The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

About Ken Howard

Unique Redevelopment Opportunity for Five Episcopal Dioceses

At the end of June, FaithX received a major grant from Trinity Wall Street Philanthropies to embark on a powerful partnership with five dioceses across the country. This initiative is called The Vitality Improvement Program for Small Congregations (or VIP). More information about the initiative and the application can be found here.

Key benefits for participating dioceses and congregations include:

  1. Access to Mapdash For Faith Communities, an interactive demographic and analytic dashboard. This tool can be used with all the churches in your diocese–not just the 7-10 churches in the VIP.
  2. Access to the Congregational Vitality Assessment – Judicatory Dashboard. Any of the churches in your diocese can take the CVA at any time. Dioceses can also customize up to 10 questions, and they will have access to all CVA results.
  3. Access to the Judicatory Vitality Assessment, which your diocese can use to diagnose and then make plans to improve its own vitality.
  4. Over 500 consulting hours with your diocese and participating congregations.
  5. Training of a diocesan-level Vitality Improvement Team to facilitate the vitality work of individual Parish Vitality Improvement Teams among participating congregations.
  6. Creation of a Learning Community for your diocese that also connects you to other dioceses participating in the VIP.
  7. An honest assessment of the vitality and sustainability of each participating congregation, as well as the development of a compelling plan for the future.  

We would love to partner with your diocese on this exciting venture into congregational vitality, so fill out the application today!

Please note that our application deadline has been extended to September 30, 2022.

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@faithx.net or make an appointment for a Zoom call with Ken Howard at kenhoward.youcanbook.me.

Become the Indispensable Center of Your Community

Faith-Based Community Resource Hubs

Faith communities becoming catalysts,
leveraging their underused buildings and property
for the sake of their neighborhoods and their mission

Click here for interactive presentation

I’ll give it to you straight:

Faith Communities are rapidly become unsustainable in their current form. Even before Covid, it was becoming abundantly clear (to those who had eyes to see it) that by the end of this century, the typical house of worship, as we have come to know and love it, would only be found stuffed and mounted in ecclesiastical museums. And now, in the aftermath of Covid, the date of its untimely demise will be anybody’s guess. My own estimate is that we have a 20-year window (maybe 25, if your congregation has an endowment).

The proverbial writing is on the proverbial wall. Just look around you:

Shrinking Membership. Before our current trend bottoms out the number of Christians per congregation will drop to less that 60, half of which will be unaffiliated with any faith community or denomination, leaving the average congregation with a total active membership of around 30 (The Religion Singularity). The average worship space is now operating at less than half of its seating capacity. And that ratio is dropping. (Pew Research)

Congregations Closing at a Rapid Clip. The inevitable impact on finances has left most congregations facing some degree of financial difficulty, leading to an estimated 3,850–7,700 worship centers closing every year. And the number of closures per year is increasing. Where once were church buildings now stand bookstores, brew pubs and wineries, skate parks and laser tag arenas, luxury condos, and even frat houses. (Journal of Pastoral Psychology).

Community Challenges Growing. Many urban and rural communities are struggling with dozens of issues like the lack of access to living wage employment, affordable housing, medical insurance, health care, and social services, which leads to many living in substandard conditions or even becoming homeless because they can’t afford to live and work in their communities (Regional Indicators Dashboard Project).

Community Resources Shrinking. Ironically, many of the government and nonprofit organizations that could help these people with the challenges they face are increasingly unable afford to locate in the communities they serve.

Feels like things are growing more and more hopeless for congregations and the communities they serve, right?

Not necessarily…

What if congregations were to look for hidden opportunities in the challenges they face?

[Read more…]

FaithX Receives Grant Award from Trinity Wall Street for Small Church Vitality Improvement Program

By The Rev Ken Howard, Executive Director

We are excited to announce that The FaithX Project has been approved for a grant from Trinity Wall Street Philanthropies* to create a Vitality Improvement Program for Small Congregations.

