By Ken Howard
Founder and President
From time to time, someone will ask me, “Why do you do this work?”
And my response is almost always, “It’s a long story…”
Because any explanation of why I do this work would have to include my origin story.
So the question might be better phrased as, “How did a nice Jewish boy end up starting a company that focused on congregational vitality…for churches?”
Well, in a few words, I lost a bet.
Back in my early twenties, I had a roommate: a drug freak who became a Jesus freak. And as Jesus freaks did in those days, he pestered me about this Jesus fellow, who my roommate said was the Messiah. Finally, at my wits’ end, I asked him this question: “If I can prove to you from the Scriptures that Jesus is not the Messiah, will you please, please leave me alone?”
He said, “Yes,” and I spent the next year trying to convince my roommate that Jesus was not the Messiah, and instead of convincing him, I wound up convincing myself.
The point of this origin story is not “never make a bet about God,” but rather to say that I am not in this work for the institutional Church; rather, I am in this work for the sake of Jesus and what MLK called the “Beloved Community” – that Jesus came to make possible.
Being once an outsider to the faith that adopted me gives me a unique perspective. I approach my work with one foot in the church and one foot out (and always remembering what it was like to be outside). I am not about preserving the institutional Church, but about creating vibrant communities of faith and making existing faith communities more vital.
I learned how to do this the hard way: starting new churches. In the crucible of church planting, I learned how to help congregations become vital and sustainable. I did a lot of research and applied the results in multiple mini-experiments with my congregation and others. Everything I learned about vitality in my 25+ years of church planting boiled down to three things. To be vital, a congregation must be willing to:
- Learn about its strengths and weaknesses, and look into its blind spots.
- Learn about the challenges and opportunities in the community it serves.
- Learn to love the community it serves enough to become what it needs.
Part of the reason I am doing this work is that the tools that existed in my days as a church planter were, as the phrase goes, necessary but not sufficient. To enable the kinds of learning I describe above, leaders of congregations need tools and practices that facilitate organizational behavior change. Providing data alone won’t cut it. Data alone doesn’t change hearts and minds, nor does it motivate people to imagine a different way of being in relation to the neighborhoods around them, unless the data carries meaning. And it won’t carry meaning unless it tells a story.
In a nutshell, for congregations to be motivated to change their behavior toward their community, they have to form a deep understanding of their own story and the community’s story, and then discern how their story fits within the larger story of the community. This is why all of our tools and processes are interactive: they facilitate exploration, ownership, and trust in the results, and increase the likelihood that they might become aware of their blind spots.
In my work with our clients, that last thing is what I live for. I sometimes call it the “holy crap” moment: the moment they begin to see the hand of God at work in the world around their congregation and envision their place in that work in new and exciting ways.
There’s more to the story than that. But that’s a story for another day.
