“CONGNAM o Dia” is the simple motto of Mark Lysaght’s Irish clan, and he lives like it’s what flows through his veins.
It means “help from God”.
There’s another relevant motto that reflects the way the Brisbane Catholic lives – “fide et opere”, Latin for “by faith and by works”.
It was the motto of his old school, St Bede’s College, in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Both come into play as he transitions from his role of the past 10 years as associate director for Identity and Mission at Australian Catholic University to become director of NET Ministries, a network of young people evangelising among young people.
Living his faith has been at the heart of everything Mark’s done in life for the past two decades, and it goes back to a conversion experience he had as a teenager.
Now 45, he sees that as a turning point, and one he had to have.
He knows he was heading in the wrong direction before that.
“I’d been living a life that was really contrary to the Christian life,” he said.
“I had a car accident when I was 15.
“I rolled a car, and my hand got caught out the window.”
After the accident and the injury, he said, he found himself “lost and immersed in exploring drugs and alcohol”.
Being a St Bede’s old boy and from a family with strong Catholic faith, a parishioner who must’ve cared about him invited him to a retreat weekend run by the Catholic youth team in Christchurch.
“It was an Antioch weekend,” Mark said.
“I had a real conversion experience there … (when I went) to Reconciliation, and for some unbeknown reason in that sort of space had this extraordinary experience of Jesus on the Cross, and getting it … for the first time.
“It made everything that my parents (Marie and Gerard) had said, what we’d been taught at school, make sense.
“I think it was the first time that I really confessed properly, with a real conviction that I’d done wrong by people, and I’d done wrong by myself.
“And I think it was out of that, in Reconciliation and coming back, that repentance (was real) … I was remorseful.
“I repented for what had happened and I wanted change in my life.”
Flowing from that experience, Mark began “to meet a number of other Catholics who’d had that experience and, as a result, I went to a prayer meeting in Christchurch”.
“Some people prayed with me, and I had just this overwhelming conviction from that time to want to proclaim Jesus Christ for what has happened in my own life, and particularly, I suppose, that young people themselves wouldn’t fall for the same traps …,” he said.
He wanted other young people to know “that there is hope and that there is another way”.
That eventually led him to join other young people in volunteering with NET (National Evangelisation Teams) Ministries, and now it’s like he’s going full circle with his new job.
Archbishop Mark Coleridge will commission him as NET Ministries director during a commissioning Mass at Our Lady of the Southern Cross Church, Springfield, on February 19.
For the new director it will be another one of “all these really very significant moments of my life where the Lord continues to push in …”
When he first volunteered to join the NET Ministries team he was about 18.
“I just had this fervour … I picked up a NET brochure at the Catholic Youth Office in Christchurch and had this feeling in top of my chest that ‘I need to do that …’,” he said.
“And I applied for NET in 1994, and they said, ‘No’, and then I applied again in 1995.”
He was accepted that second time, and again in 1996.
“That was two years travelling the east coast of Australia, giving retreats in schools – two of the most extraordinary years of my life,” he said.
“And it was about the young people.
“… It was this extraordinary conviction to want to go and tell others of this witness that I’d experienced in my own life that they could experience too.
“I suppose that’s what draws me back … Well, it’s been the defining aspect of all of the work that I do – whether that be with the (Brisbane archdiocese’s) Vocations Office or ACU or … (NET Ministries).
“I think the calling on my life is, one, to help people understand faith, and, two, to articulate it, and, three – and sometimes the harder one – to live it if they so choose.
“It’s to really break it open today and for it then to have relevance for today’s world – that Jesus is alive, that the Holy Spirit is there waiting … that God is interested in each one of us.
“And then it’s about what that contribution, and what we do in co-operating in grace, brings to the Church – to our families first and foremost – but to the Church and then to bettering society as a result.”
Mark said NET taught him “what it is to live in community with others, to pray every day, the richness and depth of what it is to be in relationship with Jesus Christ and know God the Father, and to be animated by the Holy Spirit in your life”.
