The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Adapting to the Covid New Normal: Has Online Church Giving Gone Down?

By Dr. Darren Slade,
FaithX Research Director

This discussion on the difficulties about online church giving is the third post in our ongoing blog series, Adapting to the Covid New Normal, where our research director, Dr. Darren Slade, will provide a deeper research base for the posts we are publishing on congregations and Covid-19.

Dr. Slade will describe the research and Ken Howard will provide a pastoral perspective.

In a previous post entitled, “When You Can’t Pass the Offering Plate,” Rev. Ken Howard dispelled a number of myths about what it was going to be like for congregations to give and collect donations during the COVID-19 pandemic. For instance, Ken suggested that online church giving would not decrease the amount of money donated simply because people are unable to attend in-person church services or that the impersonal nature of online giving will give people an opportunity to skimp on their tithes. In this blog post, we will go through Ken’s myths to see what the current research is saying about giving online to churches.

[Read more…]

Creating Deeper Community Connections

Deeper Community

Dear Readers,

After many requests, we have decided to postpone our webinar – Creating Deeper Community Connections – from February 17 to February 24 at 1:00pm ET to allow prospective participants to devote their entire attention to the celebration of Ash Wednesday on the 17th.

To register for the webinar, click here.

If you already registered and are okay with the new date, don’t worry: your registration will be automatically transferred to the new date.

If you are already registered and the date doesn’t work for you, simply go to the Eventbrite webinar registration page, request a refund, and we will happily comply.

Meanwhile, we hope to see you on the 24th.

Have a great Ash Wednesday!

by Mary Frances

Click this link to register
for our webinar on this topic on February 17, 2021 at 1:00pm
sponsored by FaithX, ECF, and the Gathering of Leaders

When I was in my last parish call, I was fortunate to receive a detailed demographic report from one of the big companies offering such things.  I spent hours pouring over the pages and pages of information.  Median age, median income, race, education, and more.  The whole thing was at least 20 pages long and eventually I realized that it just wasn’t going to do me any good.  First, I didn’t really understand what to do with this information.  Second, I didn’t know where some of these population groups were.  I understood there was a growing Latino population in town, but I didn’t know where they were.  I knew that the number of people experiencing homelessness was growing, but aside from the few who came to the door of the church, was there a place these folks gathered?  Sought shelter?  I just didn’t know and, perhaps more importantly, I didn’t know how to find out.
Today we have clarity on two of the issues I raised above.  We now have demographic reports that are clear, concise, and point to community strengths, weaknesses, and risk factors.  The Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report from FaithX provides over 40 relevant data points – in just two pages! And when we dig deeper into those data points we can determine how and where a community is growing or not, where there is affordable housing or not, and predominant population groups based on age, race, and gender.  We can also determine at a glance if there are concerns about medical coverage, the growing cost of daycare or how many people in your neighborhood are falling into poverty.  These numbers are vital to going beyond anecdotal evidence to understand the joys and concerns of the community in which we are planted.

[Read more…]

Strategic Redevelopment

This post on Strategic Redevelopment is written by Steve Matthews, Senior Consultant for the FaithX Project.

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.”

David Whyte

I have invested a lot of enjoyable time and energy working with churches in redevelopment over the past 10 years.  Even so, sometimes I still find myself scratching my head asking, “What is redevelopment?,” and “What does it mean to go about it strategically?”  Honestly, both words sound like a pretty mechanistic description for the vital work of nurturing beloved community and daring to be vulnerable enough to share ourselves and our experience of God’s love with our neighbors (which is the core of redevelopment for me).  

[Read more…]

Our love/hate relationship with the Church – Reflections on a poem by Carlo Carretto

Below is a poem by Carlo Carretto:

love_hate
Carlo Carretto


A Letter to the Church

How baffling you are, oh Church,

and yet how I love you!

How you have made me suffer,

and yet how much I owe you!

I would like to see you destroyed,

and yet I need your presence.

You have given me so much scandal

and yet you have made me understand what sanctity is.

I have seen nothing in the world
more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false,

and yet I have touched nothing
more pure, more generous, more beautiful.

How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face,

and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you,

because I am you,

though not completely.

And besides, where would I go?
Would I establish another?

I would not be able to establish it without the same faults,
for they are the same faults I carry in me.

And if I did establish another,

it would be my Church,

not the Church of Christ.

And I am old enough to know

that I am no better than anyone else.

– by Carlo Carretto, from The God Who Comes

In my book Paradoxy I used the phrase “a mistake made holy” to describe the paradox that is Church:

On the one hand,
there is no evidence in scripture that Jesus (or Paul, for that matter)
intended to start a new religion called Christianity.

Yet on the other hand,
it is clear that God’s Holy Spirit
has become inextricably bound up in the Church.

On the one hand,
it is clearly fallen.

Yet on the other hand,
it is clearly the body of Christ.

This poem by Carlo Carretto draws our attention
not only to the paradox that is Church,

but also to the profound paradox
of our painfully ambivalent relationship with it…

That it is impossible to truly and deeply love the Church
without sometimes hating it as well.

A Tale of Three Churches: Strategic Missional Planning in Imperiled Congregations

By The Rev. Ken Howard

On the surface, they were three different congregations in two different parts of the country – one in a northern urban city, one in a mid-Atlantic suburb, and the other in a suburban southern resort area – but otherwise seemed very much the same. But all three were imperiled (e.g., in their judicatories’ version of hospice care), and their human and financial resources were dwindling rapidly.

Their average Sunday attendance was between 30 and 40, with Christmas and Easter attendance hovering around 60, in worship spaces with a capacity of 3-10 times that total. They were rapidly drawing down their endowments, none of which were above $25,000, and roughly two-thirds of their normal operating income was from rentals. Their giving per household was exceptionally high (a point of pride), but this is frequently the case with congregations that know at some level they are in danger of closing soon. They were still imperiled.

That’s when we were called in…

We took all of them through a process we call Neighborhood Missional Assessment, in which we explored the missional opportunities and challenges in the neighborhoods they serve, their vitality strengths and weaknesses, and whether and how they could leverage their strengths to better engage the opportunities and challenges, as well as address their weaknesses. We ran Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Reports to explore key demographic trends and projections that define neighborhood missional opportunities and challenges, and MapDash for Faith Communities to dive more deeply into the demographics and projections they deemed relevant. We used our free Congregational Vitality Assessment to explore their vitality in 10 areas of congregational life, as well as their likely sustainability (with those whose judicatories subscribed to MapDash, we explored their vitality and sustainability scores). And we did trend analysis and projection on their weekly attendance, membership, and income to determine when they each would flatline (all within 10 years).

Here is what we found and how each congregation responded to combat their being imperiled…

[Read more…]

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