Samuel Thomas

November 19, 2025

This article featured in our Third Quarter Newsletter of 2025

To be a pastoral minister in L’Arche can often feel like being a tusked elephant: life is slow and there aren’t as many of you around as their used to be. As far as I am aware, I am privileged to be the only full time pastoral minister within a L’Arche community in the United States. There used to be so many that in the 1990s a volume was put together entitled ‘the priest in L’Arche’ Those days are no longer the norm.

I ardently believe that the core of my role in L’Arche is to announce the comfort of the good news in community and to equally receive that comfort from the community. Being in L’Arche means being surrounded by people in their truest form – not the perfect version, not the best version, but simply oneself with all the

faults, insecurities, and hang-ups that come with being human. As we deal with the impending death of loved ones, as we deal with hurt, and as we deal with growing pains of community, we know that God has given us a community to be loved by. People are neurotic at times, and we will all tear our hair out about something we were subjected to (and certainly other times it will be people tearing their hair out about ourselves!). God has given the church and L’Arche as vehicles to rage against the injustice of the world, to be a place of love.

There is a real tangible feeling of being loved in community. While not every core member is articulate in the traditional sense, they echo their love in a multiplicity of ways. The image above of our own Tim and Chris, two people who have limited speech, embody this. While they cannot say “I love you, and I am here for you” they still demonstrate the love of community, holding hands to pass the peace of Christ and love to one another in their joy and in their anguish. We are called to be like this.