The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Keeping Congregations Connected: Shining a Spotlight on Jim Papile and Pajama Church

By Ken Howard
(with Jim Papile)

As we continue our “Keeping Congregations Connected” series, faith leaders have begun sharing with the experiments they are undertaking to keep their congregations connected to each other and their communities in the face of the COVID crisis. So in the days and weeks ahead we are refocusing many of our FaithXperimental Spotlight posts on some of their innovative approaches as the crisis continues.

Today we are shining a Spotlight on the Rev. Jim Papile and a his recent COVID-”inspired” worship experiment that he calls Pajama Church.    
Last Sunday, two small, local churches Jim serves came online together for the first time to read Morning Prayer.

As you may already know, the service of Morning Prayer is one of the regular forms of corporate worship in the Episcipal Church’s Book of Common Prayer that does not include communion. 

“To say that it was a new experience for all of us,” says Jim, “is an accurate, and probably an obvious statement.”  On the one hand, some people had trouble negotiating the web platform for the first time, some were not happy having to be in this unfamiliar place.  

On the other hand, most people were very grateful.  “We had a couple who joined us from the road, driving up 95 from Florida,” Jim reported, “We had several elderly folk who live alone that were especially thankful for the service, as they cannot get out of the house due to COVID 19.  Hearing the voices of their friends was a huge help.” At the end of their time together, as they briefly reviewed their pajama church experience, Jim says one member commented that it was kind of nice to worship in my pajamas.” 

To worship in one’s pajamas. That comment made Jim remember how, when he was as a child, his mother and her contemporaries would not think of going to church without their hats and white gloves.  But now that he lives and serve churches in a beach town it’s not at all uncommon for him to see people coming to church in shorts and flip flops. But wearing PJs to church is brand new.

“It got me thinking,” Jim observed, “about how this moment in time, in Church Time, is not only a tragedy with so many vulnerable getting sick and dying, but maybe an opportunity to re-think how we do church.” As deeply committed as Jim is to the moving traditions of our liturgies, it’s not that he doesn’t miss the bread and the wine, and the powerful music, but that this experience has clarifired for him that maybe those things are not the most important reason we gather, or invite others to gather we us, but rather being together, honoring and thanking God for the unimaginable grace and gift of our lives and the lives of those we love. 

Reflecting on the whole experience, Jim offers this observation:

“So what does it mean to be part of a pajama church.  Well, when we have our pajamas on we are vulnerable, unadorned.  Without make-up, with our hair in curlers (does anyone wear curlers to bed anymore?) in our rattiest old t-shirt and boxers maybe we are our realist.  Power, money, big crowds, lots of swagger much of society sees our faith as what Richard Rohr calls “Churchianity.” I remember how excited i would get when I was invited to sleep overs with friends, wasting popcorn in bed, telling each other scary stories which somehow made us feel safer, not more fearful.  Virtual church in our pajamas in this scary time, being present in all our humanity to each other and to the god who will not desert us. May this not be a ending, but a new beginning.”

This post is part of an ongoing series. Future topics may include:

  • Online worship at a distance Part 2: Communion at a Distance
  • Online Outreach Part – 2: More tools and strategies.
  • Social Vulnerability: A new tool for predicting at-risk neighborhoods.
  • Things people can do to create a sense of community with their neighbors and neighborhoods.
  • Tools and strategies for hosting online fellowship.
  • Tools and strategies for facilitating online bible study and formation. 
  • Tools and strategies congregations can use to locate and reach populations most vulnerable to COVID19. 
  • Tools and strategies by which judicatories can resource their congregations
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FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is carried out under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Keeping Congregations Connected: When You Can’t Pass the Offering Plate…

By Ken Howard

Never let a crisis go to waste.

Winston Churchill

What do you do when you can’t pass the offering plate?

How does congregational giving happen when a pandemic has shut our doors?

Our traditional ways of congregational giving are just one more of our paradigms of how to be faith communities crushed by the COVID crisis. And like our other congregational paradigms that have fallen before COVID19, they are probably gone for good. At least I hope so, because when paradigms collapse in the face of crisis, that means that they are either based on false assumptions or did not adequately address the full reality of human experience.

I believe the new paradigm is going involve some form of online giving.

