Confronting The Insidious Danger of Mission Drift

By George Hull

Editor, Pastoral Report - The Newsletter of the College of Pastoral Supervision & Psychotherapy

Every organization begins with a sense of purpose, a mission that coheres the community, clarifies why it exists, and articulates the principles that guide its life. A mission is more than a slogan on a website, a line in a charter, or a statement in a document of incorporation; it is the moral and organizational compass that guides decisions, establishes priorities, and holds the community accountable. At its best, a mission inspires meaningful action, cultivates shared responsibility, and provides a framework for growth, discernment, and ethical decision-making.

Yet even the most carefully conceived mission is fragile. Mission drift does not announce itself with flourish or fanfare. It creeps in quietly, like morning fog across familiar landscapes, altering contours, making strange that which was once, at a glance, familiar. By the time members notice, the organization may look and act quite differently from what its founders envisioned.

At its core, mission drift is the widening gap between what an organization claims to do and what it actually does. As scholars Ben Suykens, Johan Hvenmark, and ChiaKo Hung observe, mission drift is “the discrepancy between organizational actions and goals.” When drift occurs, institutions no longer walk their talk; their policies, priorities, and everyday decisions begin to diverge from the foundational mission that once guided them.

There is no single cause of mission drift. Rather, it emerges from a constellation of pressures, leadership decisions, and organizational dynamics.

Paradoxically, drift often comes from success. Growth invites complexity; complexity generates structure; and structure, over time, swells into bureaucracy. What begins as a necessary system to support expansion can, over time, become a self-protecting mechanism, prioritizing the maintenance of the structure over the pursuit of the original mission. Collaboration, creativity, and shared responsibility can slowly give way to the instinct to preserve control.

Another common source of drift is competitive mimicry, the tendency to imitate organizations perceived as more successful or legitimate. Organizations may borrow language and protocols to appear equally credible or to reduce anxiety about their own position in a particular specialized field. This mirrors a psychological pattern seen in adolescence: looking sideways at peers for validation rather than inward at one’s own identity. No organization will find itself exempt from such unconscious dynamics.

Mission drift is not simply a strategic or administrative misstep; it is relational and an ethical rupture. When an organization begins to operate in ways that are disconnected from its founding principles, trust erodes. Members at large sense the discrepancy even if it is not formally acknowledged. Values such as accountability, creativity, relational integrity, and moral clarity, the very things that give life and meaning to an organization, begin to unravel its very life.

For communities like CPSP, mission drift carries additional weight. CPSP was not founded to be a credentialing gatekeeper, a hierarchical authority, or a professional competitor. It was founded as a covenant community, a fellowship of spiritual pilgrims and professional peers, committed to mutual responsibility, theological reflection, and relational accountability. The organization’s life depends on active, careful, and ongoing engagement with its covenant values, enacted and lived out in chapter-life where authority is relational, not hierarchical. Chapters are not subsidiaries of CPSP; they are the beating heart of our covenant community, where real authority and accountability are enacted.

CPSP’s values are profound and exacting: the recovery of soul, the primacy of relationships, personal authority, creativity, grace, and the refusal to become invasive, aggressive, or predatory.  CPSP commits to traveling light, to own no property, to accumulate no wealth, and to create no bureaucracy. Members are called to safeguard the organization itself from becoming idolatrous. These values are countercultural. Without vigilance, drift can turn covenant accountability into policy, relationship into procedure, and grace into governance.

Mission drift is not inevitable. It occurs only when a community ceases to know itself. Mission fidelity is cultivated through continual self-reflection, communal integrity, and the courage to act in alignment with the covenant. When drift is confronted, it is not failure; it is an invitation to continue the journey of “Recovery of Soul.”

CPSP’s founding vision remains vital: a peer-led, relationally accountable community rooted in theological reflection, depth, honesty, and mutual care. To live that vision today requires the same qualities demanded of our trainees: attentiveness, courage, humility, and the willingness to be shaped by one another.

If CPSP holds these commitments with clarity and faithfulness, its mission does not merely survive; it deepens. And in that deepening, the covenant community entrusted with its care is renewed, strengthened, and affirmed.