By Jacob Sierra, Senior Program Director, Digital Resources
Episcopal Church Foundation

Last month, 15 congregations of the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas gathered in Little Rock to launch their Pivot journey. Pivot is a program by the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) created to equip small congregations to respond creatively to challenges and opportunities in a changing world. By focusing on mission clarity, sustainable leadership, and community engagement, Pivot empowers churches to explore new ways of thriving in today’s ministry landscape.

The Pivot program does this primarily through an online curriculum and cohort-based mutual learning (where congregations learn from each other). The course takes Pivot teams through three courses: Know Your Faith Community, Know Your Neighbors, and Know Your Mission. Our ultimate goal for each Pivot team is that they end up with a revitalized mission that is aligned around a pursuit to meet the specific needs of their surrounding neighborhood. But before we get there, we have to lay the groundwork.

This is why we begin the Pivot journey with the Know Your Faith Community lesson. As each team begins its Pivot journey, it must understand its own faith community, and identify where its strengths and areas of opportunity are. If our ultimate goal is mission revitalization, then this work is foundational. And this work must be rooted in data. This is why we build the Know Your Faith Community lesson around the Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA).

The CVA was developed by The FaithX Project in partnership with ECF. It is a comprehensive survey tool designed to give congregations a thorough diagnosis of their overall health (vitality) and sustainability across 13 key categories, including worship, outreach, leadership & organization, and internal sustainability (among other categories). For each category, the CVA not only provides a numerical score but also offers a detailed explanation of what that score reflects. This helps congregational leaders understand the factors contributing to their current situation. In addition, the assessment provides recommendations for improvement, giving the congregation actionable steps they can take.

After our Pivot teams receive their CVA scores, they are encouraged to meet and discuss their reactions to the results. This process is crucial for identifying their faith community’s strengths and where growth opportunities exist. These reflections are an essential step before moving on to the next lesson: Know Your Neighbors. We believe that effectively answering the question, “How can our congregation best meet the needs of our neighborhood?” requires asking, “What are our congregation’s strengths, and how can we build on them?” While the CVA provides an objective diagnosis of a congregation’s vitality, reflecting on these findings equips teams with a holistic understanding of what their community has to offer. This allows them to enter the next phase of their Pivot journey with clarity and confidence, ready to explore how their unique strengths can serve their broader mission.

Soon, our Pivot teams will begin reflecting on their CVA scores. I’m excited to be joined by Mary Frances, Executive Director andSenior Associate Consultant at FaithX, who will guide us through this process. With her expertise, our teams will better understand their scores and develop a contextual framework for their Pivot journeys. ECF is deeply grateful to FaithX for their partnership and support, helping us transform these insights into actionable steps toward a more vital and mission-focused future.

Want to learn more about Pivot? Reach out to pivot@ecf.org. ECF is not actively recruiting congregations for new cohorts at this time, but we’d like to be in touch!

The Congregational Vitality Assessment is one of several data-grounded discernment tools available through FaithX.

For more information about these tools, click on one of the links below:

• Congregational Vitality Assessment – The tool described above.
• CVA Judicatory Platform – Dioceses, synods, and other judicatories can use this online tool to administer the CVA to their congregations and track results over time.
• Judicatory Vitality Assessment – Synods, dioceses, and other judicatories can use this tool to diagnose the vitality of their organization and its relationships with their congregation.
• MapDash for Faith Communities – Judicatories and their congregations can use to this online, interactive map-based demographic and analytic tool to explore the communities they serve at the neighborhood level.
• Neighborhood Insights Report – Congregations can use this interactive infographic tool that provides congregations with a 40-datapoint snapshot of their neighborhoods.