He returned to New Zealand after volunteering with NET but was back in Australia a year later as a 21-year-old with fresh plans.
He enrolled at ACU to complete a Bachelor of Social Science majoring in Pastoral Counselling, intending to join the police service and work for the Juvenile Aid Bureau (JAB).
During this time he fell in love with someone he’d met through NET, and with his mind set on joining JAB, “God had other plans”.
“In the midst of (following my way) I was very, very lucky to have met Nikki Seymour, who’s now my wife, who’d done a couple of degrees at that stage,” Mark said.
He and Nikki were NET volunteers at the same time, and they now have three children – Kaiya, 16; Xavier, 14; and Bella, 12.
Having “failed Year 10 spectacularly, and Year 11, and left school at the start of Year 12”, Mark wasn’t prepared for university study.
But Nikki, having done a Bachelor of Business Journalism and Bachelor of Education (Primary), “was very, very good to me in helping me better understand how to do uni”.
Later, with his own degree under his belt, he had three years on the NET Ministries staff before being appointed Brisbane archdiocese’s vocations promotions officer, a crucial role he held for more than five years.
From there he moved on to be campus minister at ACU in Brisbane, eventually being appointed associate director for Identity and Mission with ACU nationally.
Having been there more than a decade, he counts the whole experience as “an extraordinary privilege”.
“When I went to ACU … I said to God in prayer, ‘I really would love to give it 10 years at ACU …’ and that’s happened,” Mark said.
“… Come last September, I really felt that knock on the door.
“It was the Feast of the Exaltation (of the Cross) and I was reminded of my conversion experience, and I had this overwhelming sense that it was time to go.
“And I sent a text to Nikki and said, ‘I think my time at ACU is coming to a close …’
“I sent her the Scripture I was reading, and it was Jesus on the shore saying to Peter, ‘Go back out and put your net out …’
“I sent that to Nikki and said, ‘I need your permission to go and have some conversations …’ (because) we don’t make decisions independent of each other.
“There had been conversations in relation to NET before, and those conversations opened up again, and (outgoing NET Ministries director) Mark Doyle had a sense that it was time for him to go, and so there was this real synergy to what happened.
“I applied for that role, it was advertised and I went through an interview process with the board of directors, and was the successful applicant.
“But there certainly was a real sense of calling into this role, and this continued experience for an urgency for the proclamation of the Gospel and to assist young people in a vehicle that has been in Australia for 34 years.
“I’m only the fourth director for NET Ministries in 34 years.”
Now what he’s looking forward to most is leading a team exploring the “extraordinary opportunities all across this nation and New Zealand, to work with a ministry to proclaim Jesus Christ and for young people to come to know Jesus”.
“And not just young people; I think it’s more than that …,” Mark said.
“But I certainly feel this extraordinary excitement about working with the young people who are called out of their own experience of Jesus in their life to go tell others about that – to work with them – and to work with other ministries in this country and in New Zealand to do that.”
And he’ll be doing that with a trademark smile.
“Oh, look, I think if you’re in a relationship with Jesus, your face should show it …,” he said.
“I would say to staff coming to ACU – two things I want you to do when you arrive on campus: one is pray – pray for the students, for the staff, for the university, and its work and what it’s doing; and the second is smile.
“A smile will take you such a long way; it’ll open up doors that you never knew.
“It’s such an important part, and, yes, I think being positive and energetic (is an advantage too).
“But it’s the relationship with Jesus Christ, moreso than anything else, that gives me a positive outlook, and I continue to see the action of the Holy Spirit in my life, in the life of my family and in the life of others.
“May it continue to work.
“And I can’t help but not testify to that – whether that be men joining the priesthood or people coming to religious life or whether it be students and staff at ACU, whether it be Netters.
“It’s the extraordinary conviction to help people – one, to understand faith; articulate that in their lives; and, if so, choose to live that.
“Wherever I go that doesn’t change …”
