The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Two Windows: One Open, One Closed (The Future of Faith)

By Ken Howard

Open and Closed Windows - Jack Challem (2009)
Open and Closed Windows – Jack Challem (2009)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the Religion Singularity is true… If denominations and churches are growing/fracturing at a considerably higher rate than the worldwide population of Christians, driving a massive downturn in the size of those institutions… What is the future of religion? What is the future of faith?

Author Phyllis Tickle, called by some “the chronicler of the emerging church,” once suggested that the institutional church – in all its various forms – had perhaps an 18 month window in which to adjust themselves to the emerging paradigm of Church. Quite a bold prediction, don’t you think? I thought so at the time (I was inclined to be more gracious…24 months at least). And maybe she thought so, too, since this is what she said immediately after:

In general, short-range predictions are fairly dangerous things. Like loose boards on an aging country porch, they tend to fly up and hit one in the face. I try to avoid them for that very reason. On the other hand, sometimes something is not only compellingly obvious in and of itself, but so too is the need for its telling. Whether I am accurate in my observations or not remains to be seen … very soon, in this case … but the possibility of error does not eliminate the obligation to speak the truth as one sees it, any more than it defuses the urgency.

I’m feeling in a similar emotional space myself, since I now believe that Phyllis’ 18 months window was itself optimistic, and my analysis of the Religion Singularity is that there are two windows. One of those windows remains open and the other actually closed at least two decades ago. I seems to me that the window for denominations is closed and they will collapse sooner than we expect, certainly by the end of the century. But for those faith-based communities willing to do the hard, transformational work necessary to become more lean, agile, and experimental, a narrow window of opportunity remains open.

And what of those faith communities that would rather die than change?

I think that they will achieve their preference.

So the question is not wether to become a lean, agile, and experimental congregation…but how?

And that is a question for next week’s blog post.

 

Prospective Grief: Why Church Leaders Resist the Religion Singularity

By Ken Howard

This article is the third in a series on the Religion Singularity. Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 2.

Ken Outdoor Headshot Square

Organizing and sharing the data about the Religion Singularity continues to be an eye-opening experience for me. It has been enlightening to observe the responses of different groups of people. I’ve observed a couple interesting trends, especially among church people.

A continuing revelation has been how much more receptive to the data secular leaders are than church leaders. Business people, especially entrepreneurs, tend to see the trends and recognize the implications before I finish explaining them. Church leaders, on the other hand, are much more resistant. Some have trouble seeing the implications implied by the data, those who do become very defensive, and it’s hard to get them to see past the danger to the opportunity. And the more ensconced they are in the institutional church and the higher in the hierarchy they are, the more resistant they tend to be.

It’s not that they don’t recognize church decline. Everyone knows that churches are facing tough times. It’s the unwillingness to acknowledge that church demographic trends point to the end of the church as we know it. It’s thinking we can still tweak our way out of trouble or somehow revitalize the current model of church. Because if the Religion Singularity analysis is correct, it’s like thinking that the Titanic can dodge the iceberg.

And I continue to be astonished that no one in the church noticed the implications of this data before I did. After all, I’m no genius and it wasn’t rocket surgery. The demographic data I used have been around for decades and is updated every year. All it required was a spreadsheet and simple subtraction. It’s just that nobody had ever done the math. Perhaps I might have missed the implications, too, had I not stumbled into an science museum exhibit about Ray Kurzweil’s book on the Technological Singularity while I was pondering it.

In any event, I’ve been pondering the source of this resistance. And today, as I was riding my bike to the coffee shop where I do my writing, it came to me. It’s because of grief – a prospective grief at the coming death of the institutional church. And before they can see the potential resurrection of the church in a new form, they have to go through familiar stages of grief laid out by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.

It became even clearer to me when I saw the following graph,[1] a slightly tweaked, seven-stage version Kübler-Ross’s work, and it left me feeling a lot more sympathetic to the resistance I’ve been experiencing, and a lot more patient with the people offering that resistance. Most of us ordained leaders have a love/hate relationship with the church, but the frustration and anger we feel at the church from time to time is actually born of the love we have for what we know it could be.

Stages of Grief

Change Curve

It’s no wonder we find ourselves resistant to see its impending death, even if we believe there will be a resurrection on the other side.

We’ve got a lot of grief work to do before we can be at peace with the work God is asking us to do.

And we at The FaithX Project can provide a little help through the process.

 

[1] Graph courtesy of Jo Banks at What Next consultancy.

Related articles

The Religion Singularity: What Can You Do About It? How Can You Prepare?

