From Revival to The Hearth: How a Vision Began

Written by Warren Kirilenko

My name is Warren Kirilenko, and as I was cutting my lawn recently, about an acre of grass with a push mower, I found myself doing what I often do while I mow: praying, reflecting and thinking about some of the deeper things in life.

There is something strangely therapeutic about cutting grass. Maybe it’s a guy thing. Give a man a lawn mower, a reasonably straight stretch of grass and, in my case, about four hours of uninterrupted alone time, and apparently we call that meditation. Of course, when you’re bagging the grass and hauling it to the compost pile, it might also qualify as exercise.

For me, though, it has genuinely become a time of prayer, a place where I slow down, talk with God and listen.

Somewhere in the middle of that prayer and reflection, a thought came very clearly to mind: Write a blog. Introduce yourself. Tell people what The Hearth is. Tell them where the idea came from, how the vision developed, how it began to take shape, and what we are hoping to build together.

So, here I am.

Perhaps the best place to begin is with a simple question: What exactly is The Hearth?

Before I get to The Hearth, I feel like I should share a little about who I am and some of my history in Catholic education and ministry. I attended the University of Saskatchewan, where I earned a degree in Religious Studies with a minor in Philosophy. From there, I entered the College of Education, specialized in teaching Religious and Catholic Studies at the secondary level, and eventually obtained a Master's degree in Education.

After graduating in 2002, I began what would become a 19-year journey with Calgary Catholic. During those years, I had the opportunity to serve the Church and Catholic education in many different ways. I taught Catholic Studies, became a coordinator for Religious Education, served for eight years as principal of a high school supporting students with mental health needs, coordinated and led Youth Alpha programs, led sacramental preparation for teens, and spent 13 years as an executive member of the Religious and Moral Education Council. Through that work, I had opportunities to help with the faith formation of teachers and organize conferences for Catholic educators and clergy from Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Looking back, I can see how those experiences shaped the way I think about faith formation and ministry. I have spent much of my adult life working with people, especially young people, who are asking questions about God, faith, meaning, purpose and belonging. I have also had the privilege of working alongside teachers, clergy, families and many others who deeply desire to pass on the Catholic faith.

In 2021, my wife and I made the decision to return home to Saskatchewan. We settled at Wakaw Lake, St. Theresa became our new parish, and I began teaching Catholic Studies at École St. Mary High School in Prince Albert. Teaching at St. Mary's has been an absolute blessing and joy.

When we first moved to the Wakaw area, however, I wasn't heavily involved at St. Theresa Parish. Life was incredibly busy. We had just moved into a new home, I was beginning a new teaching position and, at the same time, I was working on my Master's degree with a full course load. Between teaching, classes, research papers and everything involved in settling into a new community, there wasn't much time left over. I attended Mass at St. Theresa, but for the first few years, that was largely the extent of my involvement.

That began to change when Earnie invited me to join the parish Finance Committee. It might seem like an unusual place for a story about faith formation to begin, but that simple invitation mattered. Being part of the committee helped me become more connected to the parish. I began getting to know people not simply as familiar faces I saw at Mass on Sunday, but as people with names, stories, gifts and a shared love for our parish.

Sometime later, I participated in a faith formation course being led by Ed. It was through that course that I got to know Linda Kindrachuck. When Ed eventually moved to Alberta, he asked our group a simple but important question: Who was going to continue offering faith formation in the future? Linda and I began talking about the possibility of leading something together. The desire was there, but the time wasn't. I was still teaching full time while completing my Master's degree, and evenings and weekends were often consumed by classes, research and papers. Linda and I talked about doing something, and the idea remained in the back of my mind, but I simply didn't have the time to turn it into anything concrete.

Looking back now, I can see something important in those years. My involvement in the parish didn't begin because I walked through the doors one Sunday and decided to become involved in everything. Someone invited me. That invitation led to relationships. Those relationships led to another opportunity, and that opportunity introduced me to other people who cared about faith formation. Slowly, almost without realizing it, I was becoming more connected to the life of the parish.

Perhaps that experience planted a seed as well. Sometimes people don't need another announcement in the bulletin telling them that volunteers are needed. Sometimes they simply need someone to know their name, recognize something in them and ask, “Would you like to be part of this?”

Somewhere along the way, all of those years of teaching, leading, forming, listening, succeeding, failing, learning and starting again, along with these new experiences of parish community, began to shape the way I thought about parish life and adult faith formation.

