Blog | The FaithX Project

May 27 2020

Innovate to Build Community

by Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand.
The arrogance of success is to think
that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

William Pollard
Online Small Groups

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I like working with FaithX. As consultants we are invited to bring our whole selves to the table. We bring our experience, our vocation, our vision, and we are invited everyday to innovate for the benefit of the faith communities and judicatories we accompany.

One way we experience innovation comes in the way Mary Frances, Ken Howard, and I collaborate with one another, and we also experience the excitement of innovation as we bring robust data to bear on the community contexts of the people we serve. We work with our partner DataStory to offer dynamic, informative, eye-opening resources to help organizations chart a path toward bolder and more creative visions than they might have been otherwise imagined.

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May 21 2020

Keeping Congregations Connected: Online Fellowship and Small Groups

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant
Online Small Groups

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I was chatting with a good friend the other day. She’s a pastor; retired for about a year now after serving a very long pastorate. In her retirement, she has been trying to find her way in a new congregation…as a participant, as a member. Of course, she’d been at this new church for several months before the pandemic, but that is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the majority of members who have been there for decades—many, many decades. And now the congregation is not only holding worship online but also the highly-revered small group, “coffee hour.” Everyone comes to Zoom with their own home brew and pastry and the fellowship begins. Or does it?

If you have ever been a visitor at a church and wanted to bolt for the door during coffee hour, you may have an idea what I am talking about. Bad coffee, too much sugary food, and too many cliques—lots and lots of cliques. Often, the longer people have been at a church the more they feel entitled to tune out visitors and use Sunday morning to catch up with their friends, and now we have moved this online. Putting everyone in your church into one big Zoom call and letting the conversation rip is not going to feel inclusive, considerate, or welcoming. Even for the most experienced Zoom users, Zoom can lend a sense of awkwardness to a conversation. Only one person can speak at a time while everyone else watches. People often hesitate in response because they aren’t sure if it’s their turn, so the chance to chime in is lost if you are at all meek. If the group is large, then most people are watching just a few people have a conversation. What happens to the introverts? Will they even show up for this virtual fellowship? How will visitors navigate this? Is this an improvement on our in-person fellowship? I am afraid not.

So then what is an online congregation and an online small group to do? How do we help people engage in fellowship in this modern COVID-19 world? Do not lose hope, there are two things that can help:

Zoom rooms and online small groups.

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May 12 2020

Where can I go to escape your Spirit? The Case for Communion while Social Distancing

by Ken Howard
Communion while Social Distancing

Where can I go to escape your Spirit?
Where can I flee to escape your presence?
Psalm 139:7 (New English Translation)

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I invite you to suspend your preconceptions and join me in a theological Eucharistic thought experiment. Or, borrowing from my Jewish origins, a midrash on the midrash by the author of Psalm 139.

Imagine you are a clergy person officiating at the celebration of Holy Communion. You arrive at the point in the liturgy where the rubrics call upon you to hold your hands over the bread and wine and speak the words of consecration.

What is the correct distance between your hands and the elements? Do you have to be in contact with the bread and the wine? What if you only touch the chalice and paten? Does it work if your hands are an inch away? Two inches? Three? A foot away? How about a yard? What if you took four steps back from the altar? Would it still work if you said the words of consecration while standing at the back of the church and holding your hands in the general direction of the altar? Would Communion still “work” while social distancing?

Of course it would. Some of the locations might be “irregular,” but all of them would still be valid.

Why?

Because the real presence of Jesus Christ when we celebrate communion is not brought about by the “magic hands” of the celebrant, but by the strange work of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus told his disciples that he would be present as body and blood whenever they ate bread and drank wine in his Name, he neither prescribed a specific liturgy by which it had to be done nor described either the physics or metaphysics of how it would work. How is simply an undefinable mystery. He. Just. Said. He’d. Be. There.

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May 08 2020

Repeated by Popular Demand! Before You Go Back to the Building: Preparing for the Recovery from COVID-19 (a free webinar)

FREE WEBINAR
(Repeated by Popular Demand!)
Before You Go Back to the Building:
Preparing for the Recovery from COVID-19
May 19, 2020 | 3:30-4:30pm | On Zoom
click here to register

It’s fair to say that our ideas of how to be and do Church have been turned on their heads over the last several weeks, and many of us are just starting to think about what it might be like to return to some semblance of “normal.” Some churches may have found new opportunities through online gatherings, but most of the people we have spoken with are anticipating being with their community in the church building again. Some judicatories have advised their congregations they can go back in early May, others at the end of May, while still others want to wait and see. The wisdom of any of these ideas remains to be seen, as does the question of whether the new normal will be anything at all like the old normal. As the old saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans,” but sooner or later we will be able to come out of isolation and have the opportunity to gather our communities in person again.

So wouldn’t it would be a good idea to go back with a plan in mind: a plan based on a vision – a plan imbued with flexibility, a plan that is sensitive to a greatly-altered context, and a plan that is based on discernment grounded in data?

We want to help you with this.

In this webinar we will provide you with tips on how to use demographic and analytic data to maintain context awareness as you develop your plan to make it through the transition into whatever our new normal will be. We will provide you access and orientation to a free tool (MapDash for COVID-19) that will ground your discernment in that kind of data. Data that can help you help your people and your neighborhoods survive and thrive in new ways in the aftermath and recovery from COVID-19.

click here to register for the webinar

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May 07 2020

Keeping Congregations Connected: Creating Neighborhood Community in the Context of COVID-19

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant

The post is part of our “Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19” blog series.

Click here for the previous post.

What opportunities for connection, joy, support, love, collaboration, and ministry in your neighborhood are just waiting to be noticed, named, and nurtured?

This strange time we are living in seems to be a time of dichotomy. Social distance but stay connected. Protect yourself for the sake of others. Find unity in the diaspora. Celebrate life while we sadly count the deaths. Yet the church was created for a time such as this. Today the most pressing question in the church is how do we stay connected while we are all at least 6 feet apart? How do we create community from behind our computer screens?

I think we find the answer in shifting from our well-worn model of large group gatherings to something smaller and closer to home: house churches, neighborhood groups, small groups, or fractals. Call them what you will, but small groups of people gathering around the gospel are the very foundation of the church. We find examples of them in the New Testament and more recently in the growing Christian church in China as well as the house church movement all around the world. In 1950 the Christian church in China was close to 4 million people. Today the church in China boasts over 67 million people. And yet the church is still often underground, persecuted and unable to meet in groups of more than 10 people. Ten people. That number sounds so familiar. It’s the number many states are using when they talk about lifting restrictions and allowing small groups to gather again with social distancing. More dichotomies…gather at a distance!

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