The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Congregational Vitality Assessment: A Free Tool for Determining the Health and Sustainability of Faith Communities

 

“He who has himself as a doctor has a fool as a patient.”

Or so the old saying goes. And like most proverbs, it contains a lot of wisdom. It never turns out well when people self-diagnose and self-treat, because they have neither the necessary knowledge nor essential objectivity, and at the same time have such prodigious expertise at hiding from themselves things they are afraid to face.

The same is true for congregations. It is hard for most congregations to dispassionately evaluate their own congregational health. The passion that fuels their engagement with their mission also robs them of emotional distance and objectivity. Their passionate desire for the future of their own beloved community may blind them to symptoms of unsustainability.

But perhaps most fundamentally, they have lacked a research-based, empirical foundation upon which to evaluate their health. Until now…

After more than a decade of weighing the research on congregational vitality, in late November FaithX Research is releasing in beta form our newly-developed self-assessment tool: the Congregational Vitality Assessment (or CVA).

The CVA provides a congregation with two scores:

  • Vitality: How healthy the congregation is.
  • Sustainability: Whether the congregation has the people and the financial and contextual resources necessary support itself.

The Vitality score examines 10 aspects of congregational life:

  1. Vision, Mission, & Discernment
  2. Lay Engagement & Empowerment
  3. Context Awareness & Inclusion
  4. Change Readiness
  5. Dealing with Differences
  6. Spiritual Life & Worship
  7. Formation, Education, & Training
  8. Outreach
  9. Leadership & Organization
  10. Stewardship

The Sustainability score examines 2 aspects of sustainability:

  1. Congregational Sustainability: The ability of the congregation to support itself.
  2. Community Sustainability: The ability of the community to support a congregation.

The Congregational Vitality Assessment is based on five primary research sources and more than 40 secondary sources.

The CVA takes about 30 minutes to finish. It can be completed by a single congregational leader, a congregational leadership group, or the entire congregation. It can be done as a standalone exercise or as part of an intentional congregational vitality consultation.

It is available for free download in PDF and XLS versions.

All we ask is that you provide us your feedback.

Send your feedback on your use of the Congregational Vitality Assessment to Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

If you’d like to explore with Ken’s availability for coaching, consultation, or presentations, contact him at ken@faithx.net or 301-704-3290.

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Datastory for Faith Communities Update: Continued Development and Beta Testing

 

Development and Beta Testing of Datastory for Faith Communities continues apace, with public release still anticipated for early 2018.

Our beta test sites are gearing up. Two of the new sites – the Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Oklahoma – have already provided us with the names and locations of their congregations. We will soon have that data uploaded into the app, which will allow us to generate MissionWebs (the first step in Missional Context Analysis) for every church in both of those dioceses. (click here for more information on MissionWebs).

We have also made some significant enhancements to the app in just the last few weeks:

Improved User Interface. Users now select data overlays from five menu categories: Base Map Display, Locations & MissionWebs, Population Characteristics, Community Issues, and Community Resources.

New Data Overlays Added. 14 new overlays (now 26 total), including: Educational Predominance, Crime Rate, Poverty Rate, Educational Resources, Healthcare Resources, 10-Minute Drive Time, and more (click here for current overlays list).

And there are even more data overlays under consideration:

Dozens of additional data overlays are under consideration, including: projected diversity/minority/Spanish-speaker growth, school-age children by grade range, adults by age range, charitable/religious spending, and more (click here for future overlays list).

If you would like to find out more about Datastory for Faith Communities and how it might help you create a better missional understanding of your neighborhoods, contact Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

Give or Take: A Practical Real-World Experiment – and You’re Invited

by Ken Howard

I’m planning a real-world experiment in the social impact of giving and taking, and I’d like to invite your participation.

30 years ago, I designed a structured group experience to test a two-part hypothesis:

Part A: There are three kinds of people in world (I’m not the first to make this observation):

  1. Givers: People who give without thought of getting.
  2. Takers: People who take without thought of giving.
  3. Exchangers: People who are willing to give, but only if they get equal value in return.

Part B: It is better to give, than to take…or exchange. Not just better for the soul, but actually more productive.

