The Rev. Ken Howard

About Ken Howard

Jan 28 2021

Strategic Redevelopment

This post on Strategic Redevelopment is written by Steve Matthews, Senior Consultant for the FaithX Project.

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.”

David Whyte

I have invested a lot of enjoyable time and energy working with churches in redevelopment over the past 10 years. Even so, sometimes I still find myself scratching my head asking, “What is redevelopment?,” and “What does it mean to go about it strategically?” Honestly, both words sound like a pretty mechanistic description for the vital work of nurturing beloved community and daring to be vulnerable enough to share ourselves and our experience of God’s love with our neighbors (which is the core of redevelopment for me).

[Read more…]

Jan 21 2021

Our love/hate relationship with the Church – Reflections on a poem by Carlo Carretto

Below is a poem by Carlo Carretto:

A Letter to the Church

How baffling you are, oh Church,

and yet how I love you!

How you have made me suffer,

and yet how much I owe you!

I would like to see you destroyed,

and yet I need your presence.

You have given me so much scandal

and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is.

I have seen nothing in the world
more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false,

and yet I have touched nothing
more pure, more generous, more beautiful.

How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face,

and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you,

because I am you,

though not completely.

And besides, where would I go?
Would I establish another?

I would not be able to establish it without the same faults,
for they are the same faults I carry in me.

And if I did establish another,

it would be my Church,

not the Church of Christ.

And I am old enough to know

that I am no better than anyone else.

– by Carlo Carretto, from The God Who Comes

In my book Paradoxy I used the phrase “a mistake made holy” to describe the paradox that is Church:

On the one hand,
there is no evidence in scripture that Jesus (or Paul, for that matter)
intended to start a new religion called Christianity.

Yet on the other hand,
it is clear that God’s Holy Spirit
has become inextricably bound up in the Church.

On the one hand,
it is clearly fallen.

Yet on the other hand,
it is clearly the body of Christ.

This poem by Carlo Carretto draws our attention
not only to the paradox that is Church,

but also to the profound paradox
of our painfully ambivalent relationship with it…

That it is impossible to truly and deeply love the Church
without sometimes hating it as well.

Jan 21 2021

A Tale of Three Churches: Strategic Missional Planning in Imperiled Congregations

On the surface, they were three different congregations in two different parts of the country – one in a northern urban city, one in a mid-Atlantic suburb, and the other in a suburban southern resort area – but otherwise seemed very much the same. But all three were imperiled (e.g., in their judicatories’ version of hospice care), and their human and financial resources were dwindling rapidly.

Their average Sunday attendance was between 30 and 40, with Christmas and Easter attendance hovering around 60, in worship spaces with a capacity of 3-10 times that total. They were rapidly drawing down their endowments, none of which were above $25,000, and roughly two-thirds of their normal operating income was from rentals. Their giving per household was exceptionally high (a point of pride), but this is frequently the case with congregations that know at some level they are in danger of closing soon. They were still imperiled.

That’s when we were called in…

We took all of them through a process we call Neighborhood Missional Assessment, in which we explored the missional opportunities and challenges in the neighborhoods they serve, their vitality strengths and weaknesses, and whether and how they could leverage their strengths to better engage the opportunities and challenges, as well as address their weaknesses. We ran Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Reports to explore key demographic trends and projections that define neighborhood missional opportunities and challenges, and MapDash for Faith Communities to dive more deeply into the demographics and projections they deemed relevant. We used our free Congregational Vitality Assessment to explore their vitality in 10 areas of congregational life, as well as their likely sustainability (with those whose judicatories subscribed to MapDash, we explored their vitality and sustainability scores). And we did trend analysis and projection on their weekly attendance, membership, and income to determine when they each would flatline (all within 10 years).

Here is what we found and how each congregation responded to combat their being imperiled…

[Read more…]

Jan 12 2021

New Date for Congregational Vitality Webinar: January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm

Dear Readers,

We have received a large number of requests from both current and perspective registrants to delay our Assessing & Addressing Congregational Vitality webinar for a week, in light of the events of last week and in deference to the upcoming inauguration. To that end, we are pushing the webinar back one week.

The new date and time is:
January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm

If for some reason you are unable to attend the new date, you have two options:

Request a refund through EventBrite.
Stay registered and receive the webinar recording.

Hope to see most of you on the 27th!

Blessings and thanks!
Ken+

The Rev. Ken Howard
Executive Director – FaithX
www.faithx.net

* FYI, In response to our poll of registrants, all but one said they could accommodate the date change, and that person said they would choose option 2.

Dec 23 2020

Merry Christmas from your friends at FaithX!

and a brief (or at least relatively short) message

By the Rev. Ken Howard
Executive Director – The FaithX Project

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?

This is the year that proved the old proverb:
“If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.”

We all started this year with big plans:
In our congregational life, our work life, our family life, and our personal life.

Little did we expect that 2020 would bring:

A deadly, once-in-a-century, worldwide pandemic
that killed over 300,000 Americans and 1.64 million people worldwide.

A deep, prolonged, and worldwide economic downturn
(the second one of this century).

A national year of upheaval and racial reckoning
after the continued killing of unarmed black men (and women) by police.

A national election marked by divisive rhetoric
and post-election actions at the highest levels
that endangered the rule of law.

2020 was a year that overturned all of our expectations, plans, and paradigms of how to be and to do communities of faith.

And it’s hard to know whether God is laughing or crying
or both.

But I believe that there is grace to be found
in the upheaval that is 2020.

God has used all that has happened:

To teach us that being a faith community really is not about a building.

To help us discover innovative ways
of being faith communities and organizing our congregations
that we might never have figured out if we had a choice in the matter.

To bring our faith communities (and a broad swath of our country)
to a new level of commitment to the cause
of bringing about racial equity and dismantling systemic racism.

And all that has happened in our political life
has taught us many lessons about what we need to do to strengthen the institutions of democracy and the rule of law.

Our work will be cut out for us in 2021,
but I have faith that what we have learned will serve us well.

So Merry Christmas to you and yours from all of us at FaithX!

Ken, Steve, Mary, Darren, and Mary Beth