The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Life (and death) are what happen when you’re making other plans…

 

Dear Friends,

I will not be publishing a typical post this week…

A little less than 48 hours ago I learned my father died. I was just starting a two-day consultation when I got the news. This is my first chance to write anything about it. As the old saying goes, “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” Apparently, so is death.

I will not be as available as usual over the next several days. As you might imagine, I am now in the midst of sorting through both necessary actions and a vast assortment of feelings.

Yet God is good. I am finding that almost every interaction I have with friends and colleagues during this time becomes an opportunity for reflection.

I am hopeful that by sometime next week my personal life and my professional life will return to some semblance of normality, and that you will find a regular post in this space next Thursday. I will listening to the voices of the Spirit and my soul to know the right time. As life and time permits, I am continuing to do behind the scenes work on important projects, in part because I find the kind of work my associates and I are doing grounding and uplifting, but also because it provides me with much needed islands of “normal.”

In the meantime, I would value any thoughts and prayers you might be moved to send my way.

In Christ’s eternal love,
Ken+

Measuring Missional Opportunity

 

By The Rev. Ken Howard

Click here for last week’s post on Measuring Vitality and Sustainability

Last week we discussed how we approach assessing the vitality of congregations based on key parochial report trends and their sustainability based on key demographic projections. We described how we transform those trends and projections into a Congregational Vitality Index and Congregational Sustainability Index and how dioceses other judicatories can use these indexes to perform a system-wide triage of their congregations in their current form and location.

This week we turn from how to assess our current congregational resources to how to predict and discover emerging missional opportunities in the communities around us.

Quantum physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”

But discovering emerging missional opportunities wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. Or more accurately, once we did the hard work of correlational research necessary to assess congregational sustainability, it wasn’t so hard to take the next step into the predictive analytics of missional opportunity.

Basically, it required taking our existing diagnostic algorithms for sustainability (population growth, diversity growth, generational predominance, and “qualified population”), and transforming them into positive markers in a new algorithm for missional opportunity.

[Read more…]

Measuring Congregational Vitality and Sustainability

The Necessity and The Challenge

By The Rev. Ken Howard

In this time when faith communities are becoming increasingly uncertain about their prospects for the future, evaluating congregational vitality and sustainability has become a critical necessity for congregations and the denominational organizations (dioceses, districts, associations) that support them.

Vitality vs. Sustainability

Unfortunately, with currently-available denominational annual reporting tools, measuring congregational vitality and sustainability is not an easy or straightforward task.

They simply do not ask the right questions.

Let’s face it: It is well known that annual congregational reports – with their static, point-in-time, rear-view mirror measures of membership and attendance – do not measure vitality, at least not directly. And there’s the additional problem of what some call the “B.S. Factor”: the strong incentive to estimate to the high side on attendance and to be lax in culling membership rosters. One or two denominations (ELCA for example) are beginning to formulate and test questions to assess the former. But these are not yet in final form or in widespread use

And annual congregational reports don’t really measure sustainability at all, even indirectly. No denominations are currently measuring sustainability.

So when we were challenged by the Episcopal Church’s staff officer for church starts and redevelopment to find a way to gauge congregational vitality and sustainability using only currently available data, we were aware of the magnitude of the task. But we were also excited about how useful such a tool would be if we could meet the challenge.

And after months of researching correlations and developing algorithms, and another month or so of designing, rapid prototyping, refining, and beta testing, we have developed two new map layers for MapDash for Faith Communities: a Congregational Vitality Index and a Congregational Sustainability Index.

Here’s how we did it…

[Read more…]

Old Ways Won’t Open New Doors

New Episcopal Initiative Seeks to Explore Paths to the Future of the Church



By The Rev. Ken Howard

As my readers know, I just returned from the Episcopal Church’s General Convention – its triennial legislative gathering – held this year in Austin, Texas.

Blessedly, this year I attended as a exhibitor, as previous experiences as an elected deputy filled me with all the excitement of watching proverbial paint dry. But while the processes of church legislation are boring to folks like me, it’s good there are people who love making the sausage, because a good deal of what they do is necessary, and occasionally, they produce something beautiful (the Nicene Creed, for example, was the product of a church convention – definite proof that miracles happen).

Nestled among this years avalanche of legislation produced by EpiscoCon (my pet name), was one such jewel: an ambitious (some might say audacious) three-year missional congregational redevelopment initiative that some have called missio:Engage. While the precise scope, shape, and reach of the project has yet to fully emerge (the church often needs time to contemplate the implications of what it has done before it can move legislative theory into programmatic reality), and the funding for the program will not come online until January 2019, from our discussions with those guiding the legislation, a few things are clear.

[Read more…]

Back from EpiscoCon – Pleased with Results

By Ken Howard

Just back from EpiscoCon 2018. In recuperation and digging out mode, as you might imagine, feeling good about our roll out of MapDash for Faith Communities at the Expo. Briefly, here are the “stats”…

Number of Visits

  • More than 200 visitors came by the booth, as calculated by the number of our chocolate “earths” consumed (being by the lunch line helped).
  • 47 people asked for more information or otherwise showed significant interest.
  • 39 of these people were from Episcopal Dioceses (deputies/visitors/staff/etc.).

Organizations Represented

  • 26 of 99 (25%+) dioceses of the Episcopal Church.
  • 9 church-serving organizations (4 Episcopal).
And in the race for the most visitors, Diocese of Texas comes in first with 7, Diocese of Upper South Carolina second with 3, and Dioceses of Massachusetts, Milwaukee, Newark, Virgin Islands third with 2. Go Texas!
If you missed us, don’t worry. Here is some information on our MapDash for Faith Communities tool and our Mentored Missional Journey consulting program.
For more information or a customized demo, contact Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

FIRST ISSUE – FALL 2018

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