The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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!’”

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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

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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

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

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.”

The Institutional Christianity now 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

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When “Perfection” is the Opposite of “Perfect”

by Ken Howard

A while back I was challenged on my assertions that the goal of Christian community was not to achieve and maintain perfection, and that neither Jesus Christ nor the Apostle Paul ever intended to start a religion called “Christianity.”

So I’d like to comment briefly here on the concepts of “perfection” and “religion.”

If we in the present day are not careful in our use of terms, we run the risk of overlaying the original meanings of the words of Scripture with our own connotations.

For example, we tend to think of perfection in the absolute sense, as in entirely without error, wholly without defect, as something or someone having achieved a state of being which is complete in-and-of itself.  When we hear Jesus say, “You are to be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” we view it as reaching a state of perfection exactly like God’s state of perfection. However, the writers of the New Testament used the term in a more nuanced way. Our sense of perfect is close to the Greek “aortist” tense, which connotes an act that is complete and permanent. But in all the places where we are being asked to be “perfect,” the tense is not aortist, as in completed once-and-for-all, but “imperfect,” as in an ongoing process. Paul implies as much when he says “not that I have already become perfect” (Phil. 3:12) and when he says that God “will perfect” a good work in us “until the day of Christ Jesus” (Phil. 1:6).

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