This is the second post in five-part series.
Click here for Part 1.

The impact on denominations: Death by black hole – oblivion – fragmenting and shrinking at such a rate that they are unlikely to be sustainable by any means.

The impact on worship center – a choice:  Black hole or wormhole – fragmenting and shrinking at an even higher rate, they can do nothing and face the same oblivion as denominations, or they can transform themselves into experimental faith communities and take a wormhole ride into a different way of being.

The Religion Singularity and Its Impact

Religion Singularity Small
Source: “Status of Global Mission 2014,” Bulletin of Missionary Research (Jan, 2010): 1.

Impact – Declining Denominations & Worship Centers

 

Decline in Denoms and Worship Ctrs

What Can Denominations and Worship Centers Do To Prepare?

There is nothing denominations can do to save themselves. If they try to save their lives, they will not only lose their own lives, but in trying to generate the resources to save themselves they risk dooming to death their associated worship centers by robbing them of the resources and the freedom they need to transform themselves. The most generative act denominations can do is to prepare for their own deaths by shifting resources and creative autonomy to their worship centers, so that the best of their DNA will survive in their descendants.

Worship centers can transform themselves into experimental faith communities. Compared to denominations, worship centers, by their nature, may be more flexible in the face of the changes they both face. Because the bulk of their ministries and programs are carried out by unpaid volunteers within a flatter organizational structure, worship centers are by nature much less dependent on a large base of supporting members than are denominational structures, which tend to be more hierarchical with a much greater percentage of paid staff. Consequently, it will likely be easier for individual worship centers, even as they grow smaller, to become more flexible, adaptive, and creative in the face of these changes (though it is by no means certain how many of them will).

So here’s the question. What are the qualities worship centers must acquire to ride the Religion Singularity wormhole successfully?

Agility. To survive and thrive in an unpredictable environment, an organization must possess agility:   the power to move quickly and nimbly around obstacles and toward opportunities. But it also means the capability to make vital decisions swiftly and effectively, deftly discriminating between paths containing varying degrees of danger and opportunity.

Vision. All the agility in the world will literally get you nowhere if you don’t know where you are going, which in a chaotic environment is literally impossible. Yet even when you can’t know precisely the place you want to end up, you can still know what you want to be like when you get there, and you can evaluate the possible paths before you based on whether they move you closer to or farther from that vision. This is why a transcendent vision is essential for faith-based communities and organizations operating in an uncertain environment.

Lean. To put it bluntly, “fat and agile” is an oxymoron. More mass means more inertia. More inertia means less agility. Becoming lean means shedding excess mass by eliminating all forms of waste. Traditionalism, dogmatism, clericalism, and any other “-ism” in which a created form is worshipped nearly as much as the Creator, all enable waste. Bad stewardship of congregation members’ time, talents, and treasure also increases waste. Becoming lean means reducing inertia by jettisoning every unproductive organizational process and structure, and leverage all of the capabilities of congregation members to the fullest. And as with agility itself, being lean also requires a clear and transcendent vision, in order to distinguish between those aspects of organizational structure and process that support the vision – and so must be kept – and those that do not – and must be eliminated.

Contextual Attentiveness. In order to identify and steer clear of obstacles and move toward opportunities, faith-based communities and organizations must be actively and continuously monitoring their environments.

Common Cause Community. In order to minimize competition and maximize collaboration between themselves and other organizations, faith-based communities and organizations must be able to make common cause with organizations that have similar visions and are heading in similar directions. In set theory this is known as centered-set community, in which membership is determine by shared vision and goals. It is the opposite of boundaried-set community, in which membership is defined based on boundary characteristic: all the ways in which the organization is different from all other organizations. Faith-based communities and organizations in turbulent environments must share the attitude of Jesus that “whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:40, Luke 9:50)

Rapid Hypothesis Testing.  To thrive in such an environment, faith-based communities and organizations must be able to rapidly make and test strategic hypotheses, quickly discarding strategies that fail the test and continuing with strategies pass it, repeating this process as often as needed.

Actionable Metrics. To effectively test hypotheses, an organization must know how to develop evaluative measures that provides it with the necessary feedback to know how well its chosen strategies is working, and how to adjust course.

Which brings us full circle, back to Agility. To survive and thrive in escalating uncertainty and accelerating change, faith-based communities and organizations must be able to do all of these things quickly, adroitly, and as often as needed.

Coming Soon: From Qualities to Practices

Click here to read the full paper: “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith” (on Academia.edu).