Building vibrant missionary parishes is not a game of connecting the dots.

While priests and lay leaders visualize linear growth and a mass enthusiastic embrace of every new spirituality-building initiative, cultivating a more evangelistic congregational flock requires embracing trial and error.

Divine Renovation Ministry’s Mission is Messy webinar on Feb. 20 spotlighted Catholic parish communities that have determinedly become more vibrant and vital by embarking on a process that offered no clear road map to success and a guarantee of missteps.

Fr. James Mallon, the pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in Dartmouth, N.S., and Fr. James Huang, who shepherds St. Anthony of Padua Parish in Vancouver, were the two Canadian clerics featured on the call. The former founded the Divine Renovation Ministry, which connects with nearly 4,000 priests, 5,000 parishes and over 21,000 lay leaders worldwide.

Mallon also authored the 2014 book Divine Renovation: Bringing Your Parish From Maintenance to Mission.

Fr. Stephen Langridge, the pastor of St. Elizabeth of Portugal in Richmond, England, rounded out the trifecta of panellists.

Huang provided perspective right at the top about how mission is messy by sharing a litany of the failures his parish encountered. These setbacks include struggling to reach young adults, losing staffers and aborting a strategic planning council within two years.

Langridge saluted Huang for “not giving up” as the “temptation can be ‘let's go back to what's safe. Let's go back to what we know. Let's go back to what's linear. Let's go back to that annual cycle of catechism, first communion, confirmation and say goodbye to them.’ ”

Under Huang’s leadership, St. Anthony of Padua now features thriving formation ministries, discipleship resources, parish religious education programs for children and Alpha courses. There are also groups for youth, young professionals, pro-lifers, and community fellowship, in addition to Works of Mercy and St. Anthony Novena ministries.

Huang said the vital transformation he had to make to help effectuate this growth was to permit himself to fail. He said that “the greatest fear of most pastors” is coming across as a failure.

“I didn't realize how afraid I was of failing,” said Huang, ordained in 2006. “And for me, it's very simple: I feared looking stupid in front of our people. For example, you go out there and you say, ‘hey, let's all take this program’ and no one signs up. It's a very painful human experience. You almost feel like you're rejected or you're not good enough.”

The cleric who grew up in Richmond, B.C., said it is essential for members of parish councils and leadership teams to have a safe space to discuss failures and trepidations about various initiatives instead of feeling pressure to remain silent.

Perhaps an even more powerful attitude shift than giving yourself permission to fail is believing that failure is a requisite.

“If you're not failing, you're not going beyond the limits of safety,” said Mallon. "You're not going off the map. Mission means going out in this present world, in this present place, where it's never been done before. It doesn't matter what happened in the past in your parish. You are not following a map as much as you are going to be the map makers. And that means that we're going to make mistakes.”

Mallon’s work with Divine Renovation Ministry has allowed him to travel around the world to impart advice to priests and lay leaders on fostering dynamic parishes. He always stresses that this ministry provides foundational principles and that it is up to pastors to make the adaptations that make sense in their cultural context.

Divine Renovation Ministry’s three keys for parish renewal are for houses of worship to revere the power of the Holy Spirit, embrace the primacy of evangelization, and identify, recruit and nurture the most dynamic parish leaders.

Mallon’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish does indeed accentuate faith formation as it features various small group experiences. There is Alpha, a Symbolon program that systematically teaches the Catholic faith, Monday Night More faith study groups, Jesus and Men for male fellowship and Pray and Play for mothers with young children.

The pastor is also a vibrant media presence as he publishes Coffee with Fr. James Mallon on YouTube weekly. He updates community outreach efforts, discusses parish activities and preaches the Gospel.

To learn more about Divine Renovation, visit https://divinerenovation.org/.