I run a parish
Not just preach at one or visit one on Sundays; run one: payroll, a leaky roof, safe-environment training, a finance meeting I wasn’t ready for. And yes, Masses, confessions, spiritual counseling, and the occasional 2 a.m. phone call. Nobody warned me in seminary exactly how much of parish ministry is actually administration (that they share the exact same root should’ve been warning enough) and that administration, done badly, can quietly undo a lot of good preaching.
This newsletter is where I think through that interplay out loud: where theology meets best business practices. Call it synergy, if you want a business management term, of how each aspect relates to the other. In effect, it means nurturing the Church as organ-ism: the one Body of Christ with many members (1 Corinthians 12), alive in a way no org chart can capture; without neglecting the Church as organ-ization, because a living body still has bones, and someone has to set them when they break: deferred maintenance, busted budgets, fractured friendships. Reconciling the two, week after week, is most of what this newsletter is actually about. Some weeks it’s a Scripture passage moonlighting as management advice; other weeks it’s a story from the parish that just might double as a modern parable, filed down enough so that no one involved would recognize themselves in it.
A word on the name
I’m a Catholic priest and pastor of a mid-sized U.S. parish writing under a pen name, partly for the freedom it gives me and partly because Titus Bellwether has turned out to be a voice I can think out loud in more easily than I can as myself. Titus seemed right: his work meant teaching sound doctrine, correcting error, and guiding ordinary believers in how to live well (Titus 2); about as clear a job description for parish administration as Scripture offers. Bellwether, for the lead sheep that wears the bell the rest follow; and also, usefully, a word for an early signal of where things are headed.
A note on AI integration
I use AI to draft, research, soundboard, and verify accuracy before putting stuff out there. Call it an associate pastor with no theological training and occasional hallucinations. Minus the ordination. Minus the paycheck. And minus, more to the point, any moral agency or conviction of its own on whether or not any word of this is true. It doesn’t believe anything. It processes patterns. I’m the one who edits it, tests it, and answers for it. Every doctrinal claim in this newsletter gets checked against actual Church teaching before I publish it, and I decide what stays, what goes, and what gets rewritten until it lands right, at least to my own ears. Whether that’s the right way to run a project like this, I honestly don’t know yet. It’s an iterative process I’m wrestling with in real time, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend I’ve got it figured out.
For the fence-menders
This newsletter isn’t an outlet for my complaints, nor a stage for false humility about my own competence. I suspect a lot of pastors, administrators, and parish staff are quietly doing hard, undiscussed work with no one to compare notes with.
New issues land weekly. Subscribe, and let’s compare notes.
Healthy sheep need clean sheepfolds. Someone has to think about the fence.
