The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

FaithXperimental Ministry Spotlight: The Stepping Stone Gathering

Courtesy: The Rev. Peggy Bryan

From time to time, our FaithXperimental Spotlight series shines a light on particular faith-based communities or organizations that are engaging missional opportunities or challenges in their neighborhoods in innovative and experimental ways. Today’s spotlight is focused on an innovative ministry partnership in San Jose, California.

The Stepping Stone Gathering is a ministry partnership between St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Saratoga, California, and Grace American Baptist Church, a radically-inclusive Baptist church in downtown San Jose.

Their weekly ministry starts with a Sunday morning worship service at Grace American Baptist (shown above), which is then repeated in the afternoon at the county jail (Santa Clara County Elmwood Correctional Facility, Men’s Dormitory Unit). Both services involve Jail and Reentry Worship Team members and clergy from St. Andrew’s and Grace members join in the morning worship. Upon release, formerly incarcerated men come to the service at Grace where they are welcomed by friendly and familiar faces and tangible reentry support, including groceries, clothing, transportation, and more.

Every Sunday, 50 or more men meet for worship in Stepping Stone Gathering’s worship service at the jail. Meanwhile, as many as 20 reentering men, along with their families and members of St. Andrew’s and Grace gather together for worship and support at the Stepping Stone Gathering’s urban church. The ministry maintains an active communication network via a Google Group and Facebook Page.

Renee, 41, made the rounds between prison and jail for the past 17 years since his early 20’s. At his last stint in jail he responded to an invitation to join the first jail-based Education for Ministry (EfM) class in the country, facilitated by Saint Andrew’s mentors. He proudly graduated from Year 1, was released, and six months later celebrated another graduation from rehabilitation, after which Renee and his mom Clara were confirmed and joined Saint Andrew’s (see their picture above with Bishop Mary Grey-Reeves). On Sundays he gets up early to participate in the Stepping Stone service, then doubles back, picks up his mom, and attends the midmorning service at Saint Andrew’s. Renee currently serves on a parish committee that reviews and awards grants to outreach agencies and is organizing an IBIY (I Believe in You) team to join the 545 mile LifeCycle ride to end AIDS.

“I have never been part of any church community,” says Renee, “but since those very first days when I hesitantly signed up for the EFM class held in my jail unit and then accepting the invitation to come to Saint Andrews, I see what real community is. The support I need is always there and it inspires me to live into a strong Christian life.”

St. Andrew’s and Grace launched Stepping Stone’s Sunday morning reentry/recovery service in October of 2018 and is part of of a larger jail ministry, which has been in operation since 2014. The Jail/Reentry Ministry is led by the Rev. Peggy Bryan, whose position is fully funded by grants from The Episcopal Church and Saint Andrew’s.

For more information on this innovative and collaborative partnership, contact Peggy Bryan at pbryan@st-andrews.org and 1-408-679-0240.

The Rev. Peggy Bryan is pastoral associate at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Saratoga and spends much of her time in the community visiting with the recently released.

She is from Santa Cruz and Dinkey Creek, California and is a graduate of the University of Southern California. (“Go Trojans!”). Peggy’s hobbies include swimming, hiking, and indie films. She also enjoys film festivals, Christian contemporary music, bluegrass music, Mexican Train, dancing, walking, social media, paying it forward, baseball, 49ers, and strong coffee. Her favorite Bible verse is Micah 6: 8 – “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

Is your faith-based community or organization doing something innovative and experimental to engage or transform the neighborhoods and communities it serves? Write about it and send it to ken@faithx.net. You might find your story featured here.

FaithX on the Road

Over the next several months, FaithX will be traveling to onsite strategic missional planning consultations and exhibiting (and speaking) at several large gatherings across the country, many of them with our collaborators Datastory.

Here is a taste of our schedule, both so far and into the months ahead:

January

Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing Michigan. Ken is working with key leaders in the diocese to assist them in employing the missional intelligence capabilities of MapDash for Faith Communities as part of a several-month project that will culminate in a “State of the Diocese” report. The report will provide an assessment of the vitality of the diocese and its congregations, identify demographic trends and emerging missional opportunities, and describe strategies to address what they find.

February

2/20-2/23 – CEEP annual conference, Boston, Massachusetts. FaithX and Datastory will be exhibiting at the annual conference of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes (CEEP). Ken Howard and Steve Matthews of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be there demonstrating the power and the possibilities of MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting.

