Christopher is a Lukan: liturgy, sacramentality, and service among the marginalized.

He spent more than a decade as a parish minister in non-denominational, Church of the Brethren, and Mennonite Church USA congregations before receiving Holy Orders in the Progressive Christian Alliance. He also taught seminary courses as an adjunct professor in liturgy and the arts. There’s a pattern in his employment history: he keeps getting in trouble for choosing people over the institution. He’s proud of it.

He left the machinery that keeps Christian institutions preserving themselves at any cost. And to be fair, a few of those institutions had already been trying to help him out the door. He doesn’t miss the committees. He doesn’t miss the budget meetings, the constraining critiques of perpetually dissatisfied consumers, or watching anything sacramental get slowly strangled by a process built mainly to protect the bottom line. Turns out the liturgy and ministry get a lot better the second nobody gets a vote on whether it matters.

He didn’t leave faith, ritual, or service behind. He left the bureaucracy. What’s left is a Christianity that isn’t merely for the marginalized as a talking point, but of them: built with the people organized religion either shows the door or never let in to begin with, who still want liturgy and sacrament without the committee meeting attached. And it’s for and with the actually poor, actually forgotten, actually exploited, not those who are fashionably marginalized.

He takes his cues here from Walter Wink (20th century pacifist and theologian) and Gustavo Gutierrez (a South American priest), who put it bluntly: “If there is no friendship with them and no sharing of the life of the poor, then there is no authentic commitment to liberation, because love exists only among equals.” For Christopher, being a progressive Christian means abandoning American capitalism, nationalism, and militarism in favor of the bold, borderless religion of Jesus.

In addition to this work and his day-job running a ministry that provides transportation for at-risk individuals, he is a life-vowed member of the Order of Saint Luke, a dispersed quasi-monastic religious order that focuses on liturgical scholarship and sacramental spirituality. He serves as the Order’s Chaplain-General and the Companion for the Central Plains province. He is on the Progressive Christian Alliance leadership council, serving as their Minister of Worship and Theology, and he is also a certified conflict mediator with training through the Lombard Mennonite Peace Institute.

He holds degrees in applied music, ministry leadership and postmodern theology, and a doctorate in liturgical studies. He is the author of numerous articles and a book project on sacramentality and empire.

You can read Christopher’s substack – Christianity Against Empire – here.