Free Range Priest: Substack Seminary

2. 'The biggest challenge is a regular, sustainable paycheck'

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 11:38:48 GMT

We’re at the end of the year, and I’m looking back. Which were the most read/commented on Free Range Priest blogs of 2025?

I’m sharing the top 5 for five weeks of the December. It’s helping me see what’s most important for the future of church…

#2 was written with , and it’s basically a summary of the conversation that led us to found - a space designed to help create the future of church. Together.

At Free Range Priest, we’re reimagining ministry in the digital age.

Subscribe to any (or all!) of these publications to be part of innovative ministry for the future of church.

The WHY:

The HOW:

The WHAT:

The WHERE:

So you want to start a denomination... is the way out of institutional collapse... another institution?

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 13:47:51 GMT

grew up Seventh Day Adventist, then found her way to Lutheran seminary and internship. She encountered plenty of the same stresses that many of us feel around church these days - the complexities and bureaucratic hierarchy of denominations that made her journey into ordained ministry feel more burdensome than inspiring.

But then she did something unexpe…

Substack Seminary: how to be ‘Cage free’ if you serve a denominational church (or if you don’t)

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:40:12 GMT

Available for iOS and Android

It's about the money

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 10:23:04 GMT

Frustrating conversations I’ve had recently:

I applied for a ‘ministry innovation’ grant, and did not get it (again). Why? My ministry is actually a business (an LLC), and the granting agency will only award money to non-profits.

When I argued - pretty passionately - that having a ministry that is an LLC is the innovation, they were unmoved.

A few weeks …

Unstuck church

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 12:25:07 GMT

The phone rings again - or it pings with another social media message.

Another friend is reaching out - clergy or lay, working for the mainline church or a member of a congregation.

They’ve just been fired, or they work with someone who should be fired - but won’t be.
They’re running the church all by themselves because no one else shows up.
They have no idea what they’re doing but they’re afraid of being found out, and losing their job.
They’re asked to do things (fire others, close churches) that they don’t want to do, but they can’t say no.
They know the budget can’t last another year, but everyone keeps going ahead like everything is ok.

It’s a mess. They’re stressed, they’re frustrated, they’re mad. Most of them, somewhere in the conversation say this:

‘I’m never going back to that church/denomination/diocese again.’

These calls are becoming more and more frequent. Maybe it’s because of what I do, or my experience in the church. But it’s becoming alarming.

People aren’t calling about what we think of as classic misbehavior - no one is stealing money or having inappropriate relationships (at least, they’re not telling me about it if they are!).

The alarming things are much more mundane:

Power dynamics
Entrenchment
People in jobs they’re not qualified for (but won’t leave)
Politics (all sides - people who embrace certain politics, people who won’t embrace politics, etc).
Conflict

I was worried that if I published this, people would see themselves in my story and feel exposed.

But I guarantee that these are
a) composites and
b) a drop in the bucket of the things I’ve heard lately.

I tell them all I really can’t help them beyond being a listening supporter. I have no ecclesiastical standing or authority to be involved in their situation.

But I can tell them this:

They are not alone (by a long shot)
This is what institutional collapse looks like

And it’s hard to see the big picture when you’re putting out fires every day.

It’s hard to see the system shifting when it all feels so personal.

My ministry has always been about helping people re-imagine church.

This is why so many people are calling me when things feel intolerable in their ministry. They definitely want to imagine better ways of serving God and their neighbor!

What I see is that before we get to the point of building something new, we need to see how it’s not a choice anymore.

The church of the mid-20th century is not working now that we are well into the 21st.

And the fires we’re putting out - that feel like unique, isolated situations - are signs of the futility of doing the same thing again and again, and hoping for different results.

But it all starts with seeing the places we are stuck - and how we use those pain parts to start building something new.

It may feel like you’re too stressed, too busy, too caught up in what your ministry looks like now to think about the big picture.

But I’m convinced that the walls we keep banging our heads against are exactly the places that God is calling us to turn around and find new paths for sharing Good News.

At Free Range Priest, we’re reimagining ministry in the digital age.

Subscribe to any (or all!) of these publications to be part of innovative ministry for the future of church.

The WHY:

The HOW:

The WHAT:

The WHERE:

Common Ministry

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:45:33 GMT

photo by Cathie Caimano

I was preaching on what it means to be a disciple. I stopped and asked the congregation - ‘how many of you think of yourselves as disciples?’

I was shocked that maybe only one hand raised besides mine!

This is a group of very faithful people. I had assumed that pretty much all of them thought of themselves as disciples.

So I rephras…

We're all 'specialty ministers' now

Fr. Cathie Caimano — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 11:09:48 GMT

There’s two facts about today’s church that roll around in my head pretty much constantly:

More and more congregations are struggling to find (and afford) clergy leadership.

More and more ministers - lay and ordained - feel called to serve ministry outside of the traditional congregational context.

These two facts are interrelated, of course: clergy and l…