Blog | The FaithX Project

Jan 14 2021

Thinking Strategically about Your Next Leader

By Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant

This is post #2 of a 3-part series on Strategic Missional Planning

I remember when I was interviewing for my first call. Someone asked me how long I thought I would stay, should I receive the call. My answer was pretty standard, “Typically a first call is in the three-to-seven-year range,” I said. One of the committee members was crestfallen. She said, “I thought you would be here to marry my children!” That was 20 years ago and none of her children are married yet.

We tend to have lots of notions, romantic and other, about who our leaders should be and what we expect of them. But what if, instead of some a set of unclarified, unspoken expectations, we entered into a call process with a clear idea of where we were headed and who we needed to take us there?

Last year I consulted with a congregation doing just that kind of work. They were about to enter the call process; completing all the forms the judicatory sent to them. Yet they wanted to be sure about what they put on those forms and how it would serve them in the future. It turned out this congregation had lots of empty nesters and their child, youth and family ministries were dwindling. And, so as we talked, they sounded like most churches in their situation. “We want more families with kids,” they said. And, I thought, “Doesn’t everyone?”

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Jan 12 2021

New Date for Congregational Vitality Webinar: January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm

Dear Readers,

We have received a large number of requests from both current and perspective registrants to delay our Assessing & Addressing Congregational Vitality webinar for a week, in light of the events of last week and in deference to the upcoming inauguration. To that end, we are pushing the webinar back one week.

The new date and time is:
January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm

If for some reason you are unable to attend the new date, you have two options:

Request a refund through EventBrite.
Stay registered and receive the webinar recording.

Hope to see most of you on the 27th!

Blessings and thanks!
Ken+

The Rev. Ken Howard
Executive Director – FaithX
www.faithx.net

* FYI, In response to our poll of registrants, all but one said they could accommodate the date change, and that person said they would choose option 2.

Jan 07 2021

Transforming our Understanding of Strategic Missional Planning

By Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant

Editor’s Note: This is the beginning of a four-part series on Strategic Missional Planning in different contexts. Next week’s post will be on strategic missional planning for leadership transition.

Remember the good ‘ol days when we felt we could project the trajectory of our congregations and judicatories with some degree of confidence? Remember what it was like to be able to cast a vision based on thoughtful discernment and a sense of stability – believing that in five years we might just reach our goals?

The world has certainly changed in a year, and we are reminded again that we are not in control. A couple of nights ago I had a very dramatic and involved dream. All night long, I was battling evil “Transformers.” You know, the Paramount Pictures, 200-feet-tall monsters that have the ability to change themselves from a walking robot to a fire-shooting four-wheel vehicle of destruction. They are very adaptable based on the threat and the weaknesses they see in their opponent. In reaction to their threats, I was also called to be very adaptable (mostly in the way I hid from them). It was an exhausting night.

2020 was an exhausting year, and we as faith communities continue to be called toward adaptability. In 2021 it is possible to plan and to be adaptable… and even strategic, but we won’t do it in the same way we did prior to 2020. We need to recommit to those spiritual practices that ground us in God’s love, to the practices that enable us to listen to one another and our neighbors at a deep level, to practices that encourage us to accompany our hurting neighbors in a more courageous and prophetic way – and we need to understand our world better in order to move forward together based on our current reality.

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Dec 23 2020

Merry Christmas from your friends at FaithX!

and a brief (or at least relatively short) message

By the Rev. Ken Howard
Executive Director – The FaithX Project

It’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?

This is the year that proved the old proverb:
“If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans.”

We all started this year with big plans:
In our congregational life, our work life, our family life, and our personal life.

Little did we expect that 2020 would bring:

A deadly, once-in-a-century, worldwide pandemic
that killed over 300,000 Americans and 1.64 million people worldwide.

A deep, prolonged, and worldwide economic downturn
(the second one of this century).

A national year of upheaval and racial reckoning
after the continued killing of unarmed black men (and women) by police.

A national election marked by divisive rhetoric
and post-election actions at the highest levels
that endangered the rule of law.

2020 was a year that overturned all of our expectations, plans, and paradigms of how to be and to do communities of faith.

And it’s hard to know whether God is laughing or crying
or both.

But I believe that there is grace to be found
in the upheaval that is 2020.

God has used all that has happened:

To teach us that being a faith community really is not about a building.

To help us discover innovative ways
of being faith communities and organizing our congregations
that we might never have figured out if we had a choice in the matter.

To bring our faith communities (and a broad swath of our country)
to a new level of commitment to the cause
of bringing about racial equity and dismantling systemic racism.

And all that has happened in our political life
has taught us many lessons about what we need to do to strengthen the institutions of democracy and the rule of law.

Our work will be cut out for us in 2021,
but I have faith that what we have learned will serve us well.

So Merry Christmas to you and yours from all of us at FaithX!

Ken, Steve, Mary, Darren, and Mary Beth

Dec 17 2020

New Year, Same Challenges. Follow the Light!

by Mary C. Frances

We couldn’t have imagined we’d still be here last March.

No, we couldn’t have imagined then that we would still be here now but here we are physically distanced, doing drive-through worship, showing up on Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube. And, somehow, some way…by the grace of God, it’s working, it’s all working. And it needs to keep working for quite some time.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time talking with a public health expert. Someone who lives in the world of exposures and workplace safety. Someone who has no skin in the game except to keep people safe. He said hunker down. The worst is yet to come. We have another 9-12 months ahead of us before we can feel safe gathering in groups indoors. A year?! Another year? We definitely didn’t see that coming last March!

But maybe that news could be freeing. Rather than looking ahead for each corner we need to turn in order to go back to the way things were before, what if we let go of that and just focus on what’s ahead, focus on the new year? What if we dove into the next year with creativity, energy, grace, and adaptability without worrying about being in our buildings? Could this be our best year of ministry yet?

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