For 20 years, this global ministry has combined physical labor and spiritual formation to rebuild lives, communities, and the Church itself.
Mike Johnson had his own law firm. The house, the jacuzzi, the tennis court. He sat on 13 boards and committees. His dream? To become a judge. That was five years before. Now it was his first day inside El Abra—a maximum-security prison tucked into a valley in the Bolivian Andes. The journey of Brother Mike Johnson, OFM, from successful lawyer to Franciscan friar arose from a pattern in his life: his vocation expanding as he ventured outside his comfort zone. But nothing had stretched him like this.
El Abra was raw, harsh, the kind of place where the weight of despair settles in the air. “The whole place just felt desolate,” he remembers. “Prisoners were wandering around, looking wasted. I’m guessing many of them were. There wasn’t much else to do back then.” Upon first stepping foot inside El Abra, every fiber within Brother Mike hoped it would be a onetime visit. “If I came back, what was I to do?” he reflects on the feeling of helplessness in a place so heavy with despair.
But not long into that first visit, an inmate approached him. Brother Mike would later learn this man—Ronald—was one of the most notorious murderers in Cochabamba, Bolivia. He would be killed in El Abra eight years later. “You’re a Franciscan?” Ronald asked, nodding toward the brown habit. Then he revealed a Franciscan tau cross around his own neck. Before losing his way, Ronald had once belonged to a Franciscan parish.
In that moment, a quiet connection passed between them. A thread of shared identity, fragile but real. “That was your ‘leper moment,’” a friend told him later, referring to the pivotal moment when St. Francis embraced a leper in the valley below Assisi. What began as discomfort grew into a deep calling. What began as presence became participation. Brother Mike returned the next day . . . and the next . . . and every day for months after. From the heart of a Bolivian prison came the seeds for a ministry called St. Francis Builds (SFB).
The Physical and the Spiritual
“If I came back, what was I to do?” The answer, Brother Mike discovered, was to build. Inmates gravitated toward him—the personable, outgoing, lawyer-turned-friar who poured his heart into his chaplaincy role at El Abra. One unique aspect of El Abra, and many Bolivian prisons, is that the interior is largely self-governed by the inmates. The guards stay along the perimeter. Inside, it is its own society.
Brother Mike leaned into this system, inviting inmates to share their ideas: What could they build? What could they sell? What trades did they want to learn? What would make their community stronger? With his legal background, he negotiated with government agencies to approve projects. Funding came largely from friends and generous parishioners at St. Camillus Parish in Maryland, where he served part of the year.
Together, they built a library with classrooms. They built a metalworking shop, a vehicle repair garage. Local universities invested in experimental farming on the fertile valley soil near El Abra. One inmate made false teeth. Another, jewelry. Another, shoes. One group of 50 inmates secured a contract to make soccer balls. The projects came with one condition: Anyone working in a shop had to teach others. And they did. By the time Brother Mike was asked to return full-time to Maryland, more than 75 percent of the prisoners were working on some kind of project or business. The prison became a model of rehabilitation, even recognized by the Cochabamba government.
This construction wasn’t just about infrastructure. It was about meaning-making. Inmates serving long sentences, haunted by their pasts, began to rediscover purpose, dignity, and creativity. They worked not only for survival, but for community, for their families, and for the possibility of something new. “It was the happiest five years of my life,” Brother Mike says. “It’s the closest I’ve ever been to God. We were building the whole time. By the end, we had 13 different kinds of workshops.”
One afternoon, an inmate said to him: “You know, I’ve always been told I was a rat. My family told me that. My friends did. I started to believe it. But you come here every day. You work with us. You eat with us. You treat us like brothers. I’m starting to think maybe I’m not a rat.” “You’re not a rat,” Brother Mike said gently. “Did you do something wrong? Sure. But that doesn’t define who you are—or who you can become.” These weren’t just surface-level exchanges. They were soul-level conversations that happened while building something real. The physical labor opened space for honesty, healing, and deep spiritual and leadership formation.
Entering the ‘Risk Zone’
When Brother Mike was called home to Maryland in 2005, it was difficult. El Abra had been the great adventure of his life. He had fallen in love with the work, with the dreaming and the building, with the people.
Wanting to continue that spirit of service in mission, he tried a trip with Habitat for Humanity International. While on a Habitat trip to Guatemala, he noticed something familiar: strangers becoming companions through the act of building. But something was missing. The intentional focus on spiritual depth, on inner formation, on sacred reflection—personal development that had emerged so naturally at El Abra—wasn’t quite present. What if he began leading trips that combined the physical act of building with spiritual formation? What if he took the lessons from El Abra around the world? St. Francis Builds was born.
Unlike some mission trips that center on preaching with words, SFB (StFrancisBuilds.org) flips the script. It asks participants: How is this local culture transforming you? What can you learn from the people you’re serving or those with whom you are serving? How can your physical act of building make way for spiritual connection and formation? Just like El Abra.
