As a young person making her mark in the corporate world, working in Mission had never entered Lana Turvey’s mind – that is, until Providence led her to a job at Catholic Mission, which she says allows her to employ her corporate skills not to acquire personal wealth, but in the service of the wider world.
“Over time, I’d worked out that I wanted to do something that made use of my commercial skills but actually engaged me in the bigger world,” she says.
“And so I wanted to be in a Non-Government Organisation or a development organisation, not necessarily the Church, but that’s how it worked out.”
Lana was born and raised in Queensland, attending Trinity College at Beenleigh. She spent a year as an exchange student in Japan before coming home and completing a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Japanese and Spanish.
“Mission work wasn’t even in my thought processes,” she says. “I was very much chasing control of the finances of the world. In fact at one point, I wanted to be state premier. So I worked for 10 years in a corporate career and worked in organisational behaviour and learning design and culture change management for different companies.”
After moving to Sydney and working for an international trainee exchange company for some years, Lana’s role there came to an end and she found herself looking for a new direction. At the urging of a priest friend, she had resumed going to Mass, and a friend in the parish mentioned a job at Catholic Mission which she might be interested in.
“It was the Diocesan Director’s role for the Archdiocese of Sydney,” Lana says. “And it was really interesting, because up to that point, the job had always been held by a priest. So I was the first layperson, the first woman and I was still comparatively young. It was probably a bit of a culture shock for the diocese, but I had the most wonderful people around me. We had a great team, and so we would not only fundraise for the Propagation of the Faith appeals, but we also really concentrated on engaging relationally with the parishes and understanding how a parish lives out Mission. One of the things we did was to seek out people who had lived as missionaries and send them as speakers to parishes, so that people could hear some more stories about the work that is done in this world by this awesome Church.”
Lana says she is passionate about helping people to see how they can live Mission in their own lives.
“I think Mums are one of the most awesome examples of missionaries,” she says. “We really try to help people understand that Mission is no longer understood as special people doing things in faraway places anymore. It is us. Everyday life.“
After working for almost five years as Catholic Mission’s Diocesan Director in Sydney, Lana took a year’s leave of absence to volunteer working in mission in Zambia.
“I learnt more about the world than I ever would have thought or believed possible,” she says.
Lana lived and worked at Cheshire House, a boarding house and school for children with mental and physical disabilities, run for the Children’s Missions by Franciscan sisters, who love and care for the children, provide them with medical assistance and physiotherapy, as well as special education.
“That experience really broadened my understanding, not only of Mission, but also of the role the Church has to play in the development of a society and a community, driven by a sense that this is the way Jesus lived and this is how we can live in this way in the world we live in today,” she says.
Arriving back in Sydney last year, Lana resumed working with Catholic Mission, this time in adult formation programs. In need of some temporary accommodation, Lana says she found “amazing” hospitality with the SVD community at Marsfield.
“I had first met (Fr) Tim Norton when we were both on the Catholic Mission National Council,” she says.
“The SVDs were really wonderful. One thing, as a person who goes and works as what you might call a lay missionary, is that you don’t have the infrastructure or support of say, a religious congregation. And so it was really lovely because Tim and Henry Adler and the community there saw it as part of their outreach and way of laypeople being able to do this, so they kind of took care of me, in so many more ways than just giving me housing.”
Part of Lana’s work at Catholic Mission recently has been helping to put together ‘The Francis Effect’ book and colloquium series.
“We published a book at the end of last year where we got 12 really wise and experienced leaders from the church together and they wrote responses to Pope Francis’ apostolic letter Evangelii Gaudium, from their context. It was really humbling to go through the process and have them send in their articles and just be so willing to be a part of it. And I think bringing something like that to life in that way through the book and now the colloquiums is really life-giving.”
PHOTOS: (Top Right) Lana Turvey with children at Cheshire House in Zambia and (Bottom Left), Lana with Fr Bernard Maladani Zulu, the National Director for Catholic Mission in Zambia.