August 20, 2026 – Pastor’s Note

Listen to this note instead: https://morefrmoore.podbean.com/e/august-20-2026-pastors-note/

Realistic Expectations for Partners

Last week I met with Deacon Larry Kheriaty to approve his triennial ministry agreement, and our conversation eventually turned to feedback he has been hearing about Partners in the Gospel. One group of people, he reported, is concerned that we are not being bold or aggressive enough in our decision making. To be blunt, the worry is that if we are not discussing closing churches then we are going to end this process worse off than when we started – with the same limited resources and struggles, but now with rotating priests who never seem to be around. The hope for these folks is that, if we close a few churches, our limited and diminishing priests, volunteers, and finances will be less stretched, allowing our parish life to feel more vibrant and robust.

In the spirit of one of my favorite sketches, I would like to make sure we are setting appropriate expectations.

Partners cannot create new or different priests. Whether we have four parishes, two, or one in Whatcom County, the number and type of priests in the Archdiocese of Seattle remains fixed. In fact, our current four priests are fairly representative of the priests serving in the Archdiocese of Seattle – two guys who were raised here, one guy raised in a foreign country who has been here for 20+ years, and one “fresh” missionary from a foreign country. We are similarly diverse in our relationship to parish administration – I and Fr. Tyler are serving or will serve as Archdiocesan Pastors, Fr. Gerardo is happy to oversee a specialized ministry but without the full responsibilities of a Pastor, and Fr. Stephan does not oversee any ministries directly.

Partners can allow priests to serve according to their strengths. With the flexibility provided by Partners, we have been able to:

1. Focus far more time on college ministry, which will hopefully bear fruit in the long-term with more vocations, stronger families, and fewer young people leaving the Church.
2. Attract to the Archdiocese priests like Fr. Gerardo, who came to Whatcom County specifically because it allowed him to focus on the Claretian charism of ministry to Latino immigrants and their families.
3. Spare our foreign missionaries from the burden of parish administration. When a priest comes directly from a country in which parish life is extremely different, it is unwise to immediately have him oversee a staff, a budget, and community decisions in a cultural and bureaucratic environment that is completely foreign.

What is more, we also have the flexibility to remake these decisions quickly should we be given different priests with different skills, or even should we decide that the current division of labor is not working well.

Deacon Larry said that the hardest part of Partners for the people he had been talking to was the inconsistency of the priest schedule and the sense that priests were unavailable. Because of Partners, we have full control over how we use our priests, so I am happy to engage with suggestions for better ways to divide the labor amongst the guys we have been given.

Partners cannot allow us to close and sell churches like a business might sell locations. Canon 1222, which governs the abandonment of churches, requires a “grave” reason to sell or destroy a church. We are never required to use a church – leaving it shuttered for years is a real possibility – but as long as it is in good repair and we can pay for its upkeep we are required to keep it.

Admittedly, this canon is inconsistently applied. St. Joseph in Clipper, St. Anne in Sumas, and St. Patrick in Goshen are historical churches that have been sold or demolished in Whatcom County, while the original buildings for St. Joseph in Lynden, St. Joseph in Ferndale, St. Peter, and Assumption have all been taken down in favor of new campuses and larger churches. However, as best as I can tell, no one cares to enforce this canon when they are getting something newer and shinier; the canon is only strictly enforced once an upset parishioner appeals to Rome.

Partners can allow us to rebalance resources. Does every church need every service? Sunday Mass? Daily Mass? Sacramental Prep classes? Faith formation programs? Small groups? A parish office? With Partners in the Gospel, we can scale services up and down at each location as we see fit.

There is a lot of merit in combining our pastoral programs or consolidating our staff into a smaller number of offices, as the concentration of resources can often create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. We have already been doing a lot of this centralization work (see: https://www.whatcomcatholic.org/changes) and everything short of ending weekend Masses is actively under discussion. In fact, pruning ministries and restructuring parish life is the subject of our October Listening Sessions.

Everything is on the table with Partners, so we could theoretically decide to stop offering weekend Mass in certain locations. The reason I have not proposed it, however, is because I am not convinced that we gain much. None of our churches in Whatcom County are large enough to absorb their neighbors. When I did our Sunday Mass revision last summer, I tried hard to reduce the number of Masses. But in nearly every case, shuttering a weekend Mass at one location required starting a new weekend Mass in the neighboring location because of the number of people involved. Unlike some Parish Families in Seattle, we do not have 800-person churches with only 100 people at each Mass.

I understand that having three Masses at one church, rather than one Mass each at three churches, makes possible more robust weekend programming and additional “chat time” with the priest who does not have to immediately drive away. However, those are relatively marginal gains for the weighty choice to not hold Sunday Mass in one of our major population centers.

Summary – Much of the discomfort people are feeling has to do with realities – especially priestly realities – beyond our control. As I see it, there is no amount of pruning or closing that will allow us to return to the status quo of previous decades. Instead, the benefit of Partners is that, with pooled resources, we now have the flexibility to spread out and minimize the struggles of our current situation and respond nimbly to circumstances as they change.