The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

FaithXperimental Spotlight: TryTank tries PitchTank

In our travels around the U.S., both digitally and physically,
we at FaithX like keep our eyes open for examples of people, programs, communities, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the arena of faith. And when we find one, we like to shine a spotlight on them in a FaithXperimental blog post.

By Ken Howard

There’s nothing that we at FaithX like better than shining a light on people and programs who are experimenting with new and innovative ways of creating and cultivating communities of faith… unless the people are doing it are one of our clients – then we love it!

On January 1 of this year, two Episcopal seminaries, Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) and General Theological Seminary (GTS), joined forces to launch an innovative joint project focused on the future of the church. They called this exciting new program the TryTank: An Experimental Laboratory for Church Growth and Innovation.  

Led by the Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, TryTank works to understand the forces threatening the church in order to identify creative ways to equip future leaders to reinvigorate the church, seeking to understand where new church models, business models, and technology can meet the needs of today’s church.

It is this focus on experimental learning that makes this program not simply a “Think Tank” but a TRYTank. As Fr. Lebrija describes it, “Any time we have asked ourselves, ‘what if’ as we do and are church, those are opportunities to explore and try. We are going to be doing a lot of that. And we know we’re going to fail. A lot. But that’s how we can discover new adjacent possibilities, by trying.” TryTank not only sponsors experiments but shares their stories across the church, “because something that may not have worked in one place, may just be perfect in another.”

[Read more…]

Something Old? Something New? What Kind of Congregation Benefits Most from Neighborhood Missional Assessment

by Ken Howard

Earlier this year at a conference, I gave a presentation on Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Assessment. When the time came for Q&A, one of the participants posed this question:

“I can see how neighborhood missional assessment would be good for new start congregations and congregations looking to relocate, but how is it helpful for existing congregations that have been around long enough to form a deeper understanding of their neighborhood?”

I get this question (or variations thereof) more often than one might think. 

My smarty-pants Anglican answer goes something like this:

“If you’re asking me if neighborhood missional assessment is most useful for new congregations or existing congregations, the answer is ‘Yes!’”

[Read more…]

Recommended Reading: Mobilizing Buildings by Greg Syler

Editor’s Note: When I read this article by Greg Syler in Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices, I found it so thoughtful that I wanted to share a link to it with our our readers. 

In it Greg wrestles with the question of how to change how we think about and utilize our buildings so that we can become better able to shift their use when the demographics of neighborhoods around them shift. The core of his article is two provocative questions: How do we mobilize all of our building assets for their best use? And if we find that their best use is to sell them and plow the proceeds into ministry, are we willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of God’s mission in our neighborhoods?

Click here to read the article on ECFVP

Click here for more information on Greg Syler

Support FaithX

FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is done under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Want to learn more about missional opportunities
in your congregation’s neighborhood?
Click here for a free Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report

Want to learn how your judicatory can identify
emerging missional opportunities within its boundaries?
Click here to schedule a free demo of MapDash for Faith Communities and Strategic Missional Planning

FaithX Goes To Birmingham, Alabama

Next week, FaithX folk will be going to the Genesis conference on New Episcopal Communities. Aspiring church planters from dioceses around the country will be gathering, along with many of their bishops, for three days of information sharing, training, and coaching.

Ken Howard, our executive director and principal consultant, and Steve Matthews, one of FaithX’s two senior associate consultants, will be delivering plenary presentations and offering micro-coaching sessions with interested participants. Steve’s presentation is entitled, “Falling in Love with your Neighborhood” and Ken’s is entitled, “Grounding Discernment in Data: Missional Planning with MapDash for Faith Communities.”

Other topics at the conference will include: Convening and Nurturing Your Core Team, Hosting Transformative Conversations/Networking, What To Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned, Defining and Achieving Sustainability, and more.

FaithX will be offering a new consultative program, Strategic Missional Planning for Genesis Congregations, which has been customized to the needs of those church planters who will be applying for New Episcopal Communities Grants.

For more information on the New Episcopal Communities initiative, click here.

The Great Religion Singularity: McLaren’s Reflections on Howard’s Research

by Darren M. Slade, PhD

Editor’s Note: This article is a review of Brian McLaren’s “Conditions for the Great Religion Singularity,” which in turn is a review of Ken Howard’s research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity.” We almost titled this blog post, “The Church’s Frightmare,” given the coincidence (if you believe in such things) that it would post on Halloween and the fact that the death of institutional Christianity can be a scary thing for we who are its adherents to consider. Indeed, after reading the original article, one clergy colleague quipped, “I’m so glad I’m retiring this year: this is just depressing and scary.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Schism.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Awakening.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Emergence.”

And now, the church has entered a new era of
dramatic destabilization and deinstitutionalization…

THE GREAT RELIGION SINGULARITY

Can you imagine the death of Christianity? Can you imagine a world without the Christian Church? For many anthropologists, the death of Christianity is merely an eventuality like it has been for most human religions throughout time. 1

But for many believers, the death of Christianity is an impossibility. They are incapable of imaging the total annihilation of the Christian Church. And why not? New research suggests that the human brain is quite literally incapable of imagining (or even preparing for) its own death and annihilation, though it can easily conceive of other people’s demise.2 So, the death of something as integral to one’s identity as religion is likely to be just as hard to imagine. Yet, this may prove extremely problematic for the Christian religion, especially since the Pew Forum just announced that Christianity is still in rapid decline while religious “nones” are quickly increasing.3

If things continue unchanged and unchallenged, then the death of institutional Christianity is precisely what will happen. And believers won’t have to imagine it. They will be forced to live through it. 

