By Ken Howard
We at FaithX, with our partner, Worship Times, have been hard at work for the last several months working on version 3.0 of our ever-popular Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA), scheduled for launch in January 2025.
For those of you who are new to the CVA, the Congregational Vitality Assessment is a 65-question, online diagnostic tool designed to help congregations assess their vitality and sustainability strengths and weaknesses, and learn what they can to improve their vitality and sustainability. The CVA is the only such tool grounded entirely on vitality and sustainability research.
The CVA measures how effectively a congregation is carrying out 11 vital areas of congregational functioning, including:
- Vision, Mission, & Discernment
- Lay Engagement & Empowerment
- Context Awareness & Inclusion
- Change Readiness
- Dealing with Differences/Conflict
- Worship
- Spiritual Life
- Formation, Education, & Training
- Outreach
- Leadership & Organization
- Stewardship
The CVA measures two important aspects of congregational functioning:
- Internal Sustainability: Whether the congregation has sufficient internal resources (people, financial, and other) to survive, thrive, and carry out its mission.
- External Sustainability: Whether the neighborhoods the congregations serve have sufficient resources (people, financial, and other) to sustain a typical congregation.
CVA 3.0 will include several enhancements that are in the works (we listen to our users), including: an improved survey platform, a simplified user interface, graphical reports, analytics, easy accessibility from the FaithX.net website, and more. To allow for a smooth migration to our new platform, we have placed a temporary pause on new CVA registrations until the new version launches.
After more than 4 years of free access to the CVA, FaithX will now be charging a small fee to administer the CVA to your congregation. But at $34.95, we believe this is a great value and will be affordable to almost any congregation.
Two additional vitality and sustainability tools will also launch in January 2025:
- CVA Judicatory Platform 3.0, which dioceses, synods, and other judicatories can use to administer the CVA directly to their congregation and monitor results.
- Judicatory Vitality Assessment 1.0, which judicatories can use to assess their internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as the state of their relationships with the congregations they serve. The JVA is the first and only diagnostic tool of its kind.
Also coming soon is MissionMaps for Faith Communities (successor to MapDash for Faith Communities), an interactive, online tool judicatories can use to help their congregations identify missional opportunities and challenges in the neighborhoods they serve.
More on these 3 essential tools in future blog posts.
