Programming the Parishes, Part 2

The second parish programming model in our diocese is Divine Renovation:  Bringing Your Parish from Maintenance to Mission.  

The movement was founded by Canadian priest Fr. James Mallon & inspired in part by Amazing Parish (Fr. Mallon was a guest speaker at an Amazing Parish conference early on). This model also aims to transform parish culture, which is defined by Fr. Mallon as “the things we presume, the things we celebrate, the things we tolerate, that we reward.”  Fr. Mallon published a book and held his first program conference in August of 2014.

Mallon argues in his book that parishes need to be outwardly mission-focused above all else, that they are not there “to celebrate good liturgy and to keep people happy,” that mission work constitutes their whole purpose, identity, and goal.

Like Amazing Parish, this is accomplished by building a small team of parish leaders and training them to run the parish alongside their “missionary pastor.” Fr. Mallon favors the use of Alpha, an adaptation of a non-Catholic formation & charismatic prayer program with the goal of increasing participation in evangelization.

You can read about Divine Renovation on its official site here. The program is currently in use in the Archdiocese of Chicago as part of the Renew My Church plan.

Vision & Leadership Groups

According to Fr. Mallon, the plan requires a small group of leaders who collectively “share a vision,” and direct all those not in the group toward said vision.   He largely follows Lencioni’s team model here.

Fr. Mallon speaks about relying on character-based servant leadership rather than positional authority, but also thinks that no disagreement can be allowed in the core group about its vision. The enforcement of this, one assumes, must fall back on some use of positional authority in the end. After all, somebody has to be the one to decide who gets to be in the leadership group and whether that person shares the vision adequately.

Mallon states:

“A leadership team is four or five people . . . . there has to be total commitment to the vision, you gotta be committed,  in total agreement about where you’re going, where you’re headed.   That includes fidelity to the teachings of the Church and all this, but even within the parish, our vision, the thing that makes us passionate, you’ve gotta have people of the same passion.  And you can’t tolerate disagreement on that….”  

Fr. Mallon says it’s okay to talk things out, and wants people to be unafraid to do so, but discussion isn’t about the vision, only the best means by which to reach it.   Leaders are those who follow the vision and the plan.

“The Kingdom of God is Like Unto a Photocopier...”

The second thing to know about the Divine Renovation model is that Fr. Mallon’s vision for parish health & vibrancy is “the photocopier model of Church.” Hence the focus on becoming outwardly mission-oriented:

“The Church is like a photocopier.   A photocopier brings paper in, processes it, and spits it out to make a difference in the world.  ‘Bringing in’ is evangelizing. ‘Processing’ is discipling [sic]. And printing and stapling and sending the paper out is sending the people out on mission.  When you see parishes that are actually doing this, you say, ‘Okay, what do they have in common?’ What’s important to these parishes? Not just what they say is important, what do their actions–what do they do, how they spend their money–show what they value?”

In his book, Fr. Mallon considers those not involved in this type of work to have failed in the spiritual maturity to which Scripture calls them:

“It would not be “cute” for a parent to come home and find their 25-year old son, in his mind sitting on the couch sucking on his thumb. Why, then do we have such tolerance for lifelong parishioners who are stuck in such a place spiritually?”

So, it would seem that parishioners who don’t participate in the new initiatives can be added to the list of things that are not to be “tolerated” in this model.

Just like in Amazing Parish, one of the ways to keep the photocopier going is to change up the environment of Mass and other liturgies. 

Fr. Mallon advocates for funding and providing a heavily-curated weekend experience for the Mass-goer, even if this requires parish monies to be siphoned away from other things, such as children’s’ catechesis.  He voiced his own regrets about not disposing of his parish DRE earlier so that the money spent on the kiddies’ CCD could be put into creating more exciting liturgies with bands and contemporary music. If there is a market for traditional liturgy, that can be offered as well, to cater to all tastes.  His own parish (St. Benedict’s, Nova Scotia) hired a lay person in the position of “homily support” so that homilies could be pre-fabricated to be more dynamic and ‘relevant’ than what Father himself might be able to come up with on a given Sunday.

Mission Activity and Sacraments:   What Runs the Copier?

The aim of the plan overall seems to be a form of religious productivity. Sacramental encounters with God appear to be valuable insofar as they become a means to the religious productivity.   This is why, historically, we’re more likely to find this photocopier model, with its emphasis on active recruiting methods, in Protestant churches than in Catholic parishes. Again, it’s a megachurch strategy, with roots in the Protestant “Missio Dei” theology from the 1950s and the evangelical Missional Church Movement that sprung up later.

The emphasis on the primacy of recruitment activity also leads Fr. Mallon to make some interesting comments on the sacraments themselves:    

“What is a valid sacrament if there is no fruitfulness?  These are theological categories, these are ontological, you know, medieval, scholastic categories of thought that really are abstractions.  Like, in the end, if a sacrament isn’t changing your life–this is almost heretical–who cares if it’s valid?   It makes no difference.” 

Fr. James Mallon

We are certain Fr. Mallon has his own reverence for the sacraments, but this statement seems to place the value of a sacrament on whether your life is changed in the ways he (or the Missional Church philosophy) considers important.

Are sacraments valid or relevant only when your parish is increasing, either in numbers or in whatever metric of “vitality” a program model might supply? While we concur that evangelization is key to the Christian mission, and that all must follow Our Lord’s mandate to share the Gospel, it is not clear that this is a numbers game, much less a mechanistic process like a copier spitting out pages, nor that the spiritual maturity, moral goodness, or tolerability of one’s parishioners ought to be gauged in their rate of participation in one’s programs and initiatives.

At any rate, the model has been implemented in our diocese at The Church of the Blessed Sacrament Parish in West Lafayette.  There, parish changes included the installation of new technology, including large video screens to enhance the Sunday liturgy experience.   (Fr. Mallon’s original parish in Nova Scotia also boasts such a technology array in the sanctuary.)

So again, this raises some questions that we hope our diocesan leaders will answer:

1. If such programming models are built into UiH in some way, that means the laity are in some sense about to become the subjects of a rather large social experiment, aimed at replacing their current spiritual culture with a new one which is about 6 years old, has non-Catholic roots, and is sold on the internet.  Is this the case?  

2.  Are we going to be asked to adapt the parish architecture in our church sanctuaries to reflect the ideology of these models?   To expend great sums of money on things like projection screens?   To eliminate staff positions or education funding or parish customs, the better to finance or concentrate on such undertakings?     

3.  Finally, and most importantly:  Do we really, really believe that our Church, the Bride of Jesus Christ, cannot fulfill her mission without our being brought under the ethos of the commercial parish program model?   

Though our diocese has not directly said that the Uniting in Heart 2030 Pastoral Plan has consulted, been influenced by, or intends to include models like Amazing Parish or Divine Renovation, the similarity in language and concept is noteworthy, as is the manifest interest in these models by our diocesan decision-makers. It will be interesting to see if there is an attempt to replicate something close to these models across the diocese.   

All quotations from Fr. Mallon were taken from his 5-part interview series unless otherwise specified. You can view the series at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQjXZBNQbWBzH7EScMDwaMA