March

3/29-3/31 – The New Story Festival, Austin, Texas. Ken and Matt will be delivering a presentation entitled “Datastories – How Missional Intelligence Can Help Us to Love Our Communities,” and will be exhibiting Datastory’s MapDash and FaithX’s strategic missional consulting. FaithX and Datastory are Festival Sponsors.

TBA – Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast at Valdosta, Georgia. This will be the third of four sessions of the dioceses’ Datastory Evangelism Project, in which both dioceses are using MapDash to identify emerging missional opportunities and challenges, and develop data-grounded strategies to engage with them.

Later in 2019

8/5-8/10 – ELCA Churchwide Assembly, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Planning is underway for FaithX and Datastory to exhibit at the biennial Church Wide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Matt Felton will again be representing Datastory, while Ken Howard and Mary Frances will be representing FaithX.

Join our mailing list and keep abreast of where we are going next.


For more information about MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting, or to invite Ken Howard to speak at a conference, contact Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 2)

As you learned in last week’s post, the Missional Opportunity Index (MOI) is a version of what marketing professionals call a Market Texture: a map-based representation of emerging market conditions based on a predictive algorithm composed of relevant correlated demographic factors. To generate the MOI, the program starts by creating a quarter-mile-square matrix across the entirety of a diocese, district, or other judicatory. Then it “drops a pin” on one of those thousands of points, samples the population with a 15-min drive from that point, and extracting 5-year projections of four demographic factors that drive Missional Opportunity (MO).

These four opportunity-related factors are:

  • Population Growth.Increasing population in an area is directly related to MO, as it represents an influx of new and unaffiliated people and/or a rapidly increasing rising generation.
  • Diversity Growth. Increasing diversity in an area is directly related to MO, becauseeven if area population has plateaued, it represents turnover in the current population. 
  • Generational Balance.Increasing imbalance between older and younger cohorts is inversely related to MO, as rapidly increasing or decreasing median age predicts reduced financial resources.
  • Qualified Population (a measure of population vs. competition).The number of same denomination worship centers competing for the population with a 15-min DriveTime is inversely correlated to MO.

The MOI map below represents Missional Opportunity in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. The map represents areas of high MO in medium-to-dark green, areas of moderate MO in yellow-to-light-green, and areas of low MO in orange-to-dark red. It forecasts that several areas of high Missional Opportunity will be emerging in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland over the next five years, each of which will require different missional strategies to effectively engage.

[Read more…]

Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 1)

A good hockey player plays where the puck is.
A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Wayne Gretzky
(Canadian professional ice hockey player – 1979 to 1999)

Missional opportunity is like hockey in this respect: If you wait to engage it after it has already emerged, it is already too late to engage it effectively. If you do want to engage missional opportunity effectively, you have to be there, prepared and ready, where and when it emerges, because if you wait, you will be forced to play a losing game of reactive catch-up after the fact.

Say you are considering starting a new congregation. If you wait until a growing community has developed a sufficient number of people to populate and financially support a house of worship, the rising price of real estate will have made purchasing the property on which to construct it cost prohibitive (if there are any suitable properties that have not already been snapped up by builders or more forward-thinking denominations). Similarly, if your established congregation waits to adapt its ministries to its changing neighborhood until the transformation is complete, one-time newcomers may have set down roots in congregations that loved them enough to adapt to them. No, you have to be willing to take the risk of predicting where and when the opportunity is going to be doing what is necessary to be there.

[Read more…]

Engaging the New Year

By Ken Howard

At FaithX, we are looking forward to engaging 2019 and we hope you are, too!

Our plans include:

Our FaithXperimental blog will include articles on:

  • Missional Engagement. Best practices for identifying engaging missional opportunities as they arise.
  • Mission Development and Redevelopment. Strategies for redeveloping existing congregations and planting new congregations, and how to know when each is appropriate.
  • Congregational Vitality and Sustainability. Articles on how to assess the health and long-term sustainability of congregations, and what to do about it.
  • Innovative and Experimental Faith Communities. We will be continuing our “Spotlight” articles, shining a light on more innovative and experimental faith communities, strategies, and ministries. If you would like to suggest a Spotlight article on your faith community or ministry, click here.
  • Contributions by Guest Bloggers. To let us know if you would like to be an occasional FaithXperimental contributor, click here.
[Read more…]

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