Beaverton’s Spirit of Grace church co-led by newly ordained Roman Catholic Woman Priest

At a glance, Spirit of Grace church in Beaverton might appear to be just one of many progressive Protestant churches, not unusual in the Pacific Northwest. Its website and featured introduction video emphasizes that all are welcome, with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ people of faith who may not have been welcomed in other religious faiths — and even people who may be questioning their beliefs. But read the fine print or attend a service and both the Catholic and Lutheran theology that defines the church becomes clear.

Until the mid-1980s, the congregation was Lutheran, but out of an attempt to shore up dwindling finances, the church began sharing its physical space with members of a Catholic church. Eventually what developed was one congregation that gathered each Sunday and was led by both a visiting Catholic priest and a Lutheran pastor. But in December of 2023, for the first time, the Portland Archdiocese barred Roman Catholic priests from any further participation at Spirit of Grace —and ordered any Catholics in the congregation to leave. But they stayed, choosing to keep their model, and instead of inviting visiting Roman Catholic priests, they called Rev. Vinci Halbrook-Paterson to lead. She had been serving on staff, but in the wake of the Archdiocese’s decision, chose to be ordained by Roman Catholic Women Priests in May 2025.

Halbrook-Paterson now co-leads the church and alternates leading services on Sundays with Lutheran pastor Robyn Hartwig. It is thought to be the only such Lutheran-Catholic church in the country. We hear more about the congregation, its evolution and its impact in the community from Halbrook-Paterson and two long time congregants, Lutheran Marie Gettel-Gilmartin and her husband, Mike Gettel-Gilmartin, who is Catholic.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. At first glance, the Spirit of Grace church in Beaverton might appear to be one of many progressive Protestant churches in the Northwest. Its website makes clear that all are welcome, with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ people and folks who may be questioning their beliefs. But the church is actually unique. It is thought to be the only joint Lutheran-Catholic congregation in the country. In May, the Reverend Vinci Halbrook-Paterson, who had already been serving on the church’s staff, was ordained by the group Roman Catholic Women Priests. Spirit of Grace is now led by two women. And it is not recognized by the Catholic church hierarchy in Rome.

Reverend Halbrook-Paterson joins us now, along with a couple who have been long members of this congregation: Marie Gettel-Gilmartin, who is Lutheran, and her husband Mike, who is Catholic. Welcome to all three of you.

All:  Thank you.

Miller:  Marie, my understanding is that you are the longest standing member of this congregation, among the three of you. You grew up in this church. What do you remember about the church as a young Lutheran kid?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  Well, it was a bit of a hippie church and I would say it probably still is a little bit. We had a lot of young families and our pastor, a Lutheran pastor at the time, played guitar and wrote music that we would sing. It was the ‘60s and ‘70s, so it was definitely a really groovy place.

Miller:  Let’s zoom forward a little bit. When did the church become a kind of double congregation?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  That happened around 1986 when the Lutheran church was really kind of struggling with finances, as a lot of churches do, and also had some growth issues. So the pastor at the time was a former Catholic. He was always still interested in the Catholic church and had a conversation with an auxiliary bishop at the archdiocese, Kenneth Steiner, I believe was his name. And Kenneth Steiner talked to Father Jim Parker about it. Jim Parker was very interested in doing something creative.

So they formed a coalition with a Catholic church in Tigard. And they started meeting thinking that they would share space and perhaps do things together. But a lot of people were interested in forming a community. That’s how it all started.

Miller:  So am I right, Reverend Vinci, that there was buy-in from both the Catholic and the Lutheran leadership at the time, in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s?

Vinci Halbrook-Paterson:  Correct. Up until about a year-and-a-half ago, there was buy-in or support for this venture.

Miller:  We’ll talk about what happened about a year-and-a-half ago. But what did it mean in practice? I mean, how were services held for these two Christian denominations?

Halbrook-Paterson: So prior to the pandemic, the community gathered for services. And for the first half of the service, the whole community was together. That was the reading of scripture, singing the songs, and having a sermon or a homily. At that point, they would share peace with one another, and one week the Catholics would go to the community room and the Lutherans would stay in the sanctuary. And the next week, the Catholics would stay in the sanctuary and the Lutherans would go to the community room, and have their own Eucharistic prayer or table prayer.

Once the pandemic happened, we alternated services on Zoom. One week would be Lutheran, one week would be Catholic. And when we returned from Zoom – Pastor Robin and I were both hired during the pandemic – we kept that same rhythm of just alternating weeks.

Miller:  Mike, my understanding is you grew up in the Catholic Church in England. What was it like for you to be a part of this joint venture?

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  It was initially a little puzzling. I remember Marie and I met in Japan, and she’d received a letter from her parents saying that their church was becoming a Lutheran-Catholic church. And I said to her and to myself, “Well, that’s not gonna fly.” And here we are almost 40 years later.

Miller:  Meaning, “it’s not gonna work,” or“I’m not up for that, I’m a Catholic, I have no interest in that?”

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  I literally thought it wasn’t going to work.

Miller:  Why not?