The structured experience was called Stock Exchange. It involved dividing a large group of people into teams, giving them a task to complete, and inviting them to attempt to complete the task successfully in three successive rounds with different instructions on how the teams were to behave toward each other.

The task was simple: gather a specified number of four different colors of poker chips, knowing that the facilitator had distributed to the groups exactly the number of poker chips for all groups to succeed (though not in the amounts each group needed).

The instructions for the three rounds were also very simple:

Round 1 – Taking: Groups were instructed to look out only for themselves. They could ask for, beg for, or steal the chips they needed from the other groups, but could not give or exchange chips. (Do unto others before they do unto you.)

Round 2 – Exchanging: Groups were now allowed to make quid-pro-quo exchanges with other groups. They could only give as many chips as they got. (Do unto others exactly what they do unto you.)

Round 3 – Giving: Groups were instructed to look out not for themselves but for every other group. They were to gather up all the chips of each color of which they had an excess and distribute them to groups with shortages of those color chips. (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)

Over 100’s of uses, the results of the three rounds have always seemed to follow this pattern:

Round 1: Taking – Everybody Loses: Resource inequalities develop rapidly. Because groups hoard their resources, every group ends up with a glut of one or two chip colors, but a dearth of all the others.

Round 2: Exchanging – Most Everybody Loses: Occasionally a group will succeed in the task but mostly none do, since quid-pro-quo exchanges cannot succeed in addressing resource inequalities.

Round 3: Giving – Everybody Wins: Because every group has every other group looking out for them, hoarding stops, resource inequalities are addressed, and all succeed.

But now I’d like to get a more scientific read on my hypothesis…and I’d like your help.

It’ll be easy as 1-2-3. All you have to do is:

  1. Click here to download Stock Exchange.
  2. Try it in your organization.
  3. Send me the result using the form below.

When I publish the results, you and your organization will be listed in the acknowledgement!

Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

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Fact and Opinion, and their Place in Dialogue

by Ken Howard

As many of my readers may know, I am administering a volunteer-moderated Facebook group I started early this year, Dialogue across Differences: Speaking from the Heart, which is dedicated to promoting respectful post-election dialogue across the many fissures that have developed over the years and were terribly exacerbated during the last election. Recently, in response to a question from a dialogue participant, I wrote this post, which I thought would be useful to many of you.

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Latest Research: Conservative Denominations Joining Mainline In Decline

America’s Changing Religious Identity 2016:
A Research Review
click on image to download document

By Ken Howard

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has just published their findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas in a study entitled America’s Changing Religious Identity.  Their findings add further confirmation those of our research, The Religion Singularity, published in the International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society in July, which projects that institutional Christianity will become unsustainable in its current forms before the end of this century.

Of particular significance is the finding that, despite decades insistence to the contrary by their proponents, theologically conservative denominations and congregations are not immune to the decline that has affected mainline liberal denominations after all, but rather are making up for lost time, matching or exceeding the current rate of shrinkage of their mainline brethren and sistren. In fact, it may even be worse for them than it looks, as millennials are abandoning conservative evangelical congregations at a rate faster than they are leaving other segments of institutional Christianity.

Also consistent with our findings in The Religion Singularity is the fact that “religiously unaffiliated” is one of the fastest growing and “religious” groups in America, growing at such a rate that they could become a significant majority of the U.S. population in less than 15 years (our projection based on PPRI statistics). Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated is increasing as a portion of each new generation. More than a third (36%) of Americans 18-30 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to less than a tenth of those 80 or older.

Another finding of significance is how syncretized religious and political affiliation have become, with the two becoming so overlapped that political affiliation is fast becoming a predictor of religious affiliation and theological leanings.  For example, if a person politically identifies as Republican, there is a 73% chance they will be a white conservative Christian, where white Christians make up only 29% of Democrats (14% of Democrats under 30).

Findings like these, Pew Research’s America’s Changing Religious Landscape (2015), and our own research, The Religion Singularity (International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2017), are often greeted with a combination of fatalism (“We’re all gonna die”) and denial (“My church is growing, so this can’t be true”). But we see them as a vision-clearing wake-up call and a opportunity to rethink the way we do church so that, while we may see the end of institutional Christianity in this century, we can develop a Christ-following movement of faith-based communities from its remains.

Other findings include:

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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.