The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Recommended Reading: Mobilizing Buildings by Greg Syler

Editor’s Note: When I read this article by Greg Syler in Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices, I found it so thoughtful that I wanted to share a link to it with our our readers. 

In it Greg wrestles with the question of how to change how we think about and utilize our buildings so that we can become better able to shift their use when the demographics of neighborhoods around them shift. The core of his article is two provocative questions: How do we mobilize all of our building assets for their best use? And if we find that their best use is to sell them and plow the proceeds into ministry, are we willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of God’s mission in our neighborhoods?

Click here to read the article on ECFVP

Click here for more information on Greg Syler

Support FaithX

FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is done under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

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FaithX Goes To Birmingham, Alabama

Next week, FaithX folk will be going to the Genesis conference on New Episcopal Communities. Aspiring church planters from dioceses around the country will be gathering, along with many of their bishops, for three days of information sharing, training, and coaching.

Ken Howard, our executive director and principal consultant, and Steve Matthews, one of FaithX’s two senior associate consultants, will be delivering plenary presentations and offering micro-coaching sessions with interested participants. Steve’s presentation is entitled, “Falling in Love with your Neighborhood” and Ken’s is entitled, “Grounding Discernment in Data: Missional Planning with MapDash for Faith Communities.”

Other topics at the conference will include: Convening and Nurturing Your Core Team, Hosting Transformative Conversations/Networking, What To Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned, Defining and Achieving Sustainability, and more.

FaithX will be offering a new consultative program, Strategic Missional Planning for Genesis Congregations, which has been customized to the needs of those church planters who will be applying for New Episcopal Communities Grants.

For more information on the New Episcopal Communities initiative, click here.

When “Perfection” is the Opposite of “Perfect”

by Ken Howard

A while back I was challenged on my assertions that the goal of Christian community was not to achieve and maintain perfection, and that neither Jesus Christ nor the Apostle Paul ever intended to start a religion called “Christianity.”

So I’d like to comment briefly here on the concepts of “perfection” and “religion.”

If we in the present day are not careful in our use of terms, we run the risk of overlaying the original meanings of the words of Scripture with our own connotations.

For example, we tend to think of perfection in the absolute sense, as in entirely without error, wholly without defect, as something or someone having achieved a state of being which is complete in-and-of itself.  When we hear Jesus say, “You are to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” we view it as reaching a state of perfection exactly like God’s state of perfection. However, the writers of the New Testament used the term in a more nuanced way. Our sense of perfect is close to the Greek “aortist” tense, which connotes an act that is complete and permanent. But in all the places where we are being asked to be “perfect,” the tense is not aortist, as in completed once-and-for-all, but “imperfect,” as in an ongoing process. Paul implies as much when he says “not that I have already become perfect” (Phil. 3:12) and when he says that God “will perfect” a good work in us “until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6).

[Read more…]

Redeeming Columbus? A Reflection on the Occasion of Columbus Day

By Ken Howard

Few figures have fallen further than Christopher Columbus in the estimation of the general public. Once lauded as a courageous explorer and the discoverer of the new world, Columbus is now lambasted as a royal toady, sucking up to Queen Isabella of Spain to garner financial and political support for an ill-planned get-rich scheme, whose avarice and racism ultimately led to the decimation of the indigenous tribal populations and the enslavement of those who survived the slaughter. Even his eponymous federal holiday has suffered from his disgrace: while few are willing to go as far as giving up a day off from work, many have lobbied their respective state legislatures to change the name of the holiday to less onerous appellations, such as “Native American Day” or the somewhat ambiguous “Discovery Day.”  Comedian John Oliver, on his weekly show Last Week Tonight once featured Columbus Day in his occasional segment, “Why is this still a thing?”

However, if we dig underneath the trending opinions of the day, we would discover that real Christopher Columbus was a mixed bag: neither saint nor Satan.  Columbus was a Christian: a closet converso, some say, whose ancestors had converted from Judaism to Christianity to escape the Papal Inquisition of the 13th century, and who was now seeking the favor of Ferdinand and Isabella not long after the two monarchs had kicked off the not-unexpected Spanish Inquisition, which focused its suspicion largely on converted Jews. So at the very least, one might credit him with a certain degree of chutzpah.

Columbus was – as all historical figures are – a product of his age. Particularly, his thinking had fallen victim to the influence of the religious paradigm of his age, the Christendom paradigm, under which Church and Empire merged, and as the Church began to pull the levers of the Empire to achieve its ecclesiastical ends, it became something that the earliest followers of the Way would not have recognized, having transformed itself from an trans-religious movement centered in the love of Christ, to a hierarchical institution, proselytizing new members and enforcing the uniformity of its existing members through the use of power and (implicitly) violence.

[Read more…]

Datastory Releases Greatly Enhanced MapDash 2.2

By Ken Howard

Earlier this month, Datastory released its much anticipated and greatly enhanced MapDash 2.2. 

It is amazing how far we’ve come so fast.

It was only two years ago that Datastory and FaithX teamed up to begin shaping a faith-based version of Datastory’s powerful MapDash demographic/analytic platform. Then in July of last year, after several rounds of rapid prototyping and testing in judicatories in five states, Datastory launched MapDash for Faith Communities, and FaithX launched consultative strategic missional planning programs that leverage its unique capabilities for faith communities and the judicatories that support them.

Even then the capabilities of MapDash went far beyond any demographic tool available at the time, bringing real time interactive experience and powerful analytics available nowhere else. MapDash 2.2, honed by input and feedback from actual users, goes even further, with an updated layout, more than double the data, and comprehensive improvements to tools and widgets. 

One of those tools is the new Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (NMIR), an infographic report designed to give users an interactive snapshot of their neighborhoods. As described in an earlier post, FaithX employs the MapDash NMIR as the core of its Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment, a 3-hour, online consultation designed for congregations seeking to better understand and engage the communities they serve.

Some of the new data features of MapDash 2.2 include:

[Read more…]

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