A Psychologist's Case for Parish Renewal

Undertaking culture change in a parish, or any community, is difficult. For this reason, I want to introduce another organization which was foundational to my parish's growth and change at Mary Queen of the Apostles, and one that provides a tested formula for building a vibrant community which can undergird a focus on mental well-being.

The organization is Divine Renovation, the parish renewal movement started by Father James Mallon, which grew out of St. Benedict's Parish in Halifax, Nova Scotia. DR, as it is known, is now coaching priests and parishes in over 40 countries. Its core purpose for parishes is captured in its promise: bringing churches from maintenance to mission. It is that mission focus which creates the conditions needed for the work of building a community which supports and heals.

A Survival Mindset

Most parishes, if they are honest, have drifted into a posture of caring primarily for their existing members, maintaining buildings, and managing the weekly rhythm. Divine Renovation does not dismiss that work; our parishes cannot survive if roofs are leaking and there is no liturgical schedule. But it names something important about the arc of European and much of North American Catholicism: a tradition that once was carried by the social norms of the post-war era found itself suddenly countercultural in ways it was not always well-equipped to navigate.

For many Catholics who came of age in the 1970s and beyond, they were quietly questioning the Church or exploring values the Church did not affirm. When concerns were spoken, the response encountered was often more marked by judgment than by accompaniment. People left, budgets became tighter, and a sense of focus on financial and theological survival emerged. The maintenance parish is, in part, the community that remained after those departures, and it carries a mindset of survival even when it does not speak of it.

Diagnosing the Problem

Divine Renovation's description of the maintenance parish is, at an institutional level, a parallel to the individual who has become stuck in their life. Stuckness is often related to survival: an imperfect but effective enough way of being in the world which allows a person to function. But functional is not fulfilling. And more specifically it is often a lifestyle and set of beliefs and habits which have organized themselves around a pattern of avoiding some particular discomfort.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy names this as experiential avoidance. It is the avoidance of the important but sometimes uncomfortable internal mechanisms through which we are supposed to understand our world and experiences: memories, thoughts, feelings, and sensations which arise in us. The high-functioning executive manages evening stress through binge eating. The successful runner chooses marathons over past binge drinking to outrun the memories of a painful childhood. The loving mother keeps running lists and a constant internal narrative of "be perfect" to ensure her children never fall behind or get hurt (and therefore avoids her own anxieties). It is the understandable stance of a person doing the best they can with what they have been given. But substantial change, real transformation, involves a willingness to embrace discomfort, or even suffering. And here we come to our maintenance parishes.

At the organizational and community level, Chris Argyris's concept of organizational defensive routines offers an imperfect but useful parallel. Argyris observed that organizations systematically avoid examining the assumptions and anxieties underlying their behavior, and that this avoidance becomes encoded in norms, structures, and communication patterns that feel entirely normal to insiders. People become very good at avoiding the conversations that would actually produce change. That is experiential avoidance with a bureaucratic architecture built around it.

In this way, a parish in maintenance mode is organized, often unconsciously, around most efficiently managing survival rather than pursuing mission. It avoids the awkwardness of evangelization, the vulnerability of inviting people into genuine encounter, the disruption of real leadership. It feels like stability, but it is actually a slow contraction which has played out across decades, and one that makes little space for those who arrive with questions, wounds, or needs which differ from the current parishioner base. Conversely, the parish built upon challenging itself and with skill to navigate discomfort is primed for the work.

A Choice to Be Uncomfortable

Divine Renovation is not compromising in its theology. It is, in fact, challenging and as true to Christ as any movement could hope to be. It offers parishes a reorientation around three keys: a radical reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit; a central, primary commitment to evangelization; and a focus on healthy, spirit-led, effective leadership. With those three things operating together, parishes do not just sustain themselves. They come alive and can receive people where they are.

This reorientation begins with a question about identity and values: what is this parish for? That question, held honestly and prayerfully, is what Fr. Mallon means by the primacy of evangelization, and it is a values clarification exercise in the fullest sense. ACT calls the behavioral response to that clarification committed action, and all choices are judged on whether they move a person (or a parish) in the direction they want to go or away from their values and goals. The calculus is not based on how the choice feels or a belief about whether it will certainly be successful. It is an act of the will, and a choice made based upon values and commitment.