Then, in January of 2026, something changed.

I found myself in an unusually deep and very personal time of prayer. In the days and weeks that followed, I began to sense that something was changing in me, and one word kept returning to my mind: revival.

I would wake up in the morning thinking about revival. On my drive to work, revival. At school, revival. Driving home, revival. While sitting in my office preparing lessons or working on a virtual reality film project for my students, revival. Before bed during prayer, there it was again. Revival.

Eventually, I started asking myself what God was asking of me and what this word actually meant. Was this something I needed to look at in my own life? Was it something for my students? Was it something for our parish? Was it something bigger than all of those things, or was I simply misunderstanding it? I didn't know, so I prayed about it and asked God to help me understand what revival meant.

I didn't receive an immediate answer. Instead, over the following weeks and months, little things began appearing in my life that caused me to think about the word differently. One of those things was worship music.

I have spent much of my life approaching Catholicism intellectually. I studied Religious Studies and Philosophy. I teach theology. I love Scripture, Church teaching, history and the intellectual tradition of our faith. Through worship music, however, I began discovering something that was harder for me to put into words. It felt as though the intellectual part of my Catholic faith was beginning to meet the heart. I wasn't abandoning one for the other. They were beginning to come together.

Other experiences followed. A lesson caused me to reflect deeply on the question, “What is your focus?” I found that my focus recently was completely about figuring out what revival meant. I found myself attending a course in Saskatoon on praying with and for other people. Conversations, experiences, Scripture and prayer kept bringing me back to the same questions.

Slowly, my understanding of revival began to change. I began picturing people gathering together, praying with one another, learning together and helping one another. I thought about people finding healing, discovering their gifts and growing as disciples of Jesus, and then helping someone else do the same.

The more I thought about it, the more I saw that pattern in Scripture. Jesus gathers people around Him. He forms them, teaches them and walks with them, but He doesn't keep them gathered around Him as a closed group. He sends them out. Those disciples form other disciples, the community grows, and eventually Christ gives His followers the Great Commission to go and make disciples.

Something began to click for me. Maybe revival wasn't primarily about filling a church for one extraordinary event. Maybe it wasn't about creating another program or simply getting more people to attend something. Maybe revival could begin much smaller, with a few people gathering, someone being welcomed, someone asking a question, someone learning to pray, someone discovering a gift they didn't realize they had, someone finding healing or someone growing closer to Christ and then reaching out to another person.

That led me to another question: What would this actually look like?

I started thinking about parish life and particularly about what happens between Sundays. Where do people go when they want to talk about their faith? Where does someone go when they have questions? Where can people gather to pray together? Where does someone who is hurting find people willing to walk beside them? Where does someone who wants to understand Scripture or Catholic teaching more deeply find others who want the same thing?

Perhaps most importantly, I began wondering what happens when an ordinary person sitting in the pew feels God placing something on their heart. Maybe someone feels called to start a women's or men's group. Maybe someone wants to lead Alpha. Maybe someone has a gift for hospitality. Maybe someone wants to organize a Bible study, prayer group, service project or gathering for young families. Maybe someone simply has an idea and doesn't know what to do with it.

I began wondering what would happen if we created a place where those ideas could grow. I wasn't imagining another program that depended upon one person to run everything, or a ministry where people simply showed up, listened and went home. I imagined a place where people could gather, build relationships, learn together, pray together and begin discovering how God might be calling each of them to serve.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps we didn't need to begin by creating dozens of ministries. Maybe we needed to begin by creating a place where ministries could be born. It could be somewhere welcoming, where you could sit down with a cup of coffee and have a conversation. Someone might teach a course, another person might lead a small group, someone else might share their story, and another might simply come because they needed somewhere to belong. It could be a place that helped people move from attending to belonging, from belonging to growing, and eventually from growing to serving others.

Somewhere in all of this, the image of a hearth began forming in my mind.

Historically, the hearth was the heart of the home. It was where the fire was kept burning, where people gathered for warmth, where food was prepared, stories were shared, and family and community came together. I also couldn't help noticing the word itself: hearth and heart. For me, that connection mattered. Part of what had been happening in my own faith was a movement from knowing about God primarily with the intellect toward allowing what I knew to reach more deeply into the heart. I wasn't leaving the intellectual tradition of Catholicism behind. I love that tradition. Rather, I was discovering that the head and the heart were meant to meet.