Brian McLaren, Author/Speaker/Activist

Since the publication of Kenneth Howard’s 2017 article, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” there has been an increasing demand to understand the root causes and historical foundations for why institutional Christianity is, in a word, dying.4 What Howard’s research indicates is that the percentage increase of new Christian denominations and worship centers is actually outpacing the plateaued percentage of Christian believers around the world. The inference being that churches and denominations are fragmenting (i.e. internally dividing due to conflict or other factors) faster than they are growing.5 At its current rate of disintegration, institutional Christianity will have fragmented itself into near extinction by the end of the twenty-first century, having been reduced to miniscule and, thus, financially unsustainable and culturally uninfluential congregational tribes (the “religion singularity”). 6

Activist and author, Brian McLaren, has termed this era, “The Great Religion Singularity,” in his 2019 article, “Conditions for the Great Religion Singularity,” which provides a contextual explanation for why the demise of Christianity is directly linked to the Church’s moral failures.7

Here, McLaren employs the Buddhist “law of interdependent origination” to discuss ten factors that have led to institutional Christianity’s religion singularity. Each condition falls under two main categories: either a lack of rapid adaptability in religious institutions or the moral failure of institutional leaders. The ten conditional factors include authoritarian centralization, betrayal of the religious founder’s non-violence, a history of unacknowledged atrocities, military imperialism, white supremacy, scandals, reaction against scientific inquiry, doubling down on dualism, integrated and change-averse institutional systems, and paralysis and nostalgia.

These factors in large part reveal that it would be hypocritical for present-day Christians to be judgmental toward others. According to Ron Sider’s research, by most traditional Christian indicators of immorality – such as divorce, premarital sex, adultery, and self-centered materialism – “born again Christians” are no better than the general population, and more likely to express racial bias and spousal abuse than the average American.8   Sider’s findings are confirmed by PPRI’s more recent releases of the American Values Atlas, which finds significant numbers of conservative white evangelicals holding racial stereotypes of African Americans9 and denying that white nationalism is problematic. 10 As McLaren writes, the moral failure of Christians and Christians leaders “has made claims of one religion’s spiritual supremacy over others literally incredible and ethically reprehensible.”11  

To read McLaren’s full article on “The Great Religion Singularity” in Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry, click here or on the image below:

To read download and read the full article on “The Religion Singularity” in International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, click here or on the image below:

Work thumb

Darren Slade is research director for FaithX and general editor of Socio-Historical Exploration of Religion and Ministry. Darren curates relevant research for the FaithXperimental blog and the FaithX website.

1 See for example, Jack David Eller, “Is the Disintegration of Christianity a Problem—or Even a Surprise?,” Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 1, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 29-38, https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2019.vol1.no1.04.

2 Y. Dor-Ziderman, A. Lutz, and A. Goldstein, “Prediction-Based Neural Mechanisms for Shielding the Self from Existential Threat,” NeuroImage 202 (August 2019): 116080, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.116080.

3 “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.”

4 See for example, Darren M. Slade, “Religious Homophily and Biblicism: A Theory of Conservative Church Fragmentation,” The International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society 9, no. 1 (2019): 13‒28, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2154-8633/cgp/v09i01/13-28.

5 Cf. C. Kirk Hadaway, “Is Evangelistic Activity Related to Church Growth?,” in Church and Denominational Growth, ed. David A. Roozen and C. Kirk Hadaway (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1993), 169‒87.

6 Kenneth W. Howard, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society 7, no. 2 (2017): 77‒93, http://dx.doi.org/10.18848/2154-8633/cgp/v07i02/77-93.

7 Brian D. McLaren, “Conditions for the Great Religion Singularity,” Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry 1, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 40‒49, https://doi.org/10.33929/sherm.2019.vol1.no1.05.

8 Ronald J. Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience: Why Are Christians Living Just Like the Rest of the World? (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2005), 27‒28.

9 See the statistics in Robert P. Jones, Daniel Cox, and Rachel Lienesch, Who Sees Discrimination? Attitudes on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Race, and Immigration Status: Findings from PRRI’s American Values Atlas (Washington, DC: PRRI, 2017), accessed April 5, 2018, https://www.prri.org/research/americans-views-discrimination-immigrants-blacks-lgbt-sex-marriage-immigration-reform/; Sider, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, 24‒26; Christian Smith, Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 209‒12, 221‒22; Douglas R. Sharp, “Evangelicals, Racism, and the Limits of Social Science Research,” Christian Scholar’s Review 33, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 240‒45; and Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, Pbk. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 69‒91.

10  See the statistics in Robert P. Jones, Natalie Jackson, Diana Orces, Ian Huff, Oyindamola Bola, and Daniel Greenberg, Fractured Nation: Widening Partisan Polarization and Key Issues In 2020 Presidential Elections: Findings from PRRI’s American Values Atlas (Washington, DC: PRRI, 2019), accessed October, 2019, https://www.prri.org/research/fractured-nation-widening-partisan-polarization-and-key-issues-in-2020-presidential-elections/.

11 McLaren, “Conditions for the Great Religion Singularity,” 41.

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