Last month, our mission house in Los Angeles was full of new voices, new faces, and — if we’re honest — a beautiful kind of holy chaos. The Formation Class of 2027 arrived for their week-long orientation. If you walked through our doors, you’d feel it immediately: that particular mix of nervous excitement and quiet resolve that comes with saying “yes” to something much bigger than yourself.
This year’s class brings together candidates from both Mission Doctors Association and Lay Mission-Helpers (LMH), each carrying their own story to a shared table. From MDA: Dr. Elizabeth Weissman, a family medicine physician, and the Gonzalez-Bonvini family — Dr. Juan, Silvia, and their two boys, Gabriel and Paolo. Joining them from LMH is Jesus Canchola Sanchez. Different backgrounds, different paths, but all of them walking toward the same horizon.
Four Months to Prepare for a Lifetime of Service
Over the next four months, these candidates will live in community with one another, sharing meals, sharing prayer, and sharing the kind of honest conversations that only happen when you’re all in the middle of the same leap of faith. Their formation centers on three pillars:
Spiritual development — deepening the interior life that will sustain them when mission life gets hard
Personal development — building the resilience, self-awareness, and practical skills that cross-cultural service demands
Cross-cultural awareness — learning to serve not as outsiders, but as guests who listen first
None of this happens by accident, and none of it happens alone. We are so grateful for the faculty who show up year after year to pour into this class, a mission theologian, professors from Loyola Marymount University, education consultants, and a whole roster of people whose own mission experience makes them the best kind of teachers: the kind who’ve actually lived it.
Please, Keep Them in Your Prayers
Over these four months, our candidates will be preparing physically, mentally, and spiritually for mission. It’s no small thing to uproot a life, a career, sometimes a whole family, and plant it somewhere new in service of others. We’d be so grateful if you’d hold them in prayer as they do this holy, hard, beautiful work of getting ready. And now, we’d love for you to get to know them a little better.
Dr. Elizabeth Weissman This fall, Dr. Elizabeth Weissman will join MDA as a long-term missionary candidate, headed for Santa Clotilde Hospital, rural hospital deep in the Amazon region of Peru, along the Napo River, in the Vicariate Apostolic of San Juan de Amazonas.
Elizabeth comes to this next chapter with years of experience as a family practice physician, having served both domestically and internationally in communities where physicians are few and far between. Most recently, she was the primary physician for migrant farmworkers throughout northern California’s Napa Valley. Before medicine, though, she had an entirely different calling: she was a licensed social worker. It’s that early training, learning to see the whole person, not just the diagnosis, that still shapes how she practices medicine today.
Elizabeth’s own story is one of movement and mission long before this formation program. She was born in Chile to an American father and a Chilean mother, and spent much of her childhood crisscrossing Latin America as her father’s work with USAID took the family from place to place. A lifelong Catholic, Elizabeth has experienced what she describes as a spiritual renaissance in the years since her husband’s passing, a season of grief that, in God’s mysterious way, has also become a season of deepened faith. She is the proud mother of an adult daughter currently pursuing a career in the arts in New York City.
Dr. Juan Gonzalez & Silvia Bonvini Dr. Juan Gonzalez and Silvia Bonvini are joining this year’s Formation Class as well — mostly as virtual and sometimes asynchronous participants, a reminder that God’s call doesn’t always arrive on the same schedule for everyone.
Juan’s road to medicine wasn’t a straight one. He built a career as a lawyer first, before answering God’s call to care for the sick instead. From the moment he set his sights on medicine, mission work was already part of the plan. Born in Colombia and raised in the U.S. from childhood, Juan met Silvia during a mission service trip to China, through a small Catholic community, the kind of encounter that looks, in hindsight, a lot like providence.
Silvia, who was born and raised in northwestern Italy, currently works for Clean International, an NGO dedicated to clean water projects in low-resource countries around the world. Together, she and Juan share a deep passion for sustainable, responsible international development — a passion that now shapes their vision for family life on mission.
The couple has two young sons, Gabriel (8) and Paolo (6), and the family currently lives in Ventura, California. Their hope is to transition to a long-term mission site in northern Uganda, in the Diocese of Moroto, at a site run by Comboni missionaries — a new home for a family already well-practiced in saying yes to God’s plans, wherever they lead.
Please continue to keep the entire LMH/MDA Formation Class of 2027, Elizabeth, Juan, Silvia, Gabriel, Paolo, and Jesus, in your prayers as they prepare for the road ahead.