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  Just because the Catholics … and I hadn’t met a Lutheran until I met Marie, consciously anyway. And they’re not very common in England. There’s a lot of what we call Episcopalians in the U.S., but Anglicans. So the Lutheran form of Protestantism I hadn’t come across. And knowing the Catholic church as I did, with its focus on traditionalism and [being] a little bit conservative, I thought they’re not really into ecumenism. At least I had not experienced it.

So the fact that this American experiment was going forward, it turned out to be exciting and I’ve been a member there since 1990 now. It’s really broadened my experience of Catholicism, as well as now being, I think, fairly cognizant of what Lutherans are and do.

Miller:  It makes sense that you would learn a lot more about a branch of Christianity that you hadn’t been familiar with. That makes sense, both married to a Lutheran and then being among a Lutheran congregation. But it’s a little bit surprising to me that you’d learn more about Catholicism from this as well. What have you learned about your own faith?

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  Well, we were talking in the green room prior to this. I think what I was learning about Catholicism is there’s many things that are so similar to Lutheranism, for example, our Eucharistic celebration. When I experienced it, the language isn’t that different. Maybe theologically, if you get down to it, there’s different ideas, but Lutherans and Catholics are very liturgical. They sing a lot more than Catholics actually. Lutherans sing a lot. They love to sing. They sing everything.

Miller:  “They” – you still say that. [Laughter] You’ve been married for how long?

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  Thirty-five years. But I still feel that I’m Catholic to the bone, because once you’re a Catholic, it’s very hard to move from that, all the sensory stuff that Catholics are into. But we did talk initially when I joined. There was a lot of discussion about ecumenism, where we’re similar, where there are differences. Marie was just talking in the car about the differences between Lutherans and Catholics. So [I am] just being a little bit more intentional about my faith instead of just saying, oh, I’m a Catholic. I’m just gonna accept everything that happens in the Church. I actually felt I’m being educated in the differences and the similarities.

Miller:  Reverend Vinci, let’s move on to what you hinted at, but it is a really important piece of this story. In December of 2023, just a couple weeks before Christmas, you got word from the archdiocese, the Catholic leadership locally based in Portland, that a major change was coming. What did the letter say?

Halbrook-Paterson:  The letter that our priest received – our letter got lost in the mail somehow – said that “effective December 10, 2023, you will no longer be allowed to celebrate Mass at Spirit of Grace or with any members of Spirit of Grace from that day forward.”

Miller:  Why not?

Halbrook-Paterson:  It was not made clear to us. We attempted conversation with the diocese, after the fact. We even had 40 letters sent to the Papal Nuncio, which is the Pope’s representative in the United States, explaining and requesting some sort of dialogue about the situation. But [we] did not receive any response back.

Miller:  Do you have a theory as to why? This was, what, almost 40 years of what seemed like a peaceful cohabitation, or community is maybe a better way to put it, that did have the blessing certainly from the beginning. Literally, the Catholic leadership here said, “Yes, you can do this. You can celebrate Mass together. This is working.” Do you have your own theory for what changed in 2023?

Halbrook-Paterson:  I believe there were a few components, one being that the Catholic Mass was now only being celebrated every other week. So it was not available weekly, number one. Number two, I, as a Catholic layperson, laywoman, was preaching regularly. We have a lot of lay involvement, so some of the prayers are written and spoken by the people.

Miller:  As opposed to an ordained Roman Catholic priest?

Halbrook-Paterson:  Right. Roman Catholic priests or formulated prayers that are in our prayer books. And I think our stance of welcome to all was definitely antagonistic to what the archdiocese was promoting as Catholic.

Miller:  What options did you feel like you had as a congregation at that time?

Halbrook-Paterson:  At that time, the community felt cut off at the knees. We really did. And the communities took almost a year of discernment. We allowed time for grieving and then we said, “OK, now let’s talk about what are the options.” And we discovered that there are a number of independent Catholic churches, independent Catholic organizations throughout the United States.

Miller:  Independent from Rome, from the hierarchy that flows from Rome to cardinals, to archbishops, to parish priests – separate. But as far as you and those other groups are concerned, you are still very much Catholic?

Halbrook-Paterson:  Exactly. And that’s what the community … I discern myself, as a lifelong Oregonian and lifelong Catholic, that there’s no way to take the Catholic out of me. This is who I am and how I am in the world.

Miller:  Mike, what about you? You said something earlier that was basically the same thing. You’ll be Catholic forever. You’re still Catholic. But if I understand what the Archbishop of Portland said in that letter, it was a pretty explicit message to you and others: “Hey, Catholics who are in this congregation, if you want to receive communion, if you want to celebrate a real Catholic mass, go to a real Catholic church.” I’m paraphrasing, but I think that’s relatively accurate.

What did you take from that letter?

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin: Well, I took that and I had a discussion with a journalist from The National Catholic Reporter about this who asked me the same question. She said, “I’m looking at the copy of the letter. It says all of the Catholic parishioners in this church, Spirit of Grace, need to go to their local Catholic communities and this church is basically no longer going to be Lutheran-Catholic.” And when she said that to me, I was like, “Well, Spirit of Grace is my church. It is my community.”

