The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

A Year of Lent

Year of Lent

This post on a Year of Lent is written by Steve Matthews, Senior Consultant for the FaithX Project.

This time last year, churches and judicatories were beginning to come to the realization that their Lenten practices and Easter celebrations were most likely going to be impacted by the pandemic.  Many imagined the worst would be over by Pentecost.  We hunkered down, got creative, moved online, and looked forward to a more normal way of being in the summer.  

Not only did the pandemic intensify and continue, we have also experienced trauma, anger, and injustice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder (among many others murdered as an effect of systemic racism).  We lived through a volatile election season that culminated in the raid on the Capitol on January 6th and an impeachment hearing.  It has been a horrendous year for us as a country… and this doesn’t even take into account the local challenges or those we have borne in our personal lives.

And now we enter Lent.  A time when we traditionally take on a practice to help us cultivate a penitent heart and a deeper relationship with Christ – most often this is an act of abstinence from some vice or pleasure.  I don’t know about you, but it feels like most of 2020 and 2021 have been a penitent walk in the desert, relying increasingly on God’s love and faithfulness through troubled times. It feels like the entire last year has been a forced celebration of lent.

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Transforming our Understanding of Strategic Missional Planning

By Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant

Editor’s Note: This is the beginning of a 4-part series on Strategic Missional Planning in different contexts. Next week’s post will be on strategic missional planning for leadership transition.

Remember the good ol’ days when we felt we could project the trajectory of our congregations and judicatories with some degree of confidence?  Remember what it was like to be able to cast a vision based on thoughtful discernment and a sense of stability – believing that in five years we might just reach our goals?  

The world has certainly changed in a year, and we are reminded again that we are not in control.  A couple of nights ago I had a very dramatic and involved dream.  All night long, I was battling evil “Transformers.”  You know, the Paramount Pictures, 200-feet-tall monsters that have the ability to change themselves from a walking robot to a fire-shooting four-wheel vehicle of destruction.  They are very adaptable based on the threat and the weaknesses they see in their opponent.  In reaction to their threats, I was also called to be very adaptable (mostly in the strategic way I hid from them).  It was an exhausting night.

2020 was an exhausting year, and we as faith communities continue to be called toward adaptability.  In 2021 it is possible to plan and to be adaptable… and even strategic, but we won’t do it in the same way we did prior to 2020.  We need to recommit to those spiritual practices that ground us in God’s love, to the practices that enable us to listen to one another and our neighbors at a deep level, to practices that encourage us to accompany our hurting neighbors in a more courageous and prophetic way – and we need to understand our world better in order to move forward together based on our current reality.

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Vitality Check

By Linda Buskirk for ECF Vital Practices

Occasionally, we like to publish posts from guest bloggers, especially when they say nice things about us. This week’s post is an article written by Linda Buskirk of Buskirk Solutions for Episcopal Church Foundation’s “Vital Practices for Congregations” blog. The free, online Congregational Vitality Assessment to which Linda refers was created by FaithX and brought online in a collaborative partnership by FaithX and ECF.

2020 has been a year of difficult “reality checks.”  Yes, it’s dangerous out there.  Yes, you should wear a mask. Yes, you need to figure out Zoom.

Now a new opportunity for a vitality check is available, designed to help focus congregational leadership and planning. 

The Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA), is now offered at no cost thanks to a partnership between the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) and The FaithX Project.  The CVA provides congregations with an assessment of Vitality (healthiness) and Sustainability (level of people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive, or even thrive). The vitality section of the CVA measures ten areas of congregational functioning, such as Vision and Mission, Leadership, Lay Empowerment, Worship, Formation, and Stewardship.

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10 Counterintuitive practices that will improve your stewardship (even during a pandemic)

By Ken Howard

In my more than 25 years in starting new congregations and redeveloping existing ones, I have gained a number of hard-won insights into what makes stewardship successful. These insights are the results of much congregational experimentation and reviewing giving research, and most of them go against the grain of our stewardship traditions. I offer this list ten DOs and DON’Ts below:

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“I can’t breathe” – Mapping Structural Racism

By the Rev. Ken Howard
Structural Racism

Click here to register
Mapping Systemic Racism webinar
Nov 18, 2020 | 12:30-1:30pm ET

When we started The FaithX Project a little over three years ago, we chose as our mission “helping faith communities survive and thrive in turbulent times.” Little did we know how prophetic those words would be or how turbulent the times we would be working in. In the last three months we have experienced: 

  • A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic that has closed down society, even houses of worship,
  • An economic collapse to rival the Great Depression, and…
  • Societal upheaval not seen since the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, which erupted in response to the murder of a unarmed black man by a policeman and to the systemic structural racism it represented.

Systemic Structural Racism is the idea that our social system is structured in such a way that disadvantages a particular race – in this case, African-Americans. Some people would make the case that it does not exist, that it is a made-up concept. I don’t buy that. In the work we do at FaithX helping congregations to understand and better serve their neighborhoods, we frequently notice that multiple social vulnerabilities tend to coexist in a vast number African-American neighborhoods: unemployment, poverty, low access to medical care, inadequate housing, and a number of other issues. So many that it couldn’t be a coincidence. And when we dig into the history, we often find that it follows the boundaries of earlier racial red-lining and racially-restrictive covenants. 

Let me give you some examples and let you make up your own mind. I prepared side-by-side maps* showing the relationship of predominantly African-American neighborhoods to ten different vulnerability factors. You can find all 10  maps by clicking here, but I’m going to show you just three: pandemic vulnerability, unemployment, and poverty. 

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