This is important to note, and deeply in line with our Catholic faith, which encourages discernment and decisions which are not swayed by wanting to backtrack to the comfortable. Change that is not anchored in a deeply held sense of purpose does not last. Programs without mission drift. Resolutions without values collapse. What sustains transformation, in an individual and in a community, is an ongoing and conscious return to what actually matters, in spite of difficulty and discomfort.

Where Leadership Comes In

Divine Renovation's third key is framed as promoting the best of leadership. It is tempting to hear this as a call for more competent management, but that is not what is meant. The leadership Divine Renovation points to is formational. It is about developing people, creating structures that distribute responsibility rather than concentrate it, and building a culture in which the laity are genuinely equipped and trusted to carry the mission. It respects the pastor as spiritual father and leader with primary authority in the parish, while asking pastors to be solicitous fathers who seek counsel from and empower their spiritual children. It is not the halmark of most current parish structures.

In ACT terms, this is the work of defusion at the community level: loosening the grip of unhelpful narratives, the ones that say this is just how things are done here, or we tried that before, or that is not in line with Church teaching. Those narratives are not always facts. They are stories that can be observed, examined, discussed, and set aside when they no longer serve the mission.

This is an incredibly nuanced conversation in Catholicism, and one that ACT is not fully equipped to resolve, since the framework deliberately avoids naming much as absolute truth versus constructed belief. It matters that we do not treat preferences as absolutes. On one side we have teaching about Apostolic succession, Transubstantiation, and the Immaculate Conception. On the other we have practices related to who gets a meeting with Father, what makes a good bulletin, and the best use of the parish hall on Saturday nights. A leadership team that can step back and look honestly at what their parish is doing and why, without becoming defensive or reactive, is practicing something very close to what ACT teaches individuals in a therapy room.

The Holy Spirit

The key that is easiest to underestimate from the outside is Divine Renovation's first: radical reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit. There is no psychological parallel I can offer for this, and I would offer that it is also the most ignored in parish life.

What I can't support empirically I can offer as testimony. ACT, as a framework, does not ask us to ignore or minimize difficulty. It asks us to stop organizing our lives around the avoidance of it. In that sense it is a model unusually well-suited to the reality of undertaking something genuinely hard, because it does not promise that the discomfort will go away. It asks instead for a quality of willingness, a turning toward difficulty in the service of what matters, that makes sustained effort possible even when the outcome is uncertain.

But willingness, in the psychological sense, only goes so far. When our pastor chose to begin the DR coaching process and form a senior leadership team to guide the work, he notes he prayed continually for the grace of the Holy Spirit. As the difficult decisions accumulated, and then the pandemic arrived, we often found ourselves taking one next step while feeling as though we were hanging on by a thread. What carried us through was not a technique or a framework. It was, in the testimony of those who lived it, something received rather than generated within.

ACT can describe the posture that makes a person or a community available to that kind of grace. It cannot produce the grace itself. Divine Renovation, to its considerable credit, does not pretend that hard work alone will change a parish.

Why This Matters for Mental Health Ministry

I am writing this series because I believe the mental health of a parish community is not primarily a clinical problem. It is a cultural one. You cannot program your way to a community where people feel genuinely safe, known, and accompanied in their suffering. You can only build that culture, slowly and intentionally, through the formation of people and the alignment of your community around values that make such accompaniment possible. Divine Renovation offers a proven framework for exactly that kind of parish-level transformation.

What strikes me as a psychologist, having watched it work in my own parish, is how well its three keys account for what we know about how human beings and human communities actually change. A radical reliance on the Holy Spirit cultivates the posture of openness and surrender that makes genuine transformation possible rather than merely intended. The primacy of evangelization anchors every decision in a clear and shared sense of purpose, which is what sustains communities through difficulty rather than collapsing back into old patterns. And the best of leadership develops the relational and formational capacities that allow a culture to take root and grow beyond any single program or personality.

When a community learns to sit with discomfort rather than avoid it, to act from values rather than anxiety, and to remain present to one another's suffering without rushing to fix it, something clinically significant is happening alongside something spiritually significant. These are not separate phenomena. They are, I would argue, the same transformation described in two different languages, one emerging from the Christian tradition and one from decades of psychological research.

Together they make a compelling case that the missionary parish and the mentally healthy parish are not two different destinations. They are the same place.