The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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?

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MapDash Evangelism Project: Valdosta, GA

Bishop Russell Kendrick and the Central Gulf Coast team

On February 27, the bishops of the Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast and their leadership teams gathered at the Grace Cafe, a ministry of Christ Episcopal Church, in Valdosta, Georgia, to continue their work on the MapDash Evangelism Project. The session was led by the Rev. Ken Howard, executive director and principal consultant for FaithX Strategic Missional Consulting. The MapDash Evangelism project is funded by an evangelism grant from Province IV of the Episcopal Church. MapDash for Faith Communities is a product of Datastory, a GIS firm in Baltimore, Maryland. MapDash is collaborative creation of Datastory and FaithX.

At this third working meeting of the project, the bishops and their teams began mapping out living missional strategies for their respective dioceses. A living missional strategy is different from a strategic plan in that a strategic plan tends to be a highly-structured, multi-year document, while a living strategy is emergent, model based, and adaptive.

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FaithX & Datastory at New Story Festival

Just a little over a month from now, FaithX and Datastory will be participating in the New Story Festival, which is being held on March 29-31 in Austin, Texas.

The New Story Festival is a new annual gathering for community, creativity, and the common good: a bold experiment for a better world, embodying imagination, spirituality, social action, and playful connection – defined above all by the practice of love.

Ken Howard of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be program presenters and will also be exhibiting MapDash for Faith Communities. FaithX and Datastory are also festivals sponsors. And because FaithX is a partner organization, those who register through the FaithX portal get a $20 discount.

As the Festival website says, the world runs on stories – the narratives that fuel the ways we live in this world and relate to one another. Our stories can liberate or oppress, encourage reconciliation or further separation, inspire new life or even bring death. But when we become conscious of our stories, we can begin to change them. Believing that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,” the New Story Festival seeks to lead us into a better story – one that encourages growth and liberation, healing and harmony; a story where the downtrodden are uplifted and everyone is included.

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