Chris Hoffmann

Fr. Chris Hoffmann has always wanted the same thing: to serve God and help his people. Nearly forty years into the priesthood, that is still where he finds his greatest joy, walking with people through grief, through hard seasons, through the weeks before a wedding, and watching God's grace take hold in their lives.

Warm, patient, and good with people in the quiet moments, Fr. Chris has carried those qualities through nearly forty years of parish ministry, and it is the reason those who have worked with him tend to describe him not by his titles, but by the way he actually shows up: someone who listens, works well with people, stays positive, and gives good counsel. He is the first to say a priest is a human being before anything else, with the same problems as everyone in the pews, who simply sets his own aside to help carry theirs.

He knew early. He was eight years old when he first thought about becoming a priest, and he never seriously considered anything else, committing to it for good while studying accounting at Marquette. If he had not been a priest, he says he would have been a stockbroker. He is good with numbers, likes business and investing, a practical streak that never really left him. But the pull toward serving God and helping his people had been there his whole life, and by the time he entered seminary the choice was an easy one. His years at St. Lawrence Seminary shaped how he still sees people, boys from Chicago and Detroit, from farms in Wisconsin and Michigan, and reservations in Montana, all praying and playing side by side, a lesson in how difference can bring people together rather than divide them. Ordained for the Diocese of Orlando in 1987, he has spent the years since across its parishes before returning to Deltona to lead Our Lady of the Lakes.

He is a teacher at heart, the kind of pastor who will stop to explain why the church turns to deep blue in Advent or why incense rises the way a prayer does, small things that help faith reach all the senses. But what he keeps coming back to is people. Being a priest, for Fr. Chris, was never a job to weigh against the others he might have had. It was the one thing he always wanted. "It was not hard," he says of the choice. "I had been thinking about it my whole life.