The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Is your faith-based community or organization doing something innovative and experimental to engage or transform the neighborhoods and communities it serves? We at FaithX like to shine a spotlight on the people, programs, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the area of faith. Write about it and send it to ken@faithx.net. You might find your story featured here.

Keeping Congregations Connected: 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.” 

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FaithXperimental Spotlight: The Way Station, Spencer, Iowa

In our travels around the U.S., both digitally and physically, we at FaithX like to keep our eyes open for examples of people, programs, communities, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the area of faith. And when we do find one, we like to shine a light on them in a FaithXperimental spotlight blog post.        

Today’s Spotlight article is about The Way Station, based out of Spencer, Iowa. We first learned of The Way Station at the 2019 Genesis Conference in Birmingham, Alabama (part of the Episcopal Church’s New Episcopal Communities initiative), where several dozen new or planned Episcopal Church faith communities and ministries discussed their approaches to engaging their communities. The following description comes from an interview with Rev. Beth Preston, Priest in Charge of The Way Station.

A busy day at The Way Station might find Rev. Preston chatting with a couple of women who have come in for coffee and conversation, dishing up homemade chili to hungry youth after school, supervising candle-making in the Restoration Artworks studio, and checking on the youth who are playing Statues in the Garden in Friar Tuck’s Book Nook. The Way Station is an outreach of the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa and is, in the words of Bishop Alan Scarfe, “The church of the 21st Century.” Rev. Beth believes God planted this vision through the inspiration of a class at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Church and Contemporary Society. “We studied our current culture and what people like to gather around. We all talked about how we wanted to start a coffee shop,” Rev. Preston said. Another inspiration was Spirit Wind Center for Creativity and Healing in Stonington, CT, which Rev. Beth found out about through Sharing Magazine (OSL) and visited with her husband, Glenn. 

The Way Station opened in September of 2018. It operates out of a storefront in downtown Spencer, Iowa. There is a café, where guests are served coffee, tea, hot chocolate or cold beverages and snacks. A chapel is in the heart of the building and hosts a 3:00 pm Holy Eucharist on Sundays. Then there is Rev. Beth’s office, the art room, and the book room. The ministry operates on donations, grants, and offerings, and asks only free will donations of their guests. 

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FaithXperimental Spotlight: Car Care Clinic, Tulsa, OK

by Darren Slade

In our digital and physical travels around the U.S., we at FaithX like to keep our eyes open for examples of people, programs, communities, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the area of faith. When we find one, we like to shine a spotlight on them in a FaithXperimental blog post. Today, we focus on the Car Care Clinic of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

One of the biggest factors that contributes to perpetual inequality, poverty, and a risk of homelessness in the United States is a lack of self-sufficient transportation. In fact, immigrants, impoverished families, and people of color – especially African-Americans – are significantly more likely to suffer from car-lessness than non-poor families. Being without their own means of transportation tends to have a negative snowball effect on their overall economic circumstances (Klein & Smart, 2017). Having to rely exclusively on buses, subways, commuter trains, and other forms of public transportation means greater commute times and less scheduling flexibility. This, in turn, can have a severe impact on the ability to meet basic needs, like buying groceries, filling prescriptions, and going to the doctor, and may ultimately even result in loss of income or unemployment (cf. Hensley et al., 2018). 

It was an understanding of the potentially severe consequences that led members of the Tulsa Oklahoma community to gather together in 2002 to launch the  Car Care Clinic (CCC) of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a unique ministry dedicated to helping poorer families remain self-sufficient by providing free car repairs. 

We’ve all been carless at one time or another, due to some unexpected breakdown, accident, or random act of destruction (or sometimes just running out of gas). We’ve all experienced the frustration of being stranded without a car for hours or days while waiting for the mechanic or body shop to complete the repairs. And we’ve all gritted our teeth while waiting for the dreaded repair bill. 

Even for middle-class families, car repairs can pose a real financial pinch. A simple oil change can cost a proverbial “arm and leg.” And a major repair with most modern vehicles can end up costing hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands. Most of us don’t have that kind of money lying around for out-of-pocket expenses. 

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FaithXperimental Spotlight: TryTank tries PitchTank

By Ken Howard

In our travels around the U.S., both digitally and physically,
we at FaithX like keep our eyes open for examples of people, programs, communities, or ministries doing creative, innovative, and experimental things in the arena of faith. And when we find one, we like to shine a spotlight on them in a FaithXperimental blog post.

There’s nothing that we at FaithX like better than shining a light on people and programs who are experimenting with new and innovative ways of creating and cultivating communities of faith… unless the people are doing it are one of our clients – then we love it!

On January 1 of this year, two Episcopal seminaries, Virginia Theological Seminary (VTS) and General Theological Seminary (GTS), joined forces to launch an innovative joint project focused on the future of the church. They called this exciting new program the TryTank: An Experimental Laboratory for Church Growth and Innovation.  

Led by the Rev. Lorenzo Lebrija, TryTank works to understand the forces threatening the church in order to identify creative ways to equip future leaders to reinvigorate the church, seeking to understand where new church models, business models, and technology can meet the needs of today’s church.

It is this focus on experimental learning that makes this program not simply a “Think Tank” but a TRYTank. As Fr. Lebrija describes it, “Any time we have asked ourselves, ‘what if’ as we do and are church, those are opportunities to explore and try. We are going to be doing a lot of that. And we know we’re going to fail. A lot. But that’s how we can discover new adjacent possibilities, by trying.” TryTank not only sponsors experiments but shares their stories across the church, “because something that may not have worked in one place, may just be perfect in another.”

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FaithXperimental Spotlight: Justice Revival, Washington, DC

by Allyson McKinney Timm, Executive Director

“A Justice Ministry Whose Time Has Come”

A few years ago, Megan, a millennial fresh out of college, was clear on her calling—she wanted to join a Christian human rights organization. Megan had grown up in the Church, studied theology, led mission trips. But when she went searching, there wasn’t such a group to be found. She discovered worthwhile ministries tackling crucial justice issues from hunger to human trafficking, but none focused on human rights as such.

Fast forward to 2019: Megan, now a skilled professional, joins a team meeting one morning to meet a new nonprofit client. She is unexpectedly moved because she finally hears someone articulate her deep conviction about the vital need for a Christian ministry specializing in human rights. That person is Allyson McKinney Timm, founder of Justice Revival based out of Washington, DC.

Justice Revival describes itself as “a diverse, inclusive community of Christian faith, dedicated to serving as a voice for human rights in the United States.” Its vision is a vibrant, transformative movement in which Christian faith leaders call on U.S. lawmakers to fulfill their moral and legal duty to respect and protect the human rights of all people, not just a particular class of citizenry.

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