Organization

The Organization:


The Archbishop

The denomination leader bears the Archbishop at Eric Michel Ministries International (EMMI) in
Latin archiepiscopus. The title, of the archbishop, is the highest of the three traditional clerical
1) orders of bishops,
2) priests (also called presbyters),
3) and deacons 

An archbishop may be granted the title or ordained as chief pastor of a metropolitan. 

At Eric Michel Ministries International, the archbishop is elected and must be ordained bishop. The function is equivalent to a presiding bishop, and our archbishop is elected for life.  He is the organization's chief ecumenical officer and the leader and caretaker for the synods' bishops.
The archbishop chairs the complete general assembly name Symposium and provides for the preparation of agendas for the Symposium, the Church Council and its executive committee (permanent synod), the House of Bishops, and the House of Elders.

The archbishop is in charge of initiating policy, developing strategy, and overseeing the entire organization's administration. The archbishop also serves as a figurehead and speaks on behalf of the whole of Eric Michel Ministries International.

The archbishop, the Most Reverend Eric Gagnon, was elected on May 6, 2011. EMMI is, before anything else,  a Chaplain, and he is the founder of our latest ministry, the Franciscan Chaplaincy in 2020, the EMMI Third Order of Saint Francis (EMMITOSF). 

As a novice in the Third Order of Saint Francis, Eric Gagnon took the vows of poverty, humility and prayer, (the rule says may be male or female, married, partnered or single.) and also obedience. As a Franciscan who took the vows of poverty, Eric Michel is poor. 

EMMITOSF is an ecumenical order open to any Christian who belongs to any church or denomination.
We are ecumenical and multidenominational, serving as all  Baptist, Catholic, Evangelist, Methodist and Pentecostal. 

Archbishop Eric Gagnon took the vows of poverty. He is a mendicant, from Latin: mendicans, "begging", it is one who practices mendicancy and relies chiefly or exclusively on alms to survive. In principle, mendicant religious orders own little property, either individually or collectively, and in many instances members have taken a vow of poverty, in order that all their time and energy could be expended on practicing their respective faith, preaching and serving society. 

Mendicancy in Christianity has its roots in the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is described as granting his apostles a “gift of tongues.” This is later expanded upon in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, where it allows them to be understood by anybody regardless of the language of the person being spoken to.

Early 1st CenturiesNew Testament figures such as John the Baptist and Paul of Tarsus were also known for extensively travelling and preaching the Gospel to unreached peoples in the Middle East and Europe, although often staying for longer periods than modern itinerant evangelists.

Mendicant orders are, primarily, certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, travelling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor. At their foundation, these orders rejected the previously established monastic model. This model prescribed living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and owned property in common, including land, buildings and other wealth. By contrast, the mendicants avoided owning property at all, did not work at a trade, and embraced a poor, often itinerant lifestyle. They depended for their survival on the goodwill of the people to whom they preached. 

Francis came to this manner of life through a period of personal conversion. The Franciscans spread far and wide their devotion to the humanity of Christ, with the commitment to imitate the Lord. Many of them were priests and men of learning whose contributions were notable in the rapid evolution and contemporary relevance of the movement. Notable Franciscans include Anthony of Padua, who were inspirations to the formation of Christian mendicant traditions. 

Characteristics:

The Franciscans and Dominicans put into practice a pastoral strategy suited to the social changes. The emergence of urban centers meant concentrated numbers of the homeless and the sick. This created problems for the parish churches who found themselves unable to address these issues.
Since many people were moving from the countryside to the cities, they no longer built their convents in rural districts but rather in urban zones.

In another innovation, the mendicant orders relinquished their principle of stability, a classical principle of ancient monasticism, opting for a different approach. Unlike the Benedictine monks, the mendicants were not permanently attached to any one particular convent and to its abbot. Because the orders' primary aim was the evangelization of the masses, the church granted them freedom from the jurisdiction of the bishops and they travelled about to convert or reinforce faith. The freedom of mendicancy allowed Franciscans and Dominicans mobility. Since they were not tied to monasteries or territorial parishes, they were free to take the gospel into the streets, preach, hear confessions and minister to people wherever they were. Friars Minor and Preachers travelled with missionary zeal from one place to another.

Consequently, they organized themselves differently in comparison with the majority of monastic orders. Instead of the traditional autonomy that every monastery enjoyed, they gave greater importance to the order as such and to the Superior General, as well as to the structure of the order Provinces. Their flexibility enabled them to send out the most suitable friars on specific missions, and the mendicant orders reached North Africa, the Middle East and Northern Europe.

As students and professors, Friars Minor and Friars Preacher, Franciscans and Dominicans, entered the leading universities of the time, set up study centers, produced texts of great value and were protagonists of scholastic theology in its best period and had an important effect on the development
of thought. The great thinkers, St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure, were mendicants.

In all the great cities of western Europe, friaries were established, and in the universities, theological chairs were held by Dominicans and Franciscans. Later in the 13th century, they were joined by the mendicant orders of Carmelites, Augustinian Hermits, and Servites.

They attracted a significant level of patronage, as much from townsfolk as aristocrats. Their focus of operation rapidly centred on towns where population growth historically outstripped the provision of rural parishes. Most medieval towns in Western Europe of any size came to possess houses of one or more of the major orders of friars. Some of their churches came to be built on a grand scale with large spaces devoted to preaching, something of a specialty among the mendicant orders. 

Franciscans who in modern times include:



FAICL a  Third Order of St. Francis (Eric Michel Ministries International)



Eric Michel Ministries International a Catholic Community Chaplaincy is a mendicant organization, registered as a not-for-profit corporation in Canada. EMMI founded an association of churches and para-churches in 2017 and operates under the name of the Interdenominational Assembly of Churches it is composed of Clerics regular priests (clerics) who are members of a religious order under a rule of life (regular). Clerics regularly differ from canons regularly in that they devote themselves more to pastoral care,  place an obligation to the praying of the Liturgy of the Hours in common, and have fewer observances in their rule of life.

Asking for money from a mendicant doesn't sound logical, but for a corporate partner in need as the possibility to receive some help from the association under certain conditions, please see: The Distribution Page.