Then there was the fire. Throughout Scripture, fire is associated with the presence and action of God. Moses encounters God in the burning bush, a fire that burns but does not consume. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples with what Scripture describes as tongues as of fire.

The image of Pentecost particularly captured my imagination because the disciples were gathered together when the Holy Spirit came upon them, but they weren't meant to remain in that room forever. They were sent out.

Suddenly the image of a hearth seemed to capture much of what I had been praying about. People gather around a hearth. They receive warmth. They are fed. They share stories. Relationships are formed and the fire is tended. Eventually, however, they leave the hearth and carry that warmth with them.

Maybe that was what this vision of revival could look like in a parish: a place where people could gather around Christ, where faith could move from the head to the heart, and where people could encounter the Holy Spirit, pray together, learn together, find healing, discover their gifts and grow as disciples. Then they could go out and do the same for others. Not because The Hearth had completed its work, but because that was the work.

By March of 2026, these thoughts had become concrete enough that I decided I needed to start writing them down. I began drafting a vision document, a proposal for creating a common gathering place within our parish hall. I imagined a place where someone could come for coffee and a snack, sit down with another person and have a conversation. It could be a place for community, prayer and faith formation, but most importantly, a place where relationships could grow and new ministries could eventually grow out of those relationships.

It took me about a month to put the initial proposal together. When I finally finished it, I had a rather basic problem. I had no idea what I was supposed to do with it.

I wondered whether I should present it to Parish Council. Should I invite the Finance Committee as well? Should I simply give it to Father and say, “Here's an idea I've been working on?” I honestly didn't know. Eventually, I decided to do something much simpler. I sent it to Linda and asked her to read it and tell me what she thought.

After Linda read the proposal, we spoke on the phone. She was excited and told me something I hadn't known. For months, a group in our parish called LFI had been meeting and discussing the future. Part of their work was to identify a project they could undertake for the parish.

I had no idea they were doing this, and they had no idea that I had spent the previous month developing this proposal.

Linda asked if she could take what I had written to the LFI group. The group met, discussed it and decided that this would become their project. That was an important moment for me because something that had largely existed in my thoughts, prayers and a document on my computer stopped being my idea and began becoming our vision.

I was invited to meet with the LFI group, and one of our early gatherings took place around a beautiful potluck supper. I gave a presentation on distributed leadership, an idea that had become increasingly important to the way I was thinking about ministry. The Hearth couldn't be about one person doing everything. If this was going to work, people needed to be trusted with real responsibility. They needed opportunities to use their gifts, leadership needed to be shared, and we needed to create a culture where someone could come forward with an idea and hear, “How can we help you make that happen?”

Around that table, over food and conversation, something else was already happening. Community was forming.

We talked about the vision, asked questions, shared ideas and discussed what was realistic. Eventually, we decided to ask the Finance Committee to support the LFI project we were now calling The Hearth. The physical part of the proposal was fairly modest. We wanted to make a small but meaningful renovation to the parish hall that would help transform it into a warmer, more welcoming and useful gathering space.

The Finance Committee reviewed the proposal and generously provided $10,000 to begin bringing the vision to life. They also supported another part of the vision, the development of a new parish website that could eventually become much more than a place to find Mass times and announcements. The website is still very much a work in progress, and I would say I am only about halfway finished. My hope is to eventually add courses, videos, presentations and other faith formation resources that people can access beyond the physical walls of The Hearth.

With that support, we got to work.

The Hearth team began meeting regularly. We established formal roles, developed a mission statement and vision documents, and started describing some of the ministries and groups we hoped might eventually grow from the space. Throughout the summer we met, talked, planned and prayed together. Again and again, we asked the Holy Spirit to guide what we were doing.

Then came the practical questions. If people were going to gather here, what should the space actually feel like? We wanted a coffee bar where people could naturally gather and talk. We wanted a sound system that could provide background music but also support presentations, karaoke nights, bingos and community events. We wanted improved lighting and comfortable sitting areas with sofas and chairs where people could have an actual conversation rather than always sitting in rows of folding chairs. And yes, knowing that coffee, snacks and comfortable furniture would all be occupying the same room, we even bought a fabric cleaner.

We were dreaming, but we were also trying to be practical. We quickly discovered just how fast $10,000 can disappear. Electrical work alone could consume a significant part of our budget. Plumbing was another major expense. Then there were building materials, cabinets, countertops, furniture, sound equipment, lighting and all of the other little things that suddenly appear when you start turning an idea on paper into an actual room.

