The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Keeping Congregations Together: Navigating Giving During the Covid-19 Crisis

By Mary Frances

We tend to expect charitable giving to go up during a national crisis, but then the COVID-19 crisis isn’t your typical crisis.  It’s hitting us in multiple places at once. Health, home, employment and financial security, both short- and long-term, all feel very much at risk right now.  So we might expect that congregational giving could go down at this time. Amazingly, people have the ability to rise to the current challenges. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy and its partners have been tracking donations since the start of the COVID-19 crisis.  As of March 26, 2020, people and corporations have donated over $2.9 billion dollars to disaster- and health-related organizations. People are still giving.  

Of course, those giving numbers are national and perhaps even reflect some international donations.  What can you expect at the local level? Can you expect your congregation to continue giving at the level it has in the past?  Can you expect giving to increase? The Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (NMIR) from FaithX can provide you with some answers.  This two-page report contains over 40 data points and several of them can guide your expectations and planning in a time like this.

[Read more…]

Worship in the Midst of COVID-19: Clinging to Old Paradigms Can Be Fatal

By the Rev. Ken Howard

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis. This blog will help congregations better worship together during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Click here for the previous post

Church pastor dies a week after contracting COVID-19

This article was published on the Chicago Sun Times Wire Service on Monday, March 30. In this short but moving piece about assistant pastor Angel Escamilla, assistant pastor of the local Assemblies of God church, the lead pastor describes Angel as having had “the spirit of a dove, the strength of a warrior, the faith of Abraham and when he prayed you knew he was talking to Heaven.” 

What the first article didn’t say is that he contracted COVID-19 after two weeks of the entire worship team gathering at the church’s worship center to livestream services. It didn’t report that the pastor had told the team that livestreaming from the church was an essential service, and those who didn’t feel that they were essential were welcome to stay home if that made them feel more safe. It didn’t convey the fact that several members of the worship team had also tested positive for COVID-19 and were sick or that the lead pastor had encouraged them to withhold this information from the congregation out of “pastoral concern.”

All of that news was broken by a local investigative reporter in a piece published the very next day.

This is what happens when we forget that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, our old paradigms of worship have crumbled and the new paradigm of worship together during the Coronavirus pandemic has not yet fully risen from the ashes of the old. 

In fact, the task before us is not figuring out how to adapt old ways to a new situation, but rather working together, by trial and error, to create an entirely new paradigm from scratch. In other words, we have to turn our thinking Inside Out. Because, as Jesus said, “New wine explodes old wineskins.” 

Or as Simon Sinek put it , “Start with Why”

[Read more…]

FaithXperimental Spotlight: The Way Station, Spencer, Iowa

In our travels around the U.S., both digitally and physically, we at FaithX like to keep our eyes open for examples of people, programs, communities, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the area of faith. And when we do find one, we like to shine a light on them in a FaithXperimental spotlight blog post.        

Today’s Spotlight article is about The Way Station, based out of Spencer, Iowa. We first learned of The Way Station at the 2019 Genesis Conference in Birmingham, Alabama (part of the Episcopal Church’s New Episcopal Communities initiative), where several dozen new or planned Episcopal Church faith communities and ministries discussed their approaches to engaging their communities. The following description comes from an interview with Rev. Beth Preston, Priest in Charge of The Way Station.

A busy day at The Way Station might find Rev. Preston chatting with a couple of women who have come in for coffee and conversation, dishing up homemade chili to hungry youth after school, supervising candle-making in the Restoration Artworks studio, and checking on the youth who are playing Statues in the Garden in Friar Tuck’s Book Nook. The Way Station is an outreach of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa and is, in the words of Bishop Alan Scarfe, “The church of the 21st Century.” Rev. Beth believes God planted this vision through the inspiration of a class at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Church and Contemporary Society. “We studied our current culture and what people like to gather around. We all talked about how we wanted to start a coffee shop,” Rev. Preston said. Another inspiration was Spirit Wind Center for Creativity and Healing in Stonington, CT, which Rev. Beth found out about through Sharing Magazine (OSL) and visited with her husband, Glenn. 

The Way Station opened in September of 2018. It operates out of a storefront in downtown Spencer, Iowa. There is a café, where guests are served coffee, tea, hot chocolate or cold beverages and snacks. A chapel is in the heart of the building and hosts a 3:00 pm Holy Eucharist on Sundays. Then there is Rev. Beth’s office, the art room, and the book room. The ministry operates on donations, grants, and offerings, and asks only free will donations of their guests. 

[Read more…]

Acting Outside the Box: Stewardship – Part 2

We are trying out a new occasional blog series in which people doing ministry can talk about outside the box wild ideas for ministry that they have tried and what they learned from them (whether or not the ideas work). We are calling this new series Acting Outside The Box, because just thinking about what’s outside the box is waaaay too passive. Ken Howard kicks off this series with some counter-intuitively productive stewardship strategies he’s run into (stumbled into, really) over the years.

The Power of Paradox
(part 2 in a series)

In last week’s post I talked about the awkwardness of stewardship season and how the use of religiously-loaded language sometimes backfires. I told the story of a formerly unchurched member family taking out a second mortgage to fulfill their pledge after the husband lost his job in the recession because they took the language of “pledge” so seriously.

Speaking of recessions, two of the largest increases in pledging (or should I say “Estimated Giving”) in two different churches I served took place during two rather large recessions.

What accounts for the difference? 

On both occasions, realizing that if we were in their shoes, we would have a lot of hesitation in making financial commitments in uncertain times, we decided that we would talk about the reasons for their potential hesitancy.  

We figured, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. And so we put all of our cards on the table. 

[Read more…]

“Data-Grounded Discernment for Diocesan Planning & Decision-Making”

Datastory & FaithX present joint webinar on Jan 28

The Conference on Catholic Facility Management (CCFM) has invited Matt Felton, president of Datastory, and Ken Howard, executive director of FaithX, to deliver a webinar for its members on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 from 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM CST.

Webinar Description:
Drawing on examples from projects in several CCFM member dioceses and others, Matt and Ken will describe how dioceses and congregations are using MapDash for Faith Communities and related tools and processes to guide strategic missional planning and enhance operational decision-making. 

The session will also include an overview of the map-based Membership directory that Datastory created for the CCFM website. 

[Read more…]

The FaithX Project, Inc. is 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a religious and charitable purpose operated as a ministry by the Rev. Ken Howard under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Bishop of Washington.