Free Range Priest: Substack Seminary

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 unexpected and adventurous.

She not only started her own church: , a place to wrestle with God.
She started her own denomination - A New American Orthodox Church.

When I asked her why, she said she had been opened to the idea that the church is an institution, and not just a bunch of stand alone organizations.

It may surprise you, but I could not agree more.

And ever since I discovered New American Orthodox Church, I really want to be part of it.

But I’m the Free Range Priest! I am an evangelist for ‘Cage Free’ Ministry!

And that’s exactly why I am so drawn to the idea and the reality of this new denomination.

Because I’m just as drawn to the ‘Priest’ as to the ‘Free Range’. To the ‘Ministry’ as well as the ‘Cage Free’.

There is nothing inherently wrong with institutions, and church needs organization and authority.
We also need to break free from the particular expression of 1950s administration and organization that is causing gridlock in the mainline church.

The structure that is crumbling - and crushing us in ministry - is not the connection to the larger Christian tradition. It’s the corporate mindset and ways of operating left over from the 20th century that is stifling our ability to connect in life-giving ways that share the Gospel.

When I look at New American Orthodox and my own tradition - the Episcopal Church - I don’t see much difference:

Belief in Jesus Christ as the world’s salvation.
The Bible as foundational.
Baptism and Eucharist.
Church community that shares the Gospel.

We belong to the same institution - the Church - and we share the same basic beliefs and practices.

But I feel frustrated and stressed in my own denomination, and filled with excitement about this new one.

Why?

Simplicity and accessibility.

St. Jacob’s calendar lists worship, Bible study, and community events. The denominational page lists Axioms, Tenets, Rites, and Practices.

The Episcopal Church website (and every other major denominational website) has over 25 major pages.

This is a small but telling example of how the mainline institutional church has grown to a place where the heaviness of all the ‘stuff’ - all the meetings, all the events, all the committees and commissions, all the causes - is overwhelming the basics of what we believe and how we are connected as followers of Jesus.

We need to look backward

is right. We don’t just belong to a particular congregation, a singular ‘church’.

Even if we’re non-denominational, even if we have only sat in the pews of one place of worship our entire lives, we belong to the Church.

The living body of Christ that stretches back the first disciples and has always been connected.

There were Thessalonians and Corinthians and Galatians, but all were Christians. And no matter how we’ve tried to divide ourselves into sects, denominations, and break away churches, we are all tied together through Jesus.

Acknowledging this - and living into it - is central to re-discovering our core mission, easily lost to the bureaucracy of keeping individual institutions alive just for the sake of it.

We need to look forward

It’s not what we believe that’s the problem - it’s how we live those beliefs and share them in the world - together.

Today’s systems are agile, networked, technology-based (in many ways, like the earliest church).

The institutional, denominational church still lives in strictly demarcated silos, where congregations and ministers rarely collaborate in ministry outside of their own specific location (and not without reams of paperwork), much less denominations.

Where we spend much more time and many more resources keeping each individual building and community alive as a separate entity than we do fostering discipleship and the love of God across and among communities.

An example of what I mean

The Episcopal Church currently closes dozens of churches every year, and struggles to open any new ones.

There is a 54-page ‘how to start a new Episcopal community’ guide, which is explicitly for people who have applied and secured a particular grant in the church.

I can imagine a world where the Episcopal Church takes the resources used to form the grant committees, guiding committees, and top-down guidance on how to start a new expression of church (from a denomination that hasn’t done that in decades), and uses them to support places like St. Jacob’s and the New American Orthodox Church that are actually launching new faith communities.

What I first noticed about is her call to ministry is clear and unwavering.

When faced with the administrative and organizational burdens and roadblocks of the declining institutional system, she did not abandon her ministry, but re-imagined it.

Not outside the authority of the larger church, but within it. Not rejecting the Christian tradition, but embracing it more strongly. Not isolating her faith community, but broadening it.

This is Cage Free Ministry.

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:

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…