The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Neighborhood Missional Intelligence – Report or Assessment?

The 2nd of 8 posts on MapDash Analytics

by Ken Howard

FaithX Strategic Missional Services now offers two resources to explore missional opportunities at the local community level. The first is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report. The second is a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment.

Think of the difference between the Report and the Assessment as the difference between taking a “selfie” and sitting for a portrait, except the subject is not you but your community and both are much more detailed than you might expect.

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Not Retired: Losing my “religion” to join God in the world

by Ken Howard

It’s been over two years since I left my last church to startup FaithX and, I swear, hardly a week goes by that some clergy colleague doesn’t ask me about how I’m enjoying retirement. The exchange usually goes something like this:

Colleague: So how are you enjoying retirement?

Ken: I’m not.

Colleague: Not enjoying retirement?

Ken: Not retired.

[at this point I explain how what I’m doing is a different different kind of ministry]

It’s not just the fact that people (often the same ones) keep getting wrong that irks me. What truly troubles me is the unexamined assumptions behind the sometimes spoken but usually unspoken exchange that follows:

Colleague: What? Wait! You left your congregation, right?

Ken: Yep.

Colleague: And you didn’t accept a call to a new congregation, right?

Ken: Yep.

Colleague: Then how can say you’re not retired?

[Read more…]

An Introduction to MapDash Analytics

To fully understand location-based data we need to organize and examine the data in four different ways. We have to:

  1. Visualize – Get your faith community’s data on an map, so you can explore it visually.
  2. Contextualize – Find your faith community’s place in the data, so you can examine its missional context.
  3. Analyze – Interrogate the data, to reveal what it means for your faith community.
  4. Socialize – Share your data, with leaders, members, the community, funders, and other stakeholders

Today’s post is about step 3, and the analytic tools MapDash for Faith Communities provides that help you reveal what demographic, lifestyle, and other data mean for your faith community or judicatory.

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FaithXperimental Spotlight: Grace Cafe, Valdosta, GA

by Ken Howard

The Grace Cafe college group on the porch of Louttit Hall during the 2018 Spring Semester.

Grace Café is an innovative college outreach ministry to students at Valdosta State University (VSU), sponsored by Christ Episcopal Church, Valdosta, Georgia.  

Also known as the Christ Episcopal Church College Ministry, Grace Café is a place of fellowship, prayer, and service. It is also a place at which VSU students of limited means can work in exchange for housing. The program currently has nine college students who live on the church campus and work 20 hours a week running Grace Café, helping with the Thursday Dinners, and serving in other areas of ministry at Christ Church.

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The “winners” at the recent UMC convention say the Bible condemns same-sex relations. But are they right?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

The General Conference of the United Methodist Church met in special session late February, in St. Louis, Missouri, to debate the denomination’s stance on same-sex relations. There were three proposals on the floor:

  • One would rescind the UMC’s ban on LGBTI clergy and same-sex marriage.
  • The second, the so-called “Traditional Plan,” would strengthen and aggressively enforce the ban and expel clergy who were openly gay or performed same-sex marriage.
  • The third was an attempt to find middle ground between the first two.

When all the votes were tallied, it was clear the proponents of the “Traditional Plan” had won the day. But was it the right decision?

In the debates that preceded the vote, the traditionalists claimed that theirs was the only proposal that followed the clear teachings of the Bible. They also claimed that those who opposed their position and advocated the full inclusion of LGBTI people were rejecting the authority of scripture and abandoning biblical morality in order to pursue liberal Western sexual ethics.

But is this true? Does the Bible really teach that same-sex relations are an abomination? And is any other point of view just another form of syncretism with culture?

Or did they get it wrong?

[Read more…]

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