My Profession Is My Work, My Vocation Is My Calling: A Reflection on Being a Worker Priest
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
I have been clergy for more than twenty-five years, and in all those years I have also been something else: a worker clergy. A bi-vocational servant. A man who sits at a lampworking bench shaping glass in the fire by day and helping others shape their faith the rest of the time. It has never been easy to hold both vocations at once, but it has always been holy.
The Independent Sacramental Movement is full of people like me, worker clergy whose lives are stitched together by ordinary labor and extraordinary calling. Our bishops, priests, and deacons teach school, run small businesses, practice medicine, serve tables, write code, fix cars, shelve books at the library, and pour concrete. They raise children. They care for aging parents. They work full-time jobs and then step quietly into the sacred duties of pastoral life when no one else is watching.
We are worker clergy because the Gospel does not wait until life becomes convenient. Ministry happens in the middle of everything else.
For my part, I have been self-employed for decades as a lampwork glassblower. My workshop is not a cathedral of roaring furnaces but the intimacy of a tabletop torch, a blue flame singing in the air, and thin rods of glass slowly yielding to the heat to the flame from the torch. Lampworking is a craft of patience and precision, a balance of focus, steady hands, and quiet attention. It demands long hours, sometimes twelve a day, bending fragile glass, barely molten, toward beauty, one moment, one degree at a time.
And somehow, through all of that, I am also a priest.
Clergy work does not clock in or out. A message at midnight, a crisis at dawn, a prayer needed in the middle of lunch, an emergency room visit in the evening, ministry threads itself through every hour. I sometimes laugh and say that lampworking is my part-time job, and being a priest is my full-time calling. The fire on my bench helps keep my household afloat, but the fire in my soul keeps me at the altar.
There are days when both vocations demand me at once. There are days when the only sermon I preach is the steady patience of holding glass in the flame. There are days when prayer and craft blur together until each becomes an expression of the other.
And when the balance grows difficult, I remember that the worker priest is not a modern invention. The apostles were worker clergy long before any of us. Peter and Andrew handled fishing nets before they handled the Gospel. Paul made tents, stitching canvas in the heat of the day, even as he stitched Christian communities together with his letters. Lydia, the merchant of purple cloth, was a businesswoman and a church leader at the same time. Their ministries were woven into their livelihoods, not separated from them.
The early Church was carried by worker clergy, by those who lived in the world even as they pointed beyond it. They ministered from workshop to table, from boat to marketplace. They preached not from privilege but from necessity, from the holy demands of a life poured out in two directions at once.
And now, in the Independent Sacramental Movement, that tradition lives again.
We are not clergy because we are paid; we are clergy because we are called. We hold secular jobs because we must, but we hold sacramental life because we cannot do otherwise.
My lampworking bench has become a kind of chapel. The flame is a teacher of patience. The glass is a reminder of how fragile and beautiful souls can be. The slow, attentive shaping of each piece mirrors the slow, attentive shaping of a Christian life.
My profession sustains my home.
My vocation sustains my spirit.
Both are sacred. Both are mine to steward.
I am a worker priest, not because it is simple, but because this is where God has placed me. This is the middle way where labor and liturgy meet, where flame and faith share the same energy.
This is the calling I cannot set down.
This is the craft I am formed by.
This is the life I offer back to God.
In Christ,
+B