Ministry as Soul Craft

How a shift in mindset gave me new life in ministry.

Sitting over a cup of coffee several years back, a ministry colleague paid me a confusing complement. After peppering me with questions about my parish work, he blurted out: “You’re a craftsman.” This struck me as odd. I didn’t feel like a craftsman. I didn’t work with pipes or boards or wires. I didn’t build stuff. I didn’t have customers or patrons. My work didn’t seem to stack up against Matthew Crawford’s standard of craftsmanship, that the craftsman doesn’t need “to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on…But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”¹ Dealing with human beings in ministry often resulted in offering chattering interpretations and pointing at a heap of uncertainty when people would ask: how do you know it’s working?

Maybe I didn’t see my work as concrete or tangible at the time. But more than that, back then, I thought of myself as a missionary.² I was in the prime of my youth. I’d bite off more than I could chew, and chew it anyway. Zeal for helping souls drove my ministry and my creativity. Driven by a weird admixture of missionary desire and Holy Spirit fire, I’d overpromise and somehow manage to deliver. For a few years, I essentially worked the equivalent of two full-time jobs, while plowing my way through an MA and then a PhD on the side. Weekend retreats. Marketing. Big picture planning for a diocesan-wide movement. Picking up 30 pizzas. Overnight events. Weeklong mission trips and conferences. Sunday after Sunday grind. Managing a team. Writing a dissertation. Hundreds of meetings. Maybe thousands. Oh, and we had child number 3, 4, and 5 during that stretch. Mine was an all-in mentality. Not always well-calculated or thought-through (probably because when I started, my frontal cortex wasn’t fully developed). Many risks. Most didn’t pan out. But some did, and those were the ones that pushed the ministry forward. He who does not risk does not win, as the saying goes.

I didn’t realize that in all this work, this intense focus and kind of wild, frenetic pace, I was beginning to hone skills. Dealing with a wide array of experiences and challenges. The praying and discerning. The visioning, strategizing, blowing it up, and re-visioning. Planning and executing on the plan. Dealing with patterns and experiences that broke patterns. Trying and making mistakes, then figuring out how to fix the problems I (or my team) created. Paying attention to the minutest details, things nobody notices: the content arc, the feel of a space, the amount of time between program elements in a ministry session, how we prepare as a team, when we do, and how we debrief afterwards. Fretting about every detail. How will someone receive this? Will they connect the dots? Is this the right question? Is that the right illustration? How do I want this to look, feel? Raw? Polished? In other words, this wasn’t just a “rely on Spirit juice” sort of thing like I originally thought. Sure, there was a lot of prayer involved, and none of my work was possible without Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit, but there was still a lot of me involved. “How admirable the plan,” Dom Chautard says, in The Soul of the Apostolate, “the universal law laid down by Providence, that it is through men, that men are to find out the way to salvation.”³ The only way to get out of the way, as we’re prone to say in ministry with a rightful nod to the Holy Spirit, is to first be in the way. And that demands something real and incarnate of us.

But this pace was not sustainable. In all those years, I was chopping down trees and had not looked up to see how much progress I’d made. Not to mention, as a married man with children, my first mission territory was my home. In time, my wild, missionary approach to things caught up with me. I had to call “timeout” and reevaluate. At the time, my men’s book group just so happened to be reading Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft. His philosophical work about craftsmanship resonated so profoundly with my ministry experience I consider this a key reading event in my life. Being out of ministry and looking at it from a different vantage point, suddenly my friend’s “you’re a craftsman” bit made sense. Evangelizing and catechizing is a kind of craft, and if I could mentally shift my approach to ministry from an all-in missionary approach to that of a wise craftsman, maybe I could get my legs back under me. If I could move from a missionary mindset to that of a craftsman, maybe I could get back in and stay in parish ministry longer.

As an aside, I want to point out that even with a craftsman mindset, I still think one needs a missionary heart and spirituality to do genuine ministry in any capacity — and to avoid reducing it to a certain professionalism or careerism. That’s always been off-putting to me. In a sense, I see myself as career-less. I don’t make decisions to “advance my career,” and anytime I move in that direction, it’s always a disaster. Instead, I take what I perceive to be the next correct step for my family and God’s Church, and he provides for us. In a real way, Baptism gives every Christian a missionary heart and a unique, unrepeatable, and essential place in the Church’s apostolate. But I’ve realized, over time, is that while I’m on mission, I’m not a missionary in that exclusive and exclusively-focused-on-mission sort of way. I have a family to care for. My family is my primary mission (my big “V” Vocation) and my work within the Church is second (little “v” vocation) and must, somehow, support my primary one. The craftsman idea unlocked this for me. In fact, after a ministry hiatus, when I returned to my craft, my wife noted with an air of peace: “It’s the same work, but you’re approaching it differently.” I hadn’t really shared the whole craftsman-thing with her at that point. So, I took her observation as a serious affirmation of my new mindset.

