Under the Fir Tree

There’s a parish in Portland—let’s call it St. Representative—that's finally solved the old missionary problem: instead of converting the culture, it’s let the culture convert the parish. On paper, it still belongs to the Catholic archdiocese. The archbishop’s name is on the letterhead, the tabernacle is bolted to the floor, and the stained glass that isn’t just geometric shapes still shows a God who is inconveniently incarnate. But on Sundays, you can feel the tectonic shift: the parish doesn’t stand over the neighborhood as tradition; it hovers within it as ambiance. So: instead of the Our Father , there’s the Our Mother . Instead of the Nicene Creed, there’s the Apostle’s Creed—because, they say, people can’t understand the words in the Nicene. Touching, if you don’t think about it. We live in an age where people can master the settings on their phones, decipher mortgage contracts, and decode the latest nutrition study. But the word “consubstantial” is apparently a trauma. The p...

The global disruption of COVID-19 didn’t merely interrupt church life; it accelerated trends that had been germinating for decades. In North America, the old center of gravity—bigger Sunday, bigger building, bigger programming—hit a real inflection point. And the shift is sharpest among young adults: Gen Z (1997–2012) and younger Millennials (1981–1996). This generation is now the largest alive, and it lives in tension: hyper-connected online, yet often the loneliest on record; passionate about justice, yet wary of large institutions; spiritually open, yet often religiously unaffiliated. The old “performance” approach is yielding diminishing returns (good). Not because young adults hate beauty, but because they distrust polish when it’s used as a substitute for presence. Ministry built as a show just won't feed them. So what’s rising in its place? A quieter, older, more human paradigm: presence over performance, dialogue over monologue, simplicity over complexity. That's good n...

We can say all we want about parishes as “clinics of divine healing,” about small groups as “ mobile field units ,” about intergenerational households and faith stickiness — but here’s the blunt reality: If the pastor himself is not renewed — not healed, not abiding, not apprenticed to Christ — the ecosystem he leads will, at best, plateau and, at worst, quietly wither. Small groups can sustain life in the parish even under pastoral fatigue, but they cannot generate the kind of renewal they are meant to serve unless their shepherd becomes a patient of the Divine Physician before he tries to act as His administrator. The Ontology of Pastoral Renewal: A Shepherd Who Abides The pastor is not merely a manager of religious programs, a sacrament dispenser, or a spiritual CEO. Ontologically — in the deepest structure of his vocation — he is configured to Christ the Shepherd, the one who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). If the pastor’s inner life is not being continually renew...