A Culture of Invitation and Acceptance

Dr. Williams speaking at Divine Renovation USA Conference in Coppell, Texas (2022)

I am going to begin at the end, with what we have built.

Mary Queen of the Apostles in Salem, Massachusetts is a small but spirit-filled parish with about 450 people at Mass on a given weekend, roughly split between English and Spanish language services. We are, slowly and intentionally, becoming a more integrated community, less two congregations sharing a building and more one parish learning to share a life.

In part because we are small, but more because we try, people know one another here. Anonymity is possible, but you would have to arrive late to Mass to avoid the greeters and the Prayer Partners. That is our signature pre-liturgy moment: each person reaches across the pew and introduces themselves to one other person, exchanging prayer intentions to carry into the Mass. It is a small thing. It is also not a small thing.

Some people do disappear into the social hall to avoid it every week, and that is genuinely fine. But every person who comes through our doors has the opportunity to be known and personally prayed for, and I believe that changes something in the fabric of a community. Visitors consistently remark that they feel welcome. People who sit in the same pew week after week (and we all sit in the same pew every week, as you know) begin asking follow-up questions about the intentions they heard the Sunday before. Small moments of mourning and celebration accumulate. And over time, something else happens: it becomes easier to approach the person who looks lost or overwhelmed or out of place, because you have watched everyone around you do exactly that, week after week, and you understand that this is simply what we do here.

From that foundation, the rest follows more naturally. Invitations to programs and gatherings are extended in conversation, not just announced in a bulletin. The young adult looking for community, the family with little ones, the person carrying something they have not yet named, they are noticed and included before they have to ask. Those who are hurting find out what the parish has to offer, and particularly about our healing ministry, because someone thought to mention it.

But this shift wasn’t an overnight phenomenon. It was over a decade of intentional invitational culture and the creation of a pathway for the formation of disciples in our parish. And it all began with Alpha.

The Alpha Course

Among Catholics, Alpha can be a little divisive. It has Anglican origins and does not go deep on catechesis, which for some is a concern. But for us the Anglican roots were not problematic – the program teaches nothing contrary to the Catholic faith. And the depth and focus was ideal. The staff who first proposed running Alpha were hoping to reach people on the fringes of the Church, and Alpha's focus on the essentials of Christian faith (held in an environment where questioning is genuinely welcome) was exactly right for that purpose.

The surprise was that it turned out to be right for nearly everyone. The gap for most people sitting at those tables was not an insufficient understanding of Catholic doctrine. It was a thin or broken experience of being loved by God. Alpha addresses that directly. But it does something else as well. It creates structured conditions in which people practice giving and receiving that love concretely, in real time, with other people.

Each evening begins with a meal. Then there is a video, followed by discussion. Table hosts guide conversation without positioning themselves as experts, and table helpers are more focused on clearing plates and keeping glasses full than on contributing to the theology. When I attended our first Alpha as a guest, I had been back in the Church for about ten months and was not having an easy time of it. The thing that stayed with me was not the video or the discussion. It was that someone was being genuinely kind to me and wanted to make sure I had enough of the really good antipasto.

The Engine of Culture Change

By Alpha's second run, I had been drafted into kitchen service. I cook because it is a task with a beginning, a middle, and an end (welcome clarity after a full day of clinical work). But kitchen duty still offered plenty of contact with people, and what I was learning alongside everyone else was a particular form of Christian hospitality: attentive, unhurried, focused on the person in front of you rather than on what you are going to say next*.

The participants from that first Alpha had, by this point, moved into table roles. They went through training on how to listen and reflect rather than instruct, how to hold a conversation with someone whose beliefs differ from your own, how to respond to the person who has been genuinely wounded by the Church or by someone who claimed to represent Christ and did it badly. These are not skills that come naturally to most people. They require practice, feedback, and the gradual building of a tolerance for sitting with someone else's pain without rushing to fix it.

We have now run 37 sessions, training parishioners in how to accompany one another. These are not catechists, and many of the people who come through Alpha will never enter OCIA. They are Catholics who drifted away and are feeling their way back, or who are tentatively present and not yet sure what they believe. What Alpha formed in them is something more foundational than doctrinal knowledge. It is a set of practiced behaviors oriented toward a clear value: that every person who walks through our doors deserves to be seen and met with care.

That is not a therapeutic claim. But it is recognizably what Acceptance and Commitment Therapy points toward when it talks about values-based action, the idea that meaningful behavior change is not primarily about feeling ready or comfortable, but about choosing, repeatedly and concretely, to act in the direction of what matters. Our parishioners did not wait until they felt confident around human suffering. They were trained, they practiced, and they acted. The training gave them enough to begin; the repeated doing built the rest.

The results are visible in specific moments. Someone knows to get a bottle of water for the person who walks in overheated on a Saturday afternoon, not there for Mass but drawn in by the architecture and the open door. They know how to invite that person to sit down, to take pictures, to share where they have come from. They know how to be present to the person they find standing over the book of prayer intentions, softly weeping. These are not members of our healing team. These are not trained therapists or even ministers in an official capacity. They are ordinary parishioners who were loved well and paid attention to how it was done, and who have been practicing ever since.

This is what culture change actually looks like. It does not begin with a policy or a program designated for the struggling. It begins with forming people, at scale, in the habits of attention and welcome that make it possible to accompany anyone, including and perhaps especially those whose suffering might otherwise make a community look the other way. Next up: A Psychologist's Case for Parish Renewal.

* It needs to be pointed out that I was (and still am) desperately bad at the “unhurried” part. Perhaps later I’ll explore the full healing that I have received from my participation in the community. But it came from being in community with people who held me in my imperfection – perfectionism, overcommitment, control, anger – and stuck with me while I learned to do better, and as I learned what I needed to take to my own counseling and spiritual direction for healing.