DISCIPLE: Vossen Family Sees God&#039;s Hand in Store Relocation

DISCIPLE: Vossen Family Sees God's Hand in Store Relocation

June 24, 2024

by Jim Thorp

This article appears in the Spring 2024 edition of the DISCIPLE newsletter. If you are not receiving DISCIPLE in your mailbox, contact the parish office at 763-497-2745 to register as a parishioner or update your contact information.

In 2021, parishioners Brian and Jackie Vossen were praying for a new way to provide for their children. Their oldest son has disabilities that require constant care. He had finished schooling, and their hope was to find work that would enable them to care for him during the day.

“It’s a concern for every parent of a disabled child: How can we
keep the family together?” says Brian. “Then we saw an article in the St. Raphael bulletin that the owners of St. Patrick’s Books & Gifts in Maple Lake were selling and preparing to close down.”

That was the first glimpse of God’s new plan for their family.

New Livelihood, New Location

Though they had no prior experience running a small business, they immediately felt called. They purchased St. Patrick’s in October, renamed it Holy Gifts to reduce confusion with other stores in the Twin Cities and around the country, and set about making it their own. Brian, Jackie, and their five children, ages 23 to 10, quickly realized the small 400-square-foot store in downtown Maple Lake wasn’t big enough to accommodate their entire family at once, not to mention what they wanted to achieve with the store.

The Vossen family started praying to find a space where they could operate the business as a family. Then one day, Brian was invited to attend a business networking group in Buffalo. At the meeting, he met another guest attendee whom he recognized as a Holy Gifts customer from earlier in the week. They greeted each other, and she invited him to the STMA Catholic Networking Group, a very similar group, but with a Catholic focus.

“It was definitely God’s timing,” he says. “The first meeting I attended in St. Michael, Dave Ferry said that the parish had launched a working group to figure what could be done to preserve the historic church. He said that one of the ideas was a Catholic bookstore! Here was a Catholic community and parish that always enthusiastically supported us when we were just a small store and generously invited us to participate in their parish Fall Festival and school Christmas Market.”

The family spent a lot of time praying about the decision to relocate to the church. They attended the monthly rosary in the historical church to pray with other parishioners concerned with the church’s future and spent time walking through the cemetery to gain a better appreciation for the long Catholic history in St. Michael. The Vossens have belonged to other parishes in which old churches were sold and destroyed, and they wanted to see if they could make a difference this time.

It took a full year for plans to be reviewed and accepted, for the Archdiocese to approve the use of the church, and for local government officials to iron out zoning and tax implications. Finally, the Vossens closed their Maple Lake operation in January of 2024 and started renting space from St. Michael in February.

“It was a tough year, wondering, 'What if it doesn’t come through?' And closing for three weeks to move the whole store was also a challenge,” Brian recalls. “Finally, on February 7, we just had to open the doors. We are still getting more inventory, but it’s good to be open, especially during sacrament season.”

Protecting the Past

“St. Michael is a growing suburban community, and it seems like a lot of suburbs lose their historical identity as they grow,” Brian says. “We hope that bringing a Catholic store to the historical church will help at least preserve the Catholic identity and the memory of those who helped start the town and gave it the name of St. Michael, after the great archangel. The historical church and cemetery are at the center of town and represent the founding of this great community.

“We’ve seen the devastating effects of what happens if a parish can’t support the costs of maintaining a building or if the Archdiocese decides to sell a church—including the removal of the altar, Stations of the Cross, stained glass windows, and pews,” he says. “We don’t want to see that happen in St. Michael. We are parishioners, too, and we care about what happens to the church and the parish as a whole.”

The design of the retail space in the back of the nave of the church includes low walls and a large central window that the Vossens contracted with parishioner Jim Patton of All Seasons Home Improvement to build, enabling patrons to view the high altar, windows, and more from within the store. A side door from the store provides access to worship space.

Though a number of pews were removed and put in storage to make room for Holy Gifts, the nave is still used weekly by a second tenant, Free Grace United Church, for Bible studies and Sunday services. It also still hosts the monthly rosary the family attended when they were discerning their move.

“We want this to be a center of community, where people meet and greet each other,” Brian says. “One of our main goals was to open the church up so people could visit, and we are seeing more of that than we expected. We have people dropping in all the time to look around and share their memories—people who were baptized or married here, from as far back as the 1930s. Many people say they haven’t seen the inside of the church in decades.”

Holy Gifts is very much a family affair: The Vossen clan brainstormed together on the new name, one of their sons (an architecture student) designed the new space, and most days, both parents and kids are onsite, serving customers and stocking shelves. But it’s not easy to compete with online Catholic retailers and Amazon.

“Our smaller store in Maple Lake brought in visitors from all over Minnesota and other states,” Brian says. “We look forward to bringing that same attention to St. Michael. Most of what we bring in goes back to the parish, so this is a great way to support St. Michael. And we’re definitely a family-run business—if you’d like to get to know us, stop on by!”

SHARING OUR LEGACY WITH THOSE IN NEED

While many of the pews removed from the historic church are currently in storage, several of the side pews were donated to One World Surgery, a Catholic medical mission founded by Father Michael Daly’s parents. They will be installed in the new Chapel of Divine Mercy under construction in the Dominican Republic. The small chapel is modeled after the Portiuncula, the tiny church restored by St. Francis in Assisi, Italy.

One World Surgery serves those in greatest need in the Dominican Republic and Honduras—including Haitian refugees with no rights or access to healthcare in these poor countries. What a beautiful way to extend the long legacy of Catholic faith and generosity from St. Michael, Minnesota, to the world.