Now, by talking about ministry as craft, I don’t want you to think I’m advocating for turning ministry or people into a series of projects. That’s not it at all. Let’s probe a bit deeper.

What is craft?

The word “craft” comes from the Old English cræft, which means "power, physical strength, might.” The meaning would be expanded to "trade, handicraft, employment requiring special skill or dexterity," also "something built or made."⁴ Today, we associate a craft with manual skill or a trade. To craft is to work with one’s hands. But, riffing on a thought from St. John Paul II, we can view it more universally as a kind of attentive, disciplined, dedicated, imaginative, and careful approach to co-creation in any field or area of life. Properly speaking, as St. John Paul II points out in his “Letter to Artists,” there is only one Creator/Maker and that is God. For our part, as God’s “image and likeness,” we are all craftsmen and craftswomen and not the Creator, the Maker. He says:

What is the difference between “creator” and “craftsman”? The one who creates bestows being itself, he brings something out of nothing — ex nihilo sui et subiecti, as the Latin puts it — and this, in the strict sense, is a mode of operation which belongs to the Almighty alone. The craftsman, by contrast, uses something that already exists, to which he gives form and meaning. This is the mode of operation peculiar to man as made in the image of God.⁵

A craftsman takes raw materials he didn’t make on his own and fashions them into something useful for the sake of human flourishing. Craft is the application of human freedom, through skillful work, to achieve a good (i.e., according to the truth of things) for the sake of human flourishing and excellence. When I engage in craft, I exercise my agency and skill to achieve a good through work. (There is real work involved!) I exercise this agency for the sake of flourishing — perhaps my own or that of others. I also exercise this agency for the sake of excellence, my own, to be clear. Through engaging in craft, my own soul expands magnanimously as something beautiful unfolds before my eyes and inside of me. Through craft, I can become more of myself. This is the “soul craft” Crawford gets at in his book. Interestingly, when it comes to ministry, we’re also dealing with work itself that actually crafts and forms the souls of others. The craft is crafting souls. (I suppose I prefer “heart craft,” but it doesn’t roll off like Crawford’s jazzy expression.) Ministry is soul craft.

How can ministry be a craft?

À la St. John Paul II, ministry begins with “raw materials” I didn’t make for myself. I didn’t make the Gospel. I didn’t make this person, or these people, to whom I’m ministering. I can’t make faith in Jesus Christ happen with the snap of my fingers, the right formula, great event production or programming, or process management. Most of what I do, I’d say, is an incarnational and relational craft of communication.

The goal of my craft is communion: creating spaces for encounter with Christ and abiding communion with him. Communion has to do with oneness, becoming one by being held by or holding something in common. St. Augustine notes that typically, this “making-common,” happens through language, however systematic or unsystematic, formal or informal. Language implies meaning. “Take away the word, the meaning,” St. Augustine says, “[and] there is only a meaningless sound. The voice without the word strikes the ear but does not build upon the heart.” Building up the meaning in the heart is critical for Augustine. He says, “When I think about what I am going to say, the word or message is already in my heart.” The word, its genesis, its meaning, is the manifestation of the pondering heart, and communication the searching “for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine.” Augustine continues:

In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet is still also in mine. . . . The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete. Let us hold on to the word; we must not lose the word conceived inwardly in our hearts.⁶

In a dialogue between two persons, for example, the meaning of a particular word (or particular words) already “grasped” or “held” in the heart, is transmitted by the voice of one to the other. The voice carries the word to the other, and, once grasped by the other, the voice passes away and the meaning holds the dialogue partners in common in a certain sense. In communication, duality exists in unity—communion—in the meaning that holds them in common. The word stands as a “third-party” who makes the coming together of the two possible. In sum, communication refers to affinity—the transmission of meaning that holds human beings in common.