Today’s congregations exist at a pivotal point in the history of the church, an existential crisis of accelerating change and deepening uncertainty driven by forces both inside and outside the church. We believe that congregational vitality is the defining issue for the church in this generation, if not this century, and that congregations – especially small congregations – and their judicatories are rapidly becoming unsustainable in their current forms. Only those with a clear vision, who ground their discernment in data about themselves and the communities they serve, and who are willing to take the risk of experimenting with new ways of being and doing church will survive and thrive in these challenging times. 

[Read more…]

EP Update: Hidden Opportunities in the Pandemic

EP 16 Findings and a Call for Volunteer Respondents

If you are a regular reader of the FaithX blog, you will know that we are working with TryTank Experimental Laboratory in a “proof-of-concept” experiment called Episcopal Pulse, the purpose of which is to keep a finger on the pulse of The Episcopal Church through weekly, rapid-response microsurveys.

Our most recent microsurvey (#16), completed last Friday, asked asked this question:

In what areas of congregational life
have you found hidden opportunities in the disruption caused by the pandemic?

Results:

Raw Findings (N=322):

  • Administration – None: 103 | Some: 163 | Many: 49 | Very Many: 7
  • Discipleship & Formation – None: 45 | Some: 172 | Many: 89 | Very Many: 16
  • Evangelism – None: 76 | Some: 162 | Many: 68 | Very Many: 16
  • Outreach: Social Justice – None: 95 | Some: 134 | Many: 65 | Very Many: 28
  • Outreach: Community Service & Partnerships – None: 66 | Some: 156 | Many: 74 | Very Many: 26
  • Property/Building Use – None: 142 | Some: 136 | Many: 35 | Very Many: 9
  • Worship & Spirituality – None: 22 | Some: 135 | Many: 125 | Very Many: 40
  • Other – None: 233 | Some: 55 | Many: 24 | Very Many: 10

Summary of Findings:

Most Episcopalians see few hidden opportunities in the disruption cause by in the pandemic. In all but one area, the majority of respondents (by at least a two-to-one margin) said they had found few, if any hidden opportunities in the disruption caused by the pandemic. The exception was Worship and Spirituality, for which a bare majority of respondents said they had found “many” or “very many” hidden opportunities in the pandemic disruption.

Insights (What does this tell us?)

Personally, I find these results disheartening but not surprising, except in their starkness. There are several ways we can interpret these findings.

Entrepreneurial Insight? Over the last decade or so, business and nonprofit sectors have come to the understand that any disruptions contain hidden opportunities, and the key to success in an uncertain and rapidly is to recognize and harvest those opportunities. Could it be that the vast majority of church leadership simply lacks the ability (or interest) to see past their investment in prevailing paradigms and perceive disruption-based opportunities (aka Paradigm blindness).

Adaptive Leadership? Could it be that too many church leaders (and their congregations) simply do not have the ability to see the opportunities presented by disruption but lack the adaptive capacity to to engage them?

Spirit of Innovation? Could it be that too many church leaders (and their congregations) lack sufficient outside-the-box thinking to innovate new ways of being and doing church?

Formation? Could it be that our ministry discernment and theological education processes are weeding out too many candidates that possess the above qualities.

For Reflection

Which of these results confirm your perceptions?

Which of these results surprise you?

What do these results reveal to you?

From time to time we need to replenish our respondent pool

Know an Episcopalian who might be interested in being an Episcopal Pulse volunteer respondent?Send them this registration link:
episcopalpulse.org/register-to-be-a-respondent

“I can’t breathe”: How you can impact systemic racism in the communities you serve

And how FaithX can help

By the Rev. Ken Howard

By now, most of you who follow our blog have had a chance to read the press release about the High Impact Award FaithX received for our work in mapping and mitigating systemic racism.

And while we are totally honored and excited to be recognized for the impact of our work, we would be even more excited to help more congregations and judicatories to make an impact on systemic racism in the neighborhoods they serve.

So this article is about how our approach to mapping and mitigating racism works and how we can help you employ that approach to confront systemic racism from your congregation or judicatory.

We begin by defining systemic racism

We have centered our work on a definition of systemic racism that is plain and simple:

Systemic racism is when a social system is structured in such a way that it disadvantages a particular race or ethnicity to the advantage of another

In other words:

You don’t have to be a racist to be complicit in systemic racism

[Read more…]