By Steve Matthews, Senior Missional Consultant, FaithX
I confess I am out of the loop with modern day outer space sci-fi, but I did enjoy watching the original Star Wars trilogy and the Star Trek movies. Those vast dark spaces of the galaxy were a dark and kinda scary mystery to me (I just like looking at the stars in wonder without thinking about nefarious people/creatures living out yonder trying to control the universe). But my reaction to the dark recesses of the universe was tempered by the presence of these gigantic floating spaceships in these movies which served as outposts of safety, support, and wisdom. These floating cities were available for people to seek refuge and obtain support and direction.
When I think about my long tenure of work with local churches, I am reminded that our faith communities need the kind of support, encouragement, safety, and wisdom that a strong mothership can provide. We don’t call our institutional support ships fun names like the “Enterprise” or “Home One” or “Jupiter Two”. Our names for our support networks are real yawners (diocese, synod, conference, presbytery), AND they are none-the-less important!
At FaithX we refer to these outposts of support as judicatories, and we feel strongly that these motherships need to be about the work of casting compelling visions, offering faithful support, nurturing trustworthy connections, modeling creative expression, and discerning wise action to empower and support churches for the adventurous work to which God’s love compels them. This does not happen without intention and wise leadership.
We have seen churches who don’t trust their judicatories. We have worked with well-resourced faith communities who have more financial resources than their local hubs of support, and they can’t see why they would need to collaborate with others. We have also seen mother-ships whose main objective was to maintain the status quo, so innovation at the local church level was not supported (and sometimes viewed askance).
Let’s face it. We don’t have to go the dark nether regions of the universe to encounter dark forces and injustice. We live on a planet in desperate need of organizations/judicatories which offer faithful, innovative, and supportive witness to the churches under their wings.
We need healthy, strong, confident judicatories for the challenges and opportunities ahead. This is why FaithX developed the Judicatory Vitality Assessment (the JVA). We yearn to see churches and their mother-ships working together for the common good. In 2025 we don’t need loose connections. We need interdependence that nurtures possibility for the good of the whole. That’s why this month we have been introducing our partners to the Judicatory Vitality Assessment. The JVA will help your judicatory:
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- Diagnose its Vitality and Sustainability
- Identify its internal/organizational strengths and weaknesses
- Identify its strengths and weaknesses in the way it relates to its congregations.
- Develop and prioritize strategies to improve vitality and sustainability by leveraging strengths to engage opportunities.
If you would like to learn more about the JVA, click here or email us at info@faithx.net. We need each other, and we can accomplish far more when we work together within healthy institutions than we ever could alone. In the words of Jean-Luc Picard, “Things are only impossible until they’re not.”
