A Journey around the World

This year, we, the Missionary Sisters Servants of the Holy Spirit, are deepening our “Passion for Global Mission”. In fact, it was this passion together with our thirst for God that motivated most of us SSpS to enter the Congregation and to put ourselves at the service of the Gospel.

Reinvigorating the passion for mission is part of the Congregation’s 6-Year Planning, which helps us each year to deepen an aspect of our being missionary, actualizing God’s call in our lives to better serve the people to whom God has sent us. The annual themes are inspired by the Congregational Directions defined in January 2022, during the 15th General Chapter.

With a sincere desire to announce the wonders that God has been working among his people, we will share with you what our sisters are doing in each of the 44 countries where we are present.
From now on, throughout the year, we will regularly publish new articles about our mission in different parts of the world. So, we invite you to begin this journey and to renew with us the passion and commitment to mission. It will be a dive into the diversity, both of cultures and also of the variety of our mission fields.

But before we begin our trip around the world, we want to present some information about our Congregation and our presence in the world.

Our Internationality

We are approximately 2,800 missionaries from 50 different nationalities. Although the Congregation is of German origin, St. Arnold Jansen began his missionary work in Steyl, in the Netherlands, near the German border, in order to avoid the persecution of the Kulturkampf.

Our Congregation began in 1889 and expanded rapidly. Only 20 years after the foundation, the sisters were already in the Americas, Africa, Oceania and Asia. These are our first missions: Argentina (1895), Togo (1897), Papua New Guinea (1899), the United States (1901), Brazil (1902), China (1905) and Japan (1908). Today we are on mission in 44 countries (see the map).

Congregational Directions