If I went to my local Catholic church, I wouldn’t know a single soul and I wouldn’t have that feeling of community that I have here. And I think that is the essence of what Spirit of Grace is. It has a huge community feeling. It’s like the “Cheers” bar of Christianity. You know everybody there. I’m a Sunday school teacher. I know all the children. Everybody is connected in some way or another. And even though, as I said before, I’m a Catholic, I just didn’t feel that maybe I wasn’t as Catholic as I thought. Because the archbishop’s order, I was not going to follow.

Miller:  It does seem like what you’re saying is it was more important to you to prioritize the community that you’d been a part of at that point for more than three decades over the dictates of the Roman Catholic church.

Mike Gettel-Gilmartin:  Right, completely. And if I followed the archbishop’s dictate, I wouldn’t be going to Mass with my wife or my children.

Miller:  There’s another piece of this, which is not just the personal decision of how you decide what you’ll follow, where you’ll go, but in your case, Reverend Vinci, being excommunicated by this church. Am I right that this is what has happened to you?

Halbrook-Paterson:  Yeah, so that term means that, because I chose to be ordained by Roman Catholic Women Priests, I am no longer in communion with the church in Rome. So I am excommunicated, correct. And that was part of my discernment, realizing that the church that gave me life, the church in Western Oregon, now needs to be seen, as I’ve experienced it at Spirit of Grace, as something broader than the Roman Catholic church.

Miller:  Do you feel like you left the church or the church left you?

Halbrook-Paterson:  The church left me. And I discovered a community that not only called me to serve them as their director of Catholic Ministries, but then affirmed me to be ordained as a Roman Catholic Women Priest and serve as their co-pastor.

Miller: Marie, what has this split, this schism, been like for you, as someone who did not grow up in the Catholic church but is intimately tied to a congregation that is made up of Catholics and Lutherans?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  The most overwhelming reaction that all of us had to this was concern about our priests. We had … how many priests? Four or five priests who would come and say Mass. They were a part of the community and the letter said they couldn’t come anymore,

Miller:  And they’ve been doing that for decades?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  Yes, and Mike and I were both married by a Catholic priest at Spirit of Grace. It had a previous name, Mission of the Atonement. Our children were baptized by a Catholic priest and a Lutheran pastor together. The priests are so important. They’ve been so important to the life of the community. And our visiting priests or priests on staff are all in their 80s or 90s. So they were told that if they continued to come and say Mass, they would have their pension cut off. That’s my understanding. They would no longer be supported by the archdiocese financially.

So they were very unhappy about it as well, but they had no choice. The Lutheran Church in Oregon, the ELCA, is very progressive. So as a Lutheran, I often really balked against the structure and the hierarchy, and the anti-women feeling and the anti-LGBT feeling in the Roman Catholic hierarchy. So it was frustrating to always fly under the radar.

Miller:  So am I right, or am I reading into this too much, that there’s a part of you that’s feeling some relief that the Roman Catholic church has said, “Be gone, you can’t be a part of us.” Actually, you don’t mind that?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  I do not mind that. And actually, like I said, I was sad for the priests. I was sad for the Catholics in our community, because generally my experience in our community is that Lutherans care a lot about how the Catholics are feeling about their identities.

Reverend Vinci is nodding here. Yeah, we’re very concerned about how the Catholics are feeling. But I think that it’s the best thing that could have happened to us because we got to ordain Reverend Vinci.

Miller:  And that was recently. What did that mean to you?

Marie Gettel-Gilmartin:  When I was talking to your producer yesterday about it, I got kind of choked up. The Catholic women were the ones, like when I talked to them, they were totally overwhelmed with the emotion. As a woman, even in the Lutheran church, sometimes I feel like women are not given the position that men are in the church. So it’s a real passionate feeling of mine. And we also, at Spirit of Grace, use inclusive language. We try to use expansive words for God. So for me to have a Catholic woman be ordained was just absolutely thrilling. It was an incredible celebration that day. Then the next day she gave communion for the first time and she was a complete natural.

Miller:  What do you most remember from the day before that, the day that you were ordained, Reverend Vinci, as a Roman Catholic Woman Priest?

Halbrook-Paterson:  What do I remember of the day? I remember, and I continue to feel, this sense of fullness, just receiving all this affirmation. There were people on Zoom that I knew from college, from grad school, an 80-year old nun back in Pennsylvania, one from Iowa. They were just people from different parts of the fabric of my life that were there to celebrate with Spirit of Grace. And I just continue to feel people’s affirmation and support in a way that is deeply not only humbling, but deeply inspiring me to continue to do what I do.

Miller:  Marie, Mike and Reverend Vinci, thank you very much.

All:  Thank you.

Miller:  Marie and Mike Gettel-Gilmartin have been attending the Spirit of Grace church in Beaverton for a number of decades. The Reverend Vinci Halbrook-Paterson is a Catholic pastor at Spirit of Grace.

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