Each trip is preceded by three potlucks for the participants. These are actually “formation sessions” that use the book St. Francis and the Foolishness of God (Orbis Books) as a model for spiritual discovery. These pre-trip gatherings ground the coming physical work inundefined prayer, reflection, and spiritual intention. In these sessions, the group is asked to reflect on what Francis himself had to strip away—and how that stripping opened him to receive what God most wanted to give him. One thing becomes clear: Spiritual growth on the trip will unfold outside one’s comfort zone. This mirrors Brother Mike’s journey, St. Francis of Assisi’s journey, the apostles’ journeys.
“One of the first activities we do together as a group is talk about the zones of safety,” says longtime volunteer and leader Beth Hood. “The risk zone is the most important one, as that’s where we all grow.” What will participants have stripped as they put their faith into action? And what will they receive in return, simply because their hands are now open?
‘Church Outside the Walls’
Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2025, SFB has completed nearly 60 trips in 11 countries. Its mission is simple but profound: to incarnate the Gospel through hands-on solidarity—building homes, schools, and hope alongside those in need. But more than that, it’s to build relationships, communities, and a deeper awareness of God’s presence in the margins.
“It’s Church outside the walls,” says Brother Mike. “It’s Church in mission. The motto on every participant’s shirt reads: ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words only if necessary.’” This “Church in mission” has also helped enhance parish life. Beth Hood’s story is an example of that.
In college, Hood read the writings of Dorothy Day. She served for a semester at the Catholic Worker in New York City, founded by Day and Peter Maurin. She was so inspired by how faith in action brought healing to the world that she converted to Catholicism. She went all in. But Hood found it difficult to find this same kind of community in parish life as she entered adulthood. She was confronted with the impersonal aspects of American Catholicism. Her spiritual life felt stagnant.
Then came SFB and the opportunity to go on one of its first trips to Guatemala. “That first trip completely realigned the trajectory of my life,” Hood reflects. “The social action piece is essential for me and a lot of Catholics to feel integrated within ourselves.” After Guatemala, Hood was hooked. Over the next two decades, she would go on over 30 trips with the organization. “That’s 90 potlucks,” she laughs.
The architecture of SFB serves as a major asset to parishes that can sometimes struggle with equipping their parishioners to both take their faith deeper and become more connected in their parish communities. “These trips are about action, contemplation, and community,” she says. “I think this is a great ministry for a parish because it brings people together: People who they see at Mass all the time but have never really talked to—now they’re spending a week together serving others and sharing personal things about their lives. When you return home . . . you want to stay in relationship with these people, and so [people] often turn to other Church ministries to stay in connection.” SFB has rebuilt homes in US communities affected by poverty and natural disasters, including seven missions to Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria. In the past 18 months alone, it’s built seven schools in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Hood has no shortage of stories. She has witnessed celebrations in small Mexican villages after SFB completed the building of a school. She has been on Native American reservations and seen an 88-year-old SFB volunteer connect with a tribal leader and learn that they fought in the same battle in the Korean War. She has seen young people enter the trip self-conscious and insecure and emerge as leaders. She has seen volunteers awaken to how their gifts and talents can be used in practical ways, like hydroponic gardening being established at worksites in Puerto Rico and Jamaica.
Over the past 10 years, lay leaders like Hood have taken on key roles in shaping and sustaining the ministry. The ministry has welcomed over 1,000 volunteers and is now led by multiple teams of lay leaders. “Every group we take is multigenerational and multicultural,” Brother Mike shares.
“It’s a beautiful thing to witness—people stepping outside their comfort zones, encountering those who are different, and forming real community. Everyone has a ‘leper’—someone or something they struggle to approach. These trips give people the chance to name that, face it, and maybe even embrace it.”
Full Circle
When SFB launched 20 years ago, Brother Mike returned to El Abra with one of the first groups. It would be eight more years before his pastoral duties would allow another visit. He worried the work they had done might have faded. But when he arrived, nearly everything was still running.
Only the farm had changed—replaced by an evangelical church. But the rest? Still alive. Still functioning. In fact, 100 percent of the inmates were either studying or working. They had built on what they started. “The guys there were so proud to show the group everything they had built,” he says. “It still represented who their community could be.”
Brother Mike can trace the arc of his faith and vocation through a series of yeses that pulled him outside his comfort zone. His first ministry was an AIDS outreach program he reluctantly joined just to get a priest off his back. But there, he experienced the quiet holiness of simply being with people in their pain. From there came retreats. Then pastoral planning, parish council, and eventually, religious life.
He hadn’t wanted to go to Bolivia either. “I was hoping for somewhere they spoke English, and maybe near Cancun!” he laughs. Instead, he landed in the last place he wanted to be. And it changed his life. “The older I get,” he reflects, “I realize there is nothing that is random.” Now, two decades later, he sees what God was doing all along. Every block laid, every community formed, every hand extended across cultures and comfort zones—it was never just about buildings. It was about becoming. About building the Church not only with stone, but with people who are awake to grace.
“God builds on the lessons learned in our earlier stages—and invites us to keep building,” Brother Mike says. “In the trenches of life, on the edges of comfort, with mortar in our hands and hope in our hearts, we’re always becoming.”
