In the midst of our current mental health crisis, the Christian church, its leadership and members should be deeply curious about the renewal of widespread cultural interest in psychedelic healing and the possibility for ministry within it.
While the so‑called “psychedelic renaissance” is new information for many of us, the healing nature of these substances is ancient wisdom for some Indigenous communities in North and South America. Despite strong opposition from colonizing Christianity, these communities have continued to preserve and use healing plants and fungi. For that we should be profoundly grateful and humble.
Hunt Priest
A former priest in The Episcopal Church, I can now see that my work at the intersection of psychedelics and Christian ministry began in the slow, holy work of nearly 30 years of pastoral care. First as a layperson, then as a hospital chaplain and eventually as an ordained leader, I sat with people in living rooms, hospital rooms, parish halls and in my office as we navigated heartbreak and hope together. These encounters, more than any abstract theological argument, convinced me the church must be deeply engaged wherever genuine healing is taking place.
I discerned my call to ordination in the mid‑1990s at The Church of the Holy Comforter, an Atlanta congregation where roughly 80% of parishioners lived with severe and persistent mental illness. That community formed me in ways I am still discovering. Holy Comforter taught me to see Christ’s presence in those whom society often sidelines or fears, and to understand healing not as a quick fix but as a long, often messy journey shared in community.
After seminary, carrying what I had learned there, my years as a parish priest taught me to pay close attention to the places where people suffer and where grace quietly breaks in.
The turn toward psychedelic‑assisted healing is not a departure from that life; it is an extension of it, a response to what I have witnessed over decades of listening to and loving God’s people. Over those years, I watched people carry burdens that would not yield easily to any single tool. I sat with those whose depression would not lift, even after years of therapy and medication, and with families whose loved ones were trapped in cycles of addiction, anxiety and trauma. I accompanied many people toward death, hearing their regrets and their longing for peace and wholeness.
“The turn toward psychedelic‑assisted healing is a response to what I have witnessed over decades of listening to and loving God’s people.”
My sense of call always has emerged from those encounters, from the particular faces and stories that live in my heart.
One of the clearest moments came not long before I left my last parish to start Ligare, the pastoral and spiritual care nonprofit I founded in 2021. A longtime and respected member was dying far too young of an aggressive cancer. By the time the diagnosis was received, the disease already was advanced, and the following months were spent traveling from cancer hospital to cancer hospital seeking a miracle cure.
Our pastoral conversations were filled with fear and anger — real, justified, human reactions to a life cut short. We talked, I listened, we sat in silence. I drew on everything I knew how to do as an experienced priest, yet I still felt there was a depth of existential terror I could not fully reach with the tools I had.
Looking back, I often have wished I could have offered that person a carefully prepared, safely held experience with psilocybin — not as an escape from dying, but as a way to face death with less fear and more spaciousness of spirit.
Studies over the past two decades have suggested that psilocybin, in therapeutic and spiritual care settings, can significantly reduce anxiety and depression in people with life‑threatening illnesses and help them approach death with greater peace. When I read that research and listen to the testimony of patients and clinicians, I cannot help but think of that parishioner and many others like them.
My interest in psychedelics is not theoretical; it is rooted in specific pastoral moments where I yearned for another way to help someone meet their suffering.
This is where my work with Ligare emerges. Ligare is a Christian nonprofit dedicated to supporting spiritual and pastoral care around psychedelic experiences. We exist because I and others have become convinced the church must not sit this moment out. If people are turning to psychedelic‑assisted therapy for healing, then Christians — especially those shaped by pastoral ministry — have a responsibility to bring our best wisdom, caution and compassion into the conversation.
“My interest in psychedelics is not theoretical; it is rooted in specific pastoral moments.”
At its core, my conviction is that Christians should care about psychedelic healing because healing is happening. People who have been stuck in despair, shame and fear are finding new freedom and courage. People facing death are reporting less existential distress and a renewed capacity to love in the time they have left.
For someone shaped by nearly three decades of pastoral care, those are not statistics; they sound like prayers being answered in unexpected ways. The church, which proclaims a God who heals and reconciles, cannot afford to ignore such possibilities.
Christians also should care because our tradition offers deep resources that can frame and guide these powerful experiences. Scripture is full of stories of people encountering God in ways that upend their assumptions and reorient their lives — Moses before the burning bush, Elijah hearing the still small voice, Paul on the road to Damascus. Over centuries, Christians have developed spiritual practices — prayer, discernment, confession, spiritual direction, communal worship — that help people integrate intense experiences into a life of love and service.
In a culture where psychedelics are sometimes approached as quick spiritual “hacks” or consumer products, the church can offer a slower, wiser, more humane way to understand and live out what people experience.
My pastoral background makes me especially attentive to community. No one heals alone. The most enduring transformations I have seen in parish life did not come from one‑time events but from people showing up, week after week, in a community where they were known and loved. Psychedelic experiences, even when deeply meaningful, still need that same container of community, accountability and care. The church can be such a container when it is at its best — honest about suffering, grounded in grace, committed to walking with people over time.
In all this, I do not imagine psychedelics as a magic key. Decades of pastoral care have made me suspicious of any single solution, even when it comes in religious packaging. Healing is usually slow, cyclical and relational.
What excites me about psychedelic‑assisted healing is not that it replaces the church’s ministry, but that it could become one more doorway through which people encounter the possibility of wholeness.
Hunt Priest founded Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society in 2021, five years after his participation in the Johns Hopkins/NYU Psilocybin Study with Religious Professionals. Until he gave up his ordination in 2025 in order to continue his work with psychedelic healing, he served Episcopal Church congregations in Austin, Atlanta, Seattle and Savannah, Ga., where he currently lives.
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