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Strategic Missional Consulting

About Ken Howard

7 Steps to Improved Vitality

Or what do you do after taking the Congregational Vitality Assessment

by the Rev. Ken Howard

So your leadership team has taken the Congregational Vitality Assessment. You’ve got your diagnostic scores and recommendations in hand, and you’re asking yourselves the question:

Now what?

The next step is to do a Missional Assessment: a seven step process to validate and help your congregation improve its vitality by leveraging its strengths to offset its weaknesses and more effectively engage the missional opportunities and challenges emerging in the neighborhoods you serve.

Here are the steps we recommend:

  1. Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
  2. Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
  3. Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
  4. Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
  5. Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
  6. Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
  7. Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, and build on successes.

The steps may seem simple at first glance. And in a way, they are fairly straightforward. But if you are looking for a quick and easy fix for your congregation’s vitality issues, you’re going to be disappointed, because the process of vitality improvement is neither quick nor easy. 

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Be the First in Your Neighborhood

by The Rev. Ken Howard

Early Adopter Discount on Forthcoming CVA Judicatory Version

It’s hard to believe that it’s been only seven months since we launched the online version of the Congregational Vitality Assessment in collaboration with the Episcopal Church Foundation. Yet we’ve come a very long way in a very short time.

And this spring we will launch CVA 2.0 and along with it a new CVA Judicatory Version (CVA-JV). 

CVA 2.0 will feature a totally redesigned GUI (graphical user interface), based on user input, for a much enhanced user experience.

CVA-JV was not even a gleam in our eyes when we launched CVA 1.0, but rather, its creation is a response to requests from several judicatories (i.e., dioceses, synods, districts) across the U.S., and its design is based on their input.

CVA-Judicatory Version will allow judicatories to directly coordinate the administration of the free CVA to their congregations and receive anonymized vitality and sustainability diagnostic summaries from those congregations. CVA-JV will have a customized judicatory-specific dashboard that will allow them to add locally relevant questions (which won’t affect the diagnostic scores) but will provide them important information about their congregations, such as race/ethnicity, types of ministries/programs, and more. In addition, the language of the CVA will be customized to the various denominations and faith traditions that might use the CVA, as well as a Spanish language version. We anticipate that many judicatories will use the CVA-JV to supplement the rear-view-mirror data they get from the parochial reporting mechanism with real-time vitality diagnostics that their congregations can use to improve their own vitality. 

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Mapping Systemic Racism in Rural America

A Reflection and a Webinar

by Ken Howard

Click here to register for the webinar

Why is FaithX offering webinars on systemic racism?
I thought y’all did data-grounded missional discernment and demographic mapping.

We at FaithX get this question often these days. 

And my own first, somewhat snarky response is usually, “Exactly!”

But I then offer a somewhat longer and more serious explanation: That we at FaithX felt we had to bring our expertise and experience to bear on Systemic Racism because it is the frequently-unnoticed ‘base map’ underlying all the work that we have done since we launched in late 2016.

Of course, the more obvious thing revealed in visual form by our mapping was the clear, continuing, and pernicious segregation of race and ethnicity. But as we dug down deeper into various issues affecting neighborhoods, we also saw the impacts of systemic racism visually revealed there as well. We saw historical evidence of how in places where “redlining” was imposed, actions taken in the aftermath of the Great Depression had reverberated down the decades with impacts that continue today. Not just an almost one-to-one relationship between official redlining in the 30’s to the unofficial patterns of segregation we see today, but a relationship between the patterns of racial and ethnic predominance today and a host of negative impacts from chronic-diseases, to access to health care and insurance, to local government educational spending, to educational attainment. And we believed that the visual evidence that was so emotionally convincing to us that it would not only be equally compelling to others but would define for them concrete issues in their own communities that they could take concrete actions to address. Rural America may not have experienced official “redlining,” but the presence and the impacts of Systemic Racism are as real there as anywhere else.

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Spring Training 2021

by Steve Matthews

Are you familiar with the Cactus League or the Grapefruit League? Well, it’s the time of year when professional baseball teams (and usually their fans) flock to Arizona (Cactus) and Florida (Grapefruit) to train and play in these regional short-term leagues in preparation for the real games later in the spring.  I’ve never been to spring training, but I understand it is a fun and exciting time and a unique time to see your favorite players up close (and maybe get an autograph or two).

What is your congregation training for these days?  Are you having any fun?  Where is the excitement?  For over a year we have spent a lot of time in reaction mode trying to recalculate and adjust based on new realities.  I wonder what we have learned about agility, adaptability, new technology, communication, patience, and negotiation. In the months ahead we will continue to adapt to Covid’s new realities.  The skills we have learned will continue to be part of our training, and what proactive training do we need to be incorporating into our communal life?  Who knows what the season to come will be like for us, but the call to co-create a playing field where God’s justice and joyous communion is primary and “the dignity of every human being” (and all beings) is honored never ceases. 

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Book Review – Trump and Political Theology: Unmaking Truth and Democracy

Trump and Political Theology

Title: Trump and Political Theology
Author: Jack David Eller, PhD
Publisher: GCRR Press (2020)
Reviewer: Ken Howard

This post is part of our occasional series, FaithX Book Reviews.

If you know a book you’d like us to review on our blog (or if you’d like to review one for us), please let us know by contacting Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net

Trump and Political Theology is unique, in that it reflects on the presidency of Donald Trump not simply from the standpoint of politics, but rather through the lens of theology (political theology, to be exact). Political theology has been around since the beginnings of institutional Christianity, but in the last century has focused on determining the theological legitimacy of political powers and institutions. Dr. Eller uses this theopolitical lens to understand the relationship of this particular president to norms, traditions, and institutions. 

With a foreword from FaithX’s very own Research Directory, Dr. Slade, the book’s main author, Dr. Jack David Eller, is a professor emeritus of anthropology, as well as the author of a number of books, including Cultural Anthropology: Global Forces, Local Lives, Inventing American Tradition, and Introducing Anthropology of Religion: Culture to the Ultimate.  He is also a film editor for the Anthropology Review Database. 

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