There are a lot of online giving solutions that are on offer. Faith-based platforms, such as EasyTithe, Givelify, PushPay, LifeWay Generosity, and Tithely. Fundraising platforms, like Fundly, Network for Good – DonateNow, and QGiv. Generic platforms, such as Paypal, Venmo, Zelle, and online bill pay through your bank. Lately, even Facebook has gotten into the fundraising act.  And there are plenty of evaluations of each (just Google “Best Giving Platforms”).

So rather than discuss the platforms and how to use them, I want to dispel a few myths that may be holding us back from experimenting with online giving, by sharing insights I’ve gained from talking to several online giving researchers (come back later for a list of links to giving research).

[Read more…]

Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID19: Strategies and Tools for COVID-Related Outreach

By the Rev. Ken Howard

Keeping Congregations Together in the Face of COVID19 is a blog series on strategies and tools for doing and being what God is calling your congregation to be and do in the current pandemic.
Click here for the previous post

How can our congregations do effective outreach while the COVID pandemic makes social distancing necessary?

How can our congregations contribute to controlling the Coronavirus?

These are two important questions to ask and answer during the current pandemic (and there are likely many more)…

First, ground yourself in hard data from reliable sources about Coronavirus and COVID19: What is it? What does it do? How does it spread? How can people both protect themselves from the virus and avoid spreading it to others? How do you know you might have it? What do you do if you think you do? What COVID-related resources are in your area?

Reliable, data-grounded sources and resources include:

[Read more…]

Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID: What we learned from our experiment with online worship

By the Rev. Ken Howard

Beyond Online Worship is a blog series on strategies and tools
for doing and being church in the face of the current pandemic.
Click here for the previous post

In our previous post we talked about how a faithful response to the current pandemic involves more than simply live streaming worship services (congregations do not live by worship alone), but involves finding creative and experimental ways to do and be all the things that churches (and other faith communities) are supposed to be and do, and especially how we exercise our “burden of care” to our neighbors and neighborhoods. And that our responses may ultimately lead to our congregations and the communities they serve surviving and thriving together. 

Subsequent posts will deal with each of those things in turn. But let’s start with what we learned from our recent experiment with online worship (last Sunday), in cooperation with Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, which reached 51 people on Zoom and 900+ on Facebook Live.

So what did we learn?

Online worship is not enough. Not bad for a first try, but after literally patting ourselves on the back (because COVID kept us from patting each others backs) for a few minutes after the second of the two services ended, what we learned was that, while online worship was necessary, it was not sufficient, and there were so many other things we needed to figure out how to do and be while social distancing. And that realization led to this blog series.

[Read more…]

Keeping Congregations Connected (a series): Beyond Livestream Worship

By the Rev. Ken Howard

This is the first in a multipart series on strategies and tools for faith communities in the face of COVID19

The COVID19 pandemic is not the first time Christianity has been faced with the moral question of how to respond in the face of pandemic. In fact, the question is nearly as old as the Church itself. One of the first times was during the third century Roman plague. Something likely akin to Ebola, the so-called Cyprian plague (after Bishop Cyprian of Carthage) which ravaged the Empire from 250-270 CE.

Just as they had in the Antonin plague of the second century, the powerful and well-to-do of the Empire fled the cities for the relative safety of their countryside villas, leaving the rest of the populace to fend for themselves. As attested to by both Christian and secular writers of the time, just as they did in the previous plague, the Galileans (as they were called) did the opposite, staying behind and even coming in from the countryside to feed the poor, care for the afflicted, comfort the dying, bury the dead, and to attend to public hygiene, doing this not just for the faithful but for their entire communities, Christian and non-Christian alike. It was, as Bishop Cyprian put it, their burden of care. Two remarkable things happened: they helped curb the contagiousness of the plague (the death rate was as much as 50% lower in cities with Christian communities) and the plague (or rather their response to it) helped make Christianity extremely contagious, so that it spread rapidly throughout the Empire.

Today we are faced with a modern plague but the question is the same: how are we called to live in the face of it. And our answers may ultimately lead to our congregations and the communities they serve surviving and thriving together. How might this be?

[Read more…]

The FaithX Project, Inc. is 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a religious and charitable purpose operated as a ministry by the Rev. Ken Howard under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Bishop of Washington.