Evangelization, for its part, is the communication, not of just any words, or of many words, but the communication of the Word of God. The announcement of this Word, as Ratzinger says, “is more than a word—it is a way of life, indeed, life itself.”⁷ Consequently, in every age, the Gospel needs to be proclaimed in a way that hearers will receive it. In other words, it needs structures of proclamation (i.e., ways of speaking that resonate with a culture, programs, approaches, etc.) to carry it forward in every age. The Church needs to craft spaces of encounter, relational structures, and opportunities to bring to life the full force of the Gospel.

Viewed this way, a craftsman mentality can make perfect sense. I am a communicator. I’m tasked with the craft of communicating, effectively, the Gospel by taking into account the message, the medium, the culture, and the receiver.

No craftsman makes his raw materials ex nihilo. They are given to him. The same holds in ministry. The raw materials are given. But, like a craftsman, I can prepare and shape and hone the raw materials (the Gospel, its articulation, the environment, etc.) to foster places of and opportunities for encounter and communion (though the actual making of which (i.e., making common, communion) is up to the Lord). So, while it’s not a manual trade, per se, it is a kind of spiritual craft that involves working in concert with the Holy Spirit and with certain raw materials for the sake of communication, conversion, communion, relationship.

Renewal: Constantly Honing the Craft

While the Church has constant need of such human“vehicles” to transmit the Gospel, she must remain aware of and admit to the obsolescence of such vehicles over time. Ratzinger notes that they can set “themselves up as the essence of the Church,” and prevent “us from seeing through to what is truly essential.”⁸ While they begin as seemingly necessary constructs for mission, these vehicles or structures often and eventually “smack” of ideology, bureaucracy, and so on, greatly diminish-ing their reach and effectiveness.⁹ In short, the Church (and her man-made structures) risks becoming self-referential, instead of the sacrament of salvation pointing to Christ. Ratzinger describes this reality:

In the Church . . . there are of course also institutions of purely human law for the many purposes of management, organization, and coordination, which may grow in accordance with the demands of the time and may have to grow. Yet we would have to say this: the Church needs such institutions of her own, yet if they become too numerous and too strong, then they threaten the order and the life of her spiritual essence. The Church always has to scrutinize her own institutional structure so that it does not become too heavy—lest it harden into an armor that stifles her actual spiritual life.¹⁰

Our well-crafted communication structures risk becoming the thing. The media becomes the message until the message is forgotten. The program itself becomes the purpose until the purpose is forgotten. People hold onto their structures of proclamation with icy death grips. Over time, the structures ossify and stand in need of constant renewal. Still, the structures are essential.

The Parish Workshop

I never intended to get into parish ministry. The limited experiences I had in college as a volunteer and an intern were enough to make me want to stay far away. But, newly married and expecting a baby and living in Denver and looking for a way back to Ohio, a parish youth ministry job was an easy way to get enough cash to float while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. The first year was a slog and I grumbled a lot. Recently, I read the following in Callum Robinson’s Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, and it sounds a lot like my own experience in ministry (though he’s talking about woodworking, obviously):

Yet in spite of all my bluster, every once in a while, I'd find myself being drawn in [to the work]. My hands would instinctively know where they were supposed to be, without my mind having to tell them. One process would automatically lead to another, and almost by magic the job would be done better than I expected. Or a joint would go together so sweetly that, pulling it apart again, it would pop juicily — a sure sign that the fit was perfect. With new skills not learned so much as earned, and the feeling that, however minutely, I was finding my own answers rather than following the rules, there was a freedom that caught my imagination and slowly started to take hold. Handling them every day, I became more intimately connected with the characters of different hardwood species. Getting to know their particular qualities... and their quirks.¹¹

As Callum did in the workshop, I did in the parish during my first year in full-time ministry. I found myself drawn in and kind of instinctually knowing what to do and how to respond. Things were going well, far better than I expected. I had no formal ministry formation (i.e., I didn’t study catechetics or pastoral ministry in college), but I found my own answers. I didn’t know what the “rules” were, so those weren’t really considered. I had virtually no understanding of the Church’s documents and I didn’t have time (at the time) to read them. Engaging more and more deeply in the life of the parish intimately connected me with the parish’s various characters and the teens in my youth ministry program. I got to know their qualities and quirks and I genuinely liked them.

If ministry became my craft, the parish became my workshop. The parish is the place where my pastor employs me to listen, solve problems, and make disciples. It is the place where I fuss over finding ways to communicate the Gospel — to help people encounter Jesus through the ministry of the Church. It is the place where I evaluate and take calculated risks. It is the place where I shape and form and mold. It is the place where I try to do a quality job for its own sake. It is also the place where, because of the raw materials I didn’t make for myself, I bump into limitations and I have to work through them. Like any craftsman — and you realize this when you spend time with one — there are plenty of times when I’m more or less making things up as I go along. I feel my way forward, almost by intuition and just enough light from the Holy Spirit to see the next step. I’ve learned that grit means never stopping until I finish the job properly and wholly.

