In 2004, I was approached by an administrator at John Brown University, a Christian school in Arkansas. He invited me to campus to help create an event to encourage students to practice forgiveness more often, and he was open to using the experience as a research study.

For Christians, forgiveness and love are the two cardinal virtues. Even back then, however, that prescient administrator could see where the country was heading: toward increasing political polarization and more frequent Mental health problems. He wanted to engage the methods of Christian practical theology to heal minds and relationships, and he wanted to start by joining his faith’s conception of forgiveness—prayer, restraint, looking to mature models, seeking God’s help—with the burgeoning science of forgiveness. He reached out to me as both scientist and Christian because I had published and spoken in both secular and religious venues about forgiveness.

We shaped a two-week forgiveness campaign. We worked with staff and students to design many activities that they thought would increase awareness of forgiveness—newspaper articles and ads, debates, chapel speakers, banners adorning a popular walkway, an endorsement from the university president, and more.

During the weeks of the campaign, I also trained about 50 group leaders to run secular and Christian-oriented REACH Forgiveness groups, which are psycho-educational interventions that have been found in over 30 studies worldwide to be able to help people forgive, flourish, enhance their well-being, and reduce depression and anxiety. The acronym REACH stands for five steps:

R = Recall the hurt;
E = Empathize with the offender;
A = Altruistic undeserved gift of forgiveness;
C = Commit to the forgiveness experienced; and
H = Hold on to forgiveness when doubts arise.

The aim: to help participants to make a decision to eschew payback and to treat the offender more humanely. Other activities surround these core steps, such as identifying the most difficult event a participant has successfully forgiven, defining emotional and decisional forgiveness, identifying the benefits of forgiveness to the forgiver, and working through other hurts and offenses to generalize gains.

Some students were randomized to either complete a six-hour REACH Forgiveness group or serve as the control group who were exposed only to the campaign (without the REACH group). Unsurprisingly, we found that the REACH Forgiveness groups—my principal focus at the time—were more effective than the campaign alone.

After we published the results, I was contacted by leaders at Asbury University, a Christian university in Kentucky. They wanted to conduct a similar campaign, and they also wanted to test the effects of writing forgiveness essays against the REACH Forgiveness groups. Again, we found that the groups were more effective than both a writing exercise and the campaign that everyone on campus experienced.

However, I also found that just being exposed to a campus-wide forgiveness campaign had helped the two communities become more forgiving. So, I applied to the Fetzer Institute for a grant to assess forgiveness campaigns at nine Christian universities. I compiled a list of potential forgiveness-promoting activities, and I encouraged each school to select half of their activities from the standard list and use their creativity for the other half.

At the same time, I was working with faith leaders in churches to design campaigns around forgiveness. I consulted with a large church in the Philadelphia area and a medium-sized church in Adelaide, Australia. I directed a campaign at the church that I attend in Richmond, Virginia, giving me a hands-on slant on running deeper dives. Those projects were done simply as service in congregations who were interested in them, and not for publication. By 2018, I did an after-action review of the campaigns at both faith-based universities and congregations. We assessed forgiveness of a target offense, dispositional forgivingness, well-being, hope, and reduced depression and anxiety. 

What emerged from this work are some insights into how to build forgiveness in faith-based communities—and which can be applied to secular ones, as well.

The elements of deep dives

I came to refer to the combination of a public-facing campaign, REACH groups (and later workbooks), and scientific assessment as “deep dives.” At that point, all completed deep dives were in faith-based communities that already valued forgiveness. I had learned things pertinent to those communities that I hoped to use in the future in secular communities.

First, we learned that it was essential to have leadership at the highest level of university president and provost or senior pastor and other assistant pastors engaged in active advocacy and support, not just a token endorsement.

Second, deep dives needed to focus on clear messages. We used three:

• Forgiveness has benefits to the forgiver;
• There are two types of forgiveness that are not always experienced in tandem—a decision to treat the offender more humanely and an emotional change; and
• There are local resources available to help.

Third, in faith-based communities, we had emphasized awareness-raising over actually practicing forgiveness. Awareness-raising is important, but we found that many students and religious attenders did not have skills to forgive, suggesting a fourth element was needed: to help people go beyond awareness-raising and to actively practice forgiveness in various contexts.

