The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Connecting to Climate Change to Impact your Community for the Good

By Steve Matthews

“The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.”                                             ― John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace

Today I am sitting in my hometown in the mountains of NC working on a friend’s porch.  It’s a beautiful day.  Dappled sunshine on the Blue Ridge.  The rhododendrons have finished blooming and the mountain laurel blooms are fading.   It seems as if this landscape might have looked like this since the Cherokee lived here, but that’s not true.  The natural world is changing here due to human activity. There are fewer songbirds and butterflies migrating through.  The hemlocks have been decimated by a non-native insect.  The dogwoods are diseased because in these parts, climate change means more rain and warmer temperatures resulting in disease and fungus that the trees can’t fight off.

As I drive around the county, I notice that there is more flooding in low-lying areas.  Most of the subsidized housing is in this area, as are the new, electrical towers that light, heat, and cool the town’s homes and businesses.  In short, minority groups, the poor, and compromised plant and animal species in my town bear the brunt of poor short-term and long-term human decision making.  

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Coming Soon: CVA – Judicatory Version

Coming Late June/Early July
click here to request more information
about our early adopter discount

Hard to believe it’s only been nine months since we launched Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA 1.0) in collaboration with the Episcopal Church Foundation.

We’ve come a very long way in a very short time!
And soon we will release CVA 2.0
and launch the new CVA Judicatory Version

CVA 2.0 (the congregational version) will feature a totally redesigned user interface, based on user input, for a much enhanced user experience, including a new Spanish-language version.

What’s in the CVA Judicatory Version?
We created the CVA-JV in response to requests and design input from several judicatories (dioceses, synods, districts) across the U.S. that wanted to incorporate into the systemwide congregational development processes. It will provide them with a judicatory-specific dashboard that will allow them to:

  • Directly coordinate the administration of the CVA to their congregations.
  • Receive anonymized diagnostic summary assessments of their congregations’ vitality and sustainability.
  • Monitor congregational vitality and sustainability on a year-to-year basis.
  • Add locally-relevant questions about congregations’ ministries, programs, and other important information.
  • Supplement the backward-looking parochial reporting data with real-time, forward-looking diagnostic data and recommendations that their congregations can use to improve their own vitality and sustainability. 

How can we access the CVA Judicatory Version?
The CVA-Judicatory Version will be made available on a subscription basis. Included in the subscription will be free annual updates reflecting new congregational vitality research and incorporating user feedback and suggestions. 

How much will it cost to subscribe?
Once released, the annual cost of a subscription to the CVA-JV will be $2,495, with a first year set-up fee of $2,500 (to cover customized programming).

Is there a discount for early adopters?
We are offering a $1,000 setup early adopter discount to judicatories that sign up for subscriptions before our late-June/early-July launch date.

Have any judicatories signed up yet?
We are happy to announce that the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma is our first early adopter. Currently, we are in discussions with several other Episcopal dioceses and ELCA synods. Watch our FaithX blog for updates.

click here to request more information
about our early adopter discount

Does the Future Have a Church? And in What Form?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

“Does the Church have a future?” is the wrong question.
The real question is, “Does the future have a Church?”
– Attributed variously

I think I agree… I would only add, “And if it does, in what form will that Church be?” 

It was a little over three years ago in 2017 that I published my research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. But I still prefer my working title, “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith.”

If the term “Singularity” sounds kind of astrophysics-y or SciFi-ish to you, good! It’s supposed to. Because institutional Christianity is entering a kind of wormhole that will deliver us into a context so different, it might as well be an entirely new universe. And what we do now to prepare our congregations and judicatories will determine whether they will survive and thrive or be consigned to oblivion.

The crux of the Religion Singularity is this: Christianity has become better at division than multiplication – we are producing new churches and denominations at an exponentially faster rate than we are producing new Christians. My 2017 projections indicated that by the end of the century there would be only 17,000 Christians per denomination and 67 Christians per worship center. And that’s PER not IN, which means that when you factor out the “Nones,” the average membership of those institutions could be less than half that, which means that all of our ecclesiatical institutions – from congregations to judicatories to denominations – will have become unsustainable in their current forms. 

And that’s B.C.: Before Covid accelerated those trends and crushed all of our familiar paradigms about what Church was supposed to be. This year, for the first time in the history of the U.S., fewer than half the population now “attends Church” (in either physical or virtual form).

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Church Attendance in Decline: Announcing NMIR 1.3

by Mary Frances, Senior Consultant

Recently, Gallup announced that church membership had declined below 50% for the first time in recorded history.  In 2000, 70% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.  And in the brief period of two decades, in 2020 that number has dropped to 47%.  This news was not lost on a client of mine who brought it up in a recent coaching session.  He shared the sentiments of many of his older churchgoers: we need to grow the church!  But what does evangelism mean in the nearly post-pandemic world of 2020?

The conversation that stemmed from that was one that I am deeply passionate about.  It’s time to stop thinking about growing the church.  Yes, I said it.  Stop worrying about growing the church.  Start thinking about the neighborhood in which the church resides.  Start thinking about the community, the people, the strengths, the weaknesses and risk factors, and the resources available to your community.  We need to think about our communities because the revitalization of the church starts with the revitalization of the community.  Usually, we think about it in reverse.  We think about revitalizing the church and then promise we will turn our attention outward once we are in better shape.  But how can a church be strong if the community itself is in decline, is struggling, and is challenging in any number of ways?  I believe that the church will be revitalized as it turns its attention outward, to be in relationship and to be a resource to the community where it lives.

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Learning the Language of Love

By Steve Matthews

Editor’s Note:
At first glance, this blog post might not seem very “FaithX-y…” But when you think about it, love requires the willingness to listen and see with an open mind and heart, and overcoming bias, blind spots, and preconceived notions about the people you aim to love. Which is a big part of what we do at FaithX, only with congregations and their neighborhoods.

“When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

And so Pentecost begins. It begins with a loud, even violent, sound and it begins with strange, tongue-like images on each person present… and in its wake this Spirit leaves the disciples with an ability to speak in other languages.  

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