Fr. Roger Gustafson came to the priesthood the long way round, and by his own account spent almost twenty years avoiding the call. He grew up in a suburban neighborhood of Atlanta and first learned about Jesus in the Lutheran church where his mother taught Sunday School and sang in the choir; a spiritual awakening at twenty-four led him into the Catholic Church in 1989, and the two decades that followed took in work as a healthcare administrator, a Ph.D. in Religion and Social Ethics from the University of Southern California, a law degree from the University of Chicago and seven years practising law. He began to discern again in 2006, studied at St. Patrick's Seminary and was ordained on 7 June 2014 — and his first parish out of seminary was this one, which, he wrote, “feels like home.” He left in 2016 to be pastor of St. Brendan Church & School in San Francisco and came back as St. Hilary's own pastor, installed on 18 October 2020 at a Mass where the Archbishop said from the pulpit, “I know, Father Roger, you're very good at creative strategies.” He has been proving the point since: a Rebuilt partner parish since 2020, small groups, a children's Liturgy of the Word program, global outreach, and the weekend message preached by him week after week, in series rather than one-offs. He names the local difficulty plainly — “the affluence that creates a number of distractions that have Jesus taking the back seat” — and calls showing people the relevance of Jesus an uphill battle; he and Lisa Rosenlund were invited onto the Rebuilt Parish Podcast to explain how weekly giving rose forty per cent, he sat on the parish-leaders panel at the 2025 Rebuilt Conference, and in December 2024 he led the 70th-anniversary Mass inside Old St. Hilary's, the little wooden landmark church on the hill the parish worshipped in for 71 years. He sang in the prestigious Schola Cantorum at seminary and says in print that his favourite memory of the place was a year as its head bartender; he keeps a Swedish proverb for his favourite quote — “If we reject the chaff, we may easily lose the kernel” — and since December 2022 has co-hosted “A Priest, a Minister and a Rabbi Walk Into a Bar” with the Rev. Dr. Bethany Nelson and Cantor Naomi Weiss from a table at the HopMonk Tavern. Advent brings out a particular theme of his: across his pastor’s letters he keeps returning to hygge, the Danish idea of coziness and unhurried warmth, and urges people to bring it home for the season. He traces it to a year he spent as a seminarian at St. Gabriel in the Sunset, where the pastor was always in the sacristy long before Mass, praying and, as he put it, puttering around. “There’s a kind of quiet joy,” Fr. Roger wrote, “to what I now call religious puttering.”