There were moments when I genuinely wondered how we were going to make it work, and so we prayed. I prayed. Father prayed. Brenda Prayed. Linda prayed. Yvonne prayed. Andrea prayed. Our whole group prayed. We asked God to send us the people we needed to make this vision possible.

And people came.

A small core of skilled volunteers stepped forward and simply said they would help. Some were from our own parish community, while others were from St. Louis and didn't even attend our church. I won't name them here because I would want their permission before doing so publicly, but what they told us was remarkable. They weren't going to charge us for their labour or their time. Their attitude was simple: they don't charge churches.

That changed everything. Skills and labour that could have consumed a huge portion of our limited budget were suddenly being freely given. People offered their knowledge, their hands, their evenings and weekends. They solved problems and figured out ways to make things work. Slowly, something that had once existed only as an idea began becoming a physical place.

For me, their generosity has been one of the clearest examples of God's providence throughout this project. I consider these people a tremendous blessing to our parish and, quite honestly, an answer to prayer.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the story, however, only became obvious to me when I began looking backward. Through all of these seemingly separate events, prayer was the thread that tied everything together. While I was praying about revival and developing a vision for The Hearth, I knew nothing about the work of the LFI group. I didn't know they had been meeting, and I didn't know they were looking for a project. I certainly didn't know that the document I was writing might provide an answer to a question another group of people was already asking.

Earlier still, when Linda and I talked about someday offering faith formation together, neither of us imagined that those conversations would eventually become part of something like The Hearth. Before that, I hadn't even been particularly involved in the parish until Earnie invited me to join the Finance Committee.

One invitation led to a relationship. That relationship led to another opportunity. A course introduced me to another person. A conversation planted an idea. A word kept appearing in prayer. A proposal was written without knowing where it would go. A group happened to be searching for a project. Then people with exactly the kinds of practical skills we needed appeared and offered to help.

None of those moments seemed particularly extraordinary when they happened. Looking backward, however, I began to see the dots connect.

I can't claim to understand exactly how God works or why things unfold the way they do. I can only describe what this experience has looked like from where I stand. It feels as though God has been quietly placing people in the right places at the right times, often before any of us understood why.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons The Hearth has already taught me. Sometimes we pray for God to show us the entire plan. Instead, He gives us the next person, the next conversation, the next invitation, the next idea or the next open door.

Only later, when we turn around and look back at the path we've travelled, do we begin to see what He may have been building all along.

After a long journey of thought, prayer and searching Scripture, I finally began to understand what that word “revival” might have been calling me toward.

When we speak of revival at St. Theresa Parish and The Hearth, we are not simply talking about bigger crowds, more programs, or creating excitement. Biblical revival is God breathing new life into His people and His people responding by returning to Him with renewed faith, prayer, repentance, worship, fellowship, and mission. The Psalmist cries, “Will you not revive us again, so that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6), while God promises, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezekiel 36:26). Through the prophet Joel, God calls His people, “Return to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12), and promises, “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh” (Joel 2:28). We see this fulfilled at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit transforms a frightened group of disciples into a living Church devoted to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

This is the revival we pray for at St. Theresa: not something we manufacture, but something we open ourselves to receive; a renewal in which Christ draws us more deeply into the Eucharist, Scripture, prayer and one another, heals what has grown weary, awakens what has become dormant, and sends us outward to love and serve our community. The Hearth exists to help create a place where we can respond together to that invitation: “Come, let us return to the Lord” (Hosea 6:1).

So, What Is The Hearth?

After all of that, perhaps the simplest way to explain The Hearth is this:

The Hearth is a welcoming gathering place at St. Theresa Parish where people can come together for revival, friendship, fellowship, prayer and faith formation. It is a place to belong, to grow in Christ, to discover and share our gifts, and to find ways to serve others.

The coffee bar, comfortable furniture, sound system and renovations simply help create the space. People are the real heart of The Hearth.

Some will come for coffee and conversation. Some will come for a course, a prayer group or a community event. Some may come because they are looking for friendship or a deeper relationship with God. Others may walk through the doors with an idea for a ministry that none of us has even thought of yet.

That is exactly what we hope will happen.

The Hearth is a place to gather, a community in which to grow, and a faith to live and share.