The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

American Religion: Census and Singularity

Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI)* has released its eagerly awaited 2020 Census of American Religion and the results are eye-opening.

One of the key findings of the 2020 Religion Census – that white, conservative, Evangelical denominations had plateaued and were declining, while Mainline denominations have stabilized and begun a slight uptick – almost precisely parallels what we predicted in our earlier publication, The Religion Singularity.** Published in early 2017, in the International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, the paper projected that the number of Christians per Worship Center was entering a period of increasingly rapid decline driven in large part by defections from conservative Evangelical denominations, most to join the ranks of the Nones (meaning “none of the above” or unaffiliated).

According to the Religion Census the number of white Evangelical has dropped precipitously from 23% in 2016 to 14.5% in 2020, a decline of more than one-third in 14 years. The decline appears to be driven by an exodus of Millennials and GenZ-ers, some of whom are joining (or returning) to Mainline denominations, but the vast majority of whom, while still considering themselves to be Christians, are choosing not to affiliate with a denomination.

[Read more…]

Total Christian Clergy Deaths Resulting from COVID-19


by Darren Slade, PhD – FaithX Director of Research

Over the past year, the FaithX Project, in partnership with researchers from the Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR), conducted a study to answer one very important question about clergy deaths:

How many Christian “clergy” members, from all denominations and traditions, died as a result of the COVID-19 virus?

While the study can only provide estimates and statistical probabilities, the research is finally complete and the preliminary numbers are in.

[Read more…]

Mapping Systemic Racism in the Diocese of Long Island

The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island will soon have a new and groundbreaking tool for helping its congregations, leaders, and people grapple with the pernicious issue of systemic racism. This public, data-grounded, map-based platform will reside on the diocesan website and be available for free to all who want to engage systemic racism in their neighborhoods.

The idea for this project was born when the diocese’s Canon for Ministry Support, the Rev. Canon Claire Woodley, attended a FaithX webinar entitled, “I Can’t Breathe: Mapping Systemic Racism in Your Community” last November. According to Canon Woodley, she immediately saw how this would fit perfectly into the diocese’s evolving approach to engaging systemic racism strategically rather than reactively and incrementally. Or as Canon Woodley put it…

“Spurred on by the death of George Floyd, the demonstrations in Brooklyn, throughout Long Island, and around the world, our diocese came to realize that unless and until we can develop a clear understanding of how systemic racism works in daily lived reality in our neighborhoods, we’ll just keep throwing money at it and trying tactical changes. 

This kind of learning, seeing the “red lines” and visually experiencing the specific impacts of underfunded schools, predatory lending, and other embedded structural problems helps us move past the divisions and into relationship. Seeing where our people live, move, and what limits their being, is powerful and can lead us into authentic transformative action as a whole Diocese moving towards wholeness.”

[Read more…]

7 Steps to Improved Vitality

Or what do you do after taking the Congregational Vitality Assessment

by the Rev. Ken Howard

So your leadership team has taken the Congregational Vitality Assessment. You’ve got your diagnostic scores and recommendations in hand, and you’re asking yourselves the question:

Now what?

The next step is to do a Missional Assessment: a seven step process to validate and help your congregation improve its vitality by leveraging its strengths to offset its weaknesses and more effectively engage the missional opportunities and challenges emerging in the neighborhoods you serve.

Here are the steps we recommend:

  1. Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
  2. Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
  3. Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
  4. Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
  5. Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
  6. Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
  7. Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, and build on successes.

The steps may seem simple at first glance. And in a way, they are fairly straightforward. But if you are looking for a quick and easy fix for your congregation’s vitality issues, you’re going to be disappointed, because the process of vitality improvement is neither quick nor easy. 

[Read more…]

Covid 19 and Episcopal 21: A Survey of the Lasting Effects of Covid on the Episcopal Church

Click Here to Take the Survey

​TryTank Experimental Lab, a joint project of Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, VA, and the General Theological Seminary in New York, in collaboration with York St. John University in York, England, launched a survey on June 4, 2021, to study the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Episcopal Church.

We at the FaithX Project are pleased to have been chosen to provide data analysis and opportunity assessment and recommendations for this project.

The survey is seeking to understand how clergy and churchgoers of the Episcopal Church in the United States have coped with the COVID-19 pandemic and to solicit their opinions about how this may affect the Church’s future. The survey can be found online at www.EpiscopalPulse.org.

[Read more…]