Nicholas O'Brien

Father Nicholas O'Brien is the kind of priest who cannot leave a good idea alone. If there is a way to make the faith something people can see, touch, or laugh their way into, he has probably already tried it. The people who fill his pews describe homilies that make even hard teachings feel clear and close to home.

Ordained in 1983, he came to Florida in 1990 and soon became known for an approach to ministry all his own. He taught himself magic, set up a carpentry shop to build his own props, and raised doves and rabbits for his illusions, all so a Pentecost homily might end with a dove rising from a balloon or a cross appearing where a moment before there had been none. He started a clown ministry that grew almost faster than he could keep up with. None of it was ever for show. "If I can't bring the message of Christ to what I'm doing," he once said, "then there's no sense in doing it."

That instinct never left him, it just keeps finding new tools. He has run an online ministry since 1999, back when few priests thought to look there, and the same idea now hangs on the wall of the parish thrift store downtown, a mural of saints that stops strangers in their cars and draws in people who might never walk onto church grounds. The store itself feeds families who need it, because for Fr. Nick tending the soul and tending the body were never really separate things.

For all the invention, what lies underneath has always been simple. He leads St. Matthew in Winter Haven now, a parish that calls itself a family of believers, and he cares for them the same way he writes: the first to poke fun at himself, careful never to leave anyone feeling judged, and always pointing people toward one quiet truth, that they are not just going to church but coming to meet the Lord. He still describes the priesthood the way he did years ago. As a boy, he says, he wanted to be a bus driver, a police officer, and a carpenter, and somehow, as a priest, he got to be all three. It is as good a description as any of a man who has never stopped finding new ways to do the one thing he loves.