We also discovered that church-based campaigns were different from university-based counterparts in age distribution and living environment. Activities had to be tailored to more diverse living situations in congregations than in universities. Also, universities had an educational mindset and on-campus living compared to a community church with a geographically distributed congregation and educationally diverse mindsets. In congregations, people might only come together once a week and perhaps a second time in a small group. With a university, though, interactions were more frequent and more diverse. Sporting events, encounters in dormitories or other living units (like fraternity or sorority houses), classes, and extracurricular activities provided many opportunities to interact in educational and non-educational ways each week.

Secular applications

Another grant from the Templeton World Charity Foundation (TWCF) helped extend this work to secular venues in Indonesia, South Africa, and Colombia. We have (so far) published the results of our effort in Colombia.

There, we conducted a four-week community-wide forgiveness deep-dive involving students, faculty, and staff at the Universidad del Sinú in Monteria, Colombia, a private secular university. We started by assessing 3,000 of 9,000 students at the beginning and end of the deep dive, looking for changes in forgiveness, Mental health, and flourishing. We also evaluated their engagement with, and the effectiveness of, the 16 types of activity, such as getting at least nine out of 10 answers correct on a forgiveness-knowledge test, completing a REACH Forgiveness workbook, attending a forgiveness webinar, watching and discussing forgiveness-themed movies, listening to forgiveness podcasts from world-renowned experts, sitting under a “forgiveness tree” to reflect on forgiving an offender, and writing about one’s experience and posting it at a “forgiveness wall.”

In examining the results, we addressed three main research questions.

The first: “Did the deep dive successfully foster increased forgiveness, Mental health, and flourishing?” It did. In fact, averaged across all of the students, the effects were half as large as participating in an intensive forgiveness intervention. That is astounding for a public health intervention in which, like many public health initiatives, not every student got engaged.

The second research question was, “Did the number of types of activities affect the amount of forgiveness, Mental health, and flourishing that people experienced?” Again, the answer was yes, and we found engagement matters. For three or fewer activities, people experienced essentially no gains. But from four to 16 types of activities, each additional activity they completed yielded more forgiveness and flourishing—and less depression and anxiety.

The third research question was, “Which types of activities were most effective at promoting forgiveness, Mental health, and flourishing, and most popular in attracting users?” We found that if an activity took more than about four hours, students rarely used it—but those who did benefited. If it took less than an hour, many students used it but it had little or no effect. Those that were both often-used and effective took between one and four hours. (So, as you plan your own deep dive, you should opt for interesting activities. Like the baby bear in The Three Bears, they are not too brief, don’t take too long, but are just right!)

Practical lessons

Putting all of our experience together, we have learned several practical lessons. These can help you design an effective and efficient forgiveness deep dive for your organization:

1. Identify a limited community for intervention—ideally one that wants to become more forgiving.

2. Leaders are crucial. Engage lay leaders who can galvanize people to act and have large personal networks. Encourage administrators to actively advocate participation, not merely give token endorsement. Recruit enough leaders that work gets distributed and you don’t end up doing all of it.

3. Establish three types of goals: awareness-raising, education (i.e., how to define forgiveness, know the benefits, and know where to get free interventions), and skill-development in forgiving and maximizing Mental health.

4. Tailor activities to your community. Make sure the activities are ones that your people want to engage in! In addition, include proven effective activities that require people to spend time actively trying to forgive particular hurts. Choose activities that require time, but not too much time; effort, but not too much; variety, but not too much.

5. Seek to convince people that they can forgive more if they work at it. Few activities (up to three) over the course of the deep dive won’t benefit them much; four to 13 have increasingly larger effects.

6. To prevent dropout or missed sessions, use existing groups to which people already have a loyalty and set a time limit for the deep dive at no more than seven weeks for faith communities and one month for universities. For ad hoc forgiveness-related groups, limit time commitments per meeting and number of meetings, and make sure people know they are time-limited.

7. Deep dives for churches should be timed for events like Lent, Advent, or the approach of Yom Kippur. University deep dives should try to avoid midterms or finals.

We all live in many communities. We know too well that in each one, people harbor grudges that can make things unpleasant for others within the community when the grudges leak out. Public health and Mental health campaigns almost never eradicate the target maladies.

But it’s fun to ask ourselves what-if questions. What if one local forgiveness campaign could stop half of the unpleasantness that leaks out this year? What if the person inspired to forgive more were someone holding a grudge against me? What if it affected my romantic partner or children? What if I could become a more forgiving person? What if this became a widely used community intervention? Could this actually make the world a better place?