The Stained Glass Project
Not just letting the light in - church transforming into living light
How do we re-imagine ministry in the digital age?
Do we think about what ministry means and how we’re sharing God’s love as individuals (clergy and lay)?
Do we focus on what it means to be Christian and dedicate ourself to faith practices?
Do we find practical steps to have fewer meetings and fundraisers and more worship and prayer in community?
Do we make a plan to for our own congregation or denomination to get out from under the exhaustion of propping up an old church system and find more joy in following Jesus?
YES.
At Free Range Priest, we’re dedicated to all these things. And developing separate ministries to look deeply at each aspect of becoming the Future of Church.
We’re also pulling them together in a new system of church - one that is agile, networked, and technology-based, focused on Christian practice and small worshiping communities.
We call it the ‘Stained Glass Project’ - multiple ‘Panes’ of ministry, each dedicated to a different facet of ministry (individual and community, ‘Cage Free’ and ‘Unstuck Church’), all working together to create a new pattern of light and love.
One of these Panes will help you as you seek the light of Christ in your life, and how you share it with others in ministry.
Maybe more than one.
Maybe all of them.
Cage Free Ministry
For individuals - lay and ordained - who are called to share the Good News of the Gospel, but frustrated that there seems to be only one model to do it in. What if there were other ways?
We live in an amazingly creative world, full of tools and patterns we can follow to bring new life to our ministry. Let’s find it together.
These are the Cage Free Ministries we’re building at Free Range Priest:
Substack Seminary: Bring church to people. A community for ministry innovators. If you’re building (or dreaming of building) innovative ministry - something that doesn’t fit the traditional church job description - this is your support system. Encouragement, resources, networking. Let’s find new ways to be Faith Practitioners in a new church.
Trexo: a gym for your soul: Ancient Christian Practice for modern life. Using the concept of the gym (itself an idea from the early church), at Trexo we’re learning to be Christians by practicing the faith (not just learning about it), in order to grow in relationship with God. Because it’s based on the first few hundred years of the church, it’s pre-denominational, so it introduces (or re-introduces) us to the basics of faith.
Trexo is ‘Cage Free’ because it’s not a traditional congregation. It exists mostly online. However, it’s also a way for congregations to engage in Christian formation as a community - by becoming gym members together, or by becoming a ‘chapter’ of Trexo and developing your own Practices.
In this way it’s also ‘Unstuck Church’….
Unstuck Church
For congregations, denominations, and other church communities. What are the practical steps we need to take to become Communities of Practice - not just another branch of the crumbling institution?
Free Range Priest: Reimagining ministry in the digital age. Theory and practice, FrP is where ministry is developed and experimented with. It started with the thought: ‘there has to be a better way’, and for over a decade, I’ve been helping clergy and congregations think outside the institutional church box.
FrP is not your typical church consulting business - the primary mission is developing new ways of doing and being church, and connecting ministries with each other and with those seeking a deeper relationship with God.
St. Paul’s, Salisbury NC: ‘I should go to that church’.
A real congregation grappling with the changes to the institutional church system in real time. They’re transforming into a Community of Practice, based on Trexo guidelines (they’re the first Trexo chapter) and their own ‘special sauce’.
This is also where I practice my own Cage Free Ministry - together we have built a new way for clergy and congregations to serve together. Walk with them as they face the challenges all traditional congregations are facing in today’s church landscape - and become a digital member to support and learn from them.
Each ‘Pane’ of the Stained Glass Project is its own ministry - and its own Substack site and subscription.
If you want to become a monthly subscriber to all four Panes - and get a 10% discount on all Free Range Priest ‘reimagination packages’ - and support the Future of Church - become a founding subscriber to Free Range Priest…
‘Our church is not ok.’ A friend practically whispered it to me.
Her church is a big one - all the other congregations around wish they had their resources, their members.
‘But we’re still struggling’, she admitted.
Not enough people or money or energy to keep everything going. The exhaustion of it all.
‘No church is ok right now,’ I told her. But you will be. You can be.
First step: let go of everything that is not directly about practicing the Christian faith.
