” she admits.

At 21 she got engaged and enrolled in premarital counseling at an Episcopal church, where the minister drew her back to Sunday services. “This priest talked about Jesus in a way I’d never heard before. He had a sense of humor and my defenses began to come down. I wanted to know more,” she says. He also told the couple that love was not a feeling but an active promise to do what’s best for your spouse, and to do that both individuals would need Jesus at the center of their lives. “I was open to the idea that God could be a part of my life.”

Another turning point for her, she says, was seeing her biological father revisit his own faith and seeing how it transformed him and his relationships. Her parents eventually forgave each other their past hurts and reunited. “That was my first piece of evidence that God was real,” LePine now says.

Her own husband Paul, who later became an Episcopal music minister, urged her to explore her faith more fully. So she took a Bible study class, and the young couple went on a three-day retreat for Catholics and Protestants. “When I went to the prayer team, they asked what I wanted them to pray for and all I could say was, ‘I want to know Jesus better,’” she recalls. The team prayed for her on the spot.

“In that moment, I was filled with a love and joy that I had never experienced before. Jesus became real to me and all I wanted to do was to tell people how real he is and that they can have a personal relationship with him,” LePine says. “It was on that retreat I would say that Paul and I became disciples – we made a decision to give our lives to Jesus and follow him, and our lives have not been the same since.”

Returning to Her Catholic Faith

As an adult, LePine inevitably faced some of life’s many challenges that tested her faith, including lean years and various family health issues but, in time, she recognized the presence of God alongside her. She also struggled with anxiety, which sometimes left her feeling distant from God, she says, but every time someone helped her along the way she grew in hope. “God hadn’t left me and still loved me,” she says.

She had three children and believes God also revealed himself to her through the joy they brought into her life. “He speaks to me mostly through Scripture, sermons and other people,” LePine explains.

 Still, she wanted to get closer to Jesus. And one of her daughters began asking questions about the Catholic Church. “I knew that God was calling me to be Catholic,” LePine says. She joined RCIA and came fully into the Catholic Church in 2014. She joined St. Teresa of Avila Church, which, through a merger with Church of the Nativity, became Prince of Peace Parish in 2017.

Eager to learn more about her reclaimed Catholic faith, LePine attended the Archdiocese of Hartford’s Catholic Biblical School for two years at the Lyceum in Terryville. “That was great and I loved my classmates. They were fantastic,” she says.

LePine was later encouraged by her parish priest, Father James Gregory, to attend the archdiocese’s ELM Leadership Formation program for parish ministry training. Around that time, she saw a video of Archbishop Leonard P. Blair calling all Catholics to become missionary disciples and to evangelize the faith. She felt compelled to answer that call.

After consulting with her parish priest, LePine formed a Catholic book group that read and discussed Forming Intentional Disciples by Sherry Weddell and Divine Renovation: Bringing Your Parish from Maintenance to Mission by James Mallon. She eventually agreed to assist Father Gregory in co-leading an Alpha group at her parish this year. “I saw Alpha as a way to introduce people to the proclamation of Jesus Christ,” she says.

Through Zoom, the group gathers, watches a video and then breaks into small groups for more intimate conversations. “After attending Alpha, some people may desire to know more about becoming Catholic and we can direct them to RCIA,” LePine says. “Others may desire to join a small group or Bible study to grow more in their faith. And others may desire to put their faith into action and become more involved in outreach. The end goal is to help one another become disciples, who in turn use their gifts to help others to become disciples.”

Though LePine is helping to spread the Catholic faith to others, she knows that when it comes to her own personal faith, she has just scratched the surface of all that a relationship with Jesus, the sacraments and Catholicism have to offer.

“I love the Catholic Church and that there are prayers for everything. I’m learning to surrender my worries to God,” she says. “It’s so rich, you can never plumb the depths of it in your lifetime.”