Deepening our thirst for God through
encounter and community.
Let’s face the reality: the health of the Church is struggling. The church needs renewal and rejuvenation from grassroots movements that are filled with fresh energy. Grounded Catholic is an organization that has ideas, spiritual gifting, and both skills and experience to begin fresh fires in the Church. We are an organization where creative lay people can bring their ideas and dreams to reality by providing unique opportunities of encounter and community for the church. If you’d like to get a taste of some of those unique opportunities, go to our events page.
We don’t have a niche market (although we ourselves are parents in the heart of parenting young ones). We are not a niche ministry (like helping people pray the rosary, serving the poor, etc). We are simply striving to make the world better by giving people around us opportunities to encounter God and build community. This is what drives us.
Our Leadership
Carrie Pirotte is a people magnet. She has a charismatic personality, She dreams big, and she’s all action. Carrie has a rare intuition in the ministry world in that she innately knows what people need and what people are drawn to, and she is capable of building ministries that produce effective outreach. Carrie has worked in a number of different settings within the church and secular fields, but her crowning achievement came through her leadership as the founder and first director of a young adult Catholic apostolate called City on A Hill. Having begun with just a handful of committed Catholics in a living room with a white board, today it serves thousands of young adults every year primarily through large group formation events, mens and women’s small groups, social events, and sports leagues. City on a Hill has grown to be one of the largest Catholic young adult groups in the country. Carrie currently serves on the COAH board. She also helped develop the Meyer Catholic Quarter, an offshoot from City on a Hill. The Meyer Catholic Quarter is a neighborhood in Brookside where young adult Catholics intentionally moved within close proximity of each other and began living out a lay community life of sorts. It was immensely important in the early developmental years of forming City on a Hill. The most difficult thing Carrie has ever done (other than being married to Chad), is homeschooling her 5 kiddos. Carrie is an accomplished cook, a gardener, a laundry folding machine, a lover of dogs and hamsters, a chicken farmer, an interior decorator, and on top of all of this, she has accomplished two sprint triathlons (with many more to come).
Chad Pirotte likes to think of himself as a philosopher and a visionary. He is more accurately a tactician, constantly processing how to do things better than they are being done and actually testing through action. His main gift is recognizing what needs to change and then being the guy in the room that actually says, bluntly sometimes, that things need to change. In that sense, he carries a prophetic voice. Chad is a very authentic public speaker and teacher. His faith story has been an interesting one. He was an Evangelical pastor for 10 years in Chicago, then converted to Catholicism after processing life and faith in the aftermath of his first wife’s death. He then worked for an organization called School of Faith, where he wore a number of hats and gained valuable experience in many fields. He was a faculty formation instructor for 100s of teachers in the KC Diocese. He worked with Kansas University students, built a network of small groups at a couple of parishes, ran church retreats and seminars, and led a pilgrimage on the Camino De Santiago. After that 5 year stint ended abruptly at the wake of COVID, He became a full-time window and door carpenter for Pirotte Restoration. In the free time he has, he smokes Peterson pipes, reads and writes, and fixes stuff. He has a Masters in Divinity from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and an undergraduate in History from Kansas State University.
Over their 8 year marriage, Chad and Carrie have had a hard time getting in sync when it came to doing ministry together. In the early years, Carrie was taking care of babies and Chad was working in the evenings seemingly everywhere but in his neighborhood. They’ve finally hit a period in their life when they can put their energy TOGETHER to change the environment around them with a unified vision. We really believe that one of the reasons God brought us together is for this moment. We want to see a renewal in the Church. That only starts when people encounter the living God in ways that will take them deeper. Grounded Catholic is an outlet for this desire.