Parish work puts me in touch constantly with real people and their real problems and real desires. The humanity of the thing is inescapable and it’s precisely what makes parish work so interesting and challenging. Let me illustrate from the world of woodworking one last time. Robinson writes:

Tempting as it is to believe otherwise, timber is not, as R. Bruce Hoadley has wryly noted, "a material designed to satisfy the needs of woodworkers.” Almost every piece of wood you handle will be just a little too long, too short, too wide, too damaged, too misshapen, or too discolored to be used in its entirety. The grain, often obscured until the surfaces are machined-peeled away like the skins of muddy vegetables — will deceive you; your cutting list will call for awkward divisions of the board's usable length; or the wood will contort wildly the moment the blade cuts into it.¹²

As soon as I read this, I put Robinson’s book down and thought: “People are not a material designed to satisfy the needs of ministers.” Every person is totally unique — and imperfect. Their grain can deceive and their personalities can twist unexpectedly when you start engaging with them. At the bottom of it, sin has made rough cuts of all of us. None of us are finished yet. Ministry is an attempt to work with the rough cuts (of which I am a part), to remove the excess, to cut away the unnecessary, to plane and sand, and to form and join together in the one Body of Christ. Like a woodworker must be present to and in contact with his materials, I’m invited to carry out my craft through an incarnational relationship with my raw materials: the Gospel, the people I serve, and myself.

As I look back over the last 18 years, I can see how parish work has kept me close to the ground. So often I don’t appreciate this. I play the comparison game. I see my peers “making it” in business, leading organizations, and the like. Ambition creeps in and I think about the speaking circuit, higher ed, diocesan work, and so forth. But I’ve dabbled in many of these areas and every time I do, I realize I spend more time talking about conversion than being part of them. In parish work, though mired with murky minutiae and dimpled by dysfunction, I am close to where conversion happens. I’m on the ground, in the trenches. Outside of parish ministry, my head becomes disconnected from reality and I become too idealistic. I get lost in the clouds. My pride puffs up and ego sets in. Parish work is humble. It’s a lot like family work. Most of what I do for the Church goes unnoticed. Most of what I do at home goes unnoticed by my children. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s the best thing that I’m kind of tucked away in a rather rural setting, a beautiful parish workshop that comprises the whole southern third of a beautiful Ohio county, with some of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met. It seems that over the last 18 years, no matter how hard I’ve tried to get out of parish ministry or to move beyond it to “bigger and better” things, God keeps calling me back to the shop.

The parish is my workshop; ministry is my soul craft.

1. Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soul Craft (New York: Penguin, 2009), 15.

2. I should clarify what I mean, here. By “missionary,” I have in mind a sense of being all-in, with an undivided mind. A sense of intense focus on the mission at hand, and a radical willingness to be available and of service. There’s something wholly consuming about mission. This is not to say that mission is all doing and no being, or all activity without contemplation. But, there is a kind of all-in mentality that emerges. That’s what I’m getting at.

3. Chautard, The Soul of the Apostolate, 5–6.

4. Harper Douglas, "Etymology of craft," Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed August 7, 2025, https://www.etymonline.com/word/craft.

5. John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” §1, accessed https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_23041999_artists.html.

6. Augustine of Hippo, Sermo 293, 3, cited in Catholic Church, Liturgy of the Hours.

7. Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, 42. This excerpt on St. Augustine comes directly from my book Because He Has Spoken to Us: Structures of Proclamation from Rahner to Ratzinger (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2022), 341–42.

8. Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 142.

9. Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 136. Elsewhere, Ratzinger claims, “we have too much bureaucracy. Therefore, it will be necessary to simplify things. Everything should not take place by way of committees; there must even also be the personal encounter. And not everything can be dealt with rationally. However much Christianity makes a claim on reason and claims to speak to it, there are other dimensions of the perception of reality that we also need” (Salt of the Earth, 266). See also Ratzinger, New Outpourings, 24–25, 27, 69, 73–74.

10. Ratzinger, New Outpourings, 24–25.

11. Robinson, Ingrained (New York: Ecco, 2024), 236.

12. Robinson, Ingrained, 57–58.