You have not heard from Ad Alta in a while, and I owe you an honest update about what has changed.

When I started the Weekly, I framed Ad Alta as formation for leaders in transition - individual executives sitting with vocational questions. That was true of me and what I was building at the time. It was true of some of you, and I am grateful the essays found you when they did.

Here is what happened next:

The consulting work I picked up to cover runway turned into a real practice. Catholic foundations, dioceses, parishes, and schools started arriving with real problems. Donor records in one system, Sacramental records in another, and registration in a third. Development offices running on exports. Chanceries where the answer to most questions is that somebody would have to pull it together. Sophisticated missions running on tools nobody chose deliberately.

That gap - between how serious the missions are and how underbuilt the systems underneath them are - turned out to be the work I am actually doing. Not the individual-vocational track I first named.

Interestingly, and perhaps Providentially, the work that started to come my way over the last couple of months is precisely the work my career built up in me, now aimed at serving the Church. I have come to realize that my own climb was called to go in a different direction, drawing on the foundation of the work I had already done.

So Ad Alta is being reshaped to match.

What Ad Alta is now

Advisory and consulting for Catholic institutions - technology, mission, and organizational effectiveness.

Thirty years of media, marketing, and technology consulting work meeting the specific needs of the Church, from someone who is also a permanent deacon. The technology is the visible part. The mission and organizational work is the other half, because a data platform nobody uses is worse than no platform, and a strategy nobody can execute never held.

What is changing

Ad Alta Weekly continues, with a different aperture. Going forward it is observations and ideas on Church, mission, and technology at the institutional level - what I am seeing across the work, what institutions are wrestling with, and how the intersection actually plays out. It's moving to Monday mornings, with a companion post on LinkedIn most Tuesdays.

The Ad Alta Assessment is the new entry engagement. Four weeks, fixed fee, fixed scope. I deliver a written findings document across all three pillars. The fee credits toward whatever engagement comes next. $6,500 for a diocese, foundation, school, or apostolate. $1,500 for a parish.

Where You Stand is a new free diagnostic. Fifteen questions across the three pillars, live on the site, with results in about five minutes.

An Hour with Michael continues. A paid strategic hour for a specific decision or question. $250. Same structure, repositioned.

If you came here for the earlier voice

If you subscribed because the essays on vocation, discernment, career, family, and faith spoke to you, that voice has always lived at DeaconMichael.net. Homilies, Wednesday @ Lunch, and the more integrated pastoral writing are there. If that is what you actually came here for, follow me there - and unsubscribe from Ad Alta with no hard feelings. Both are honest paths. You can go there to subscribe to my Wednesday @ Lunch email.

You do not need to do anything to stay on Ad Alta Weekly. If Church, mission, and technology at the institutional level is interesting to you, stay.

Why I am telling you this

You deserve the truth about what changed. The Weekly went quiet for a stretch because I was writing essays for a positioning that had stopped being honest, and the honest move was to stop and reshape rather than keep publishing under a frame that no longer fit.

The reshaping is done. The Weekly returns Monday, October 5.

Thank you for being part of the chapter that got me here.

In fieri. Ad alta.

Deacon Michael