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? Write about it and send it to ken@faithx.net. You might find your story featured here.

FaithXperimental Spotlight: The New Story Festival – March 29-31, 2019

From time to time FaithXperimental features stories about faith communities engaging their communities in innovative and experimental ways.

Today’s FaithXperimental Spotlight features the New Story Festival being held on March 29-31 in Austin, Texas. The New Story Festival is a new annual gathering for community, creativity, and the common good: a bold experiment for a better world, embodying imagination, spirituality, social action, and playful connection – defined above all by the practice of love.

The FaithX Project will be an organizational sponsor of the event, and Ken Howard has been invited to submit several proposals for presentations at the festival. FaithX and our newly launched and independently-governed SHERM Journal (Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry) are festival sponsors. And because FaithX is a partner organization, those who register through the FaithX portal get a $20 discount.

As the Festival website says, the world runs on stories – the narratives that fuel the ways we live in this world and relate to one another. Our stories can liberate or oppress, encourage reconciliation or further separation, inspire new life or even bring death. But when we become conscious of our stories, we can begin to change them. Believing that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,” the New Story Festival seeks to lead us into a better story – one that encourages growth and liberation, healing and harmony; a story where the downtrodden are uplifted and everyone is included. [Read more…]

FaithXperimental Spotlight: Q Commons Baltimore – Oct. 25

From time to time we like to bring you stories about faith communities engaging their communities in innovative and experimental ways.

Today’s FaithXperimental spotlight focuses on Q Commons – Baltimore, scheduled for October 25 from 7:00pm–9:00pm in Catonsville, Maryland, hosted by New Hope Community Church and St. Hilda’s Episcopal Church. The theme for this year’s Q Commons is “The Power of We: Healing a Divided Nation.”

Q Commons events are kind of like Christian TEDtalks. They bring together speakers from across the spectrum of faith and culture to talk about important ideas. They take place under the umbrella of Q Ideas,an organization started by a Gabe Lyons. Our friend Joe Miller, Lead Pastor of New Hope, was prompted to organize a Baltimore-area Q Commons because his heart was greatly pained by the many angry divisions that plague not only the church, but the nation and the world. In Joe’s words, his hope in hosting Q Commons is that “it will be just one small faithful step towards actually acting like we really are Christ’s one church. Because, as we read in Ephesians 4, the truth is that there has always only ever been one church.” [Read more…]

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