The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

As Pastors Get Older, Churches Start to Die

by Darren Slade

In a survey of over 9,500 different congregations from 2008-2017, NCD America reports that 54% of pastors are above the age of 50*. Not surprisingly, there is a direct correlation between the age of the pastor and the age of the congregants who attend church every week. The older the pastor, the older the congregation. These same churches also have very little growth, where the older a pastor/congregation is the less likely the church is to grow numerically. In fact, the growth rate is so minimal that it is virtually nonexistent.

What’s more, these same churches tend to have very few children, adolescents, or young adults attending services, meaning there will likely be no new families to replace current church members as congregants begin to retire from services.

So, what happens when a church is run by and populated with senior citizens? The short answer: it dies. This will happen for a number of reasons. Retirees and senior citizens tend to be on a fixed income. Hence, church contributions plummet. Retirees and senior citizens become less active in outreach and evangelism, preferring to stay within the safety of familiar places and closed circles. Thus, new memberships plummet. Lastly, retirees and senior citizens tend to expire. Hence, attendance plummets.

[Read more…]

From the Field – Report on MapDash & Strategic Missional Planning

On September 11, the Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast began the first of four sessions of the Mentored Missional Journey using MapDash for Faith Communities. Later in the week, this article was published in the official Diocese of Georgia e-newsletter In The Field.

 

Learning with the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast
By the Rev. Canon Frank Logue
Canon to the Ordinary
Episcopal Diocese of Georgia

On Tuesday, a six-person team from the Diocese of Georgia joined a team from the Diocese of Central Gulf Coast for an initial round of training in using Datastory demographic data led by the Rev. Ken Howard.

The Church Development Institute will use this robust demographic tool as part of its work with congregation teams. Additionally, the Bishop [Scott Benhase] and Canon [Frank] Logue are looking at how this data can assist congregations in their ongoing engagement with Invite-Welcome-Connect. [Read more…]

Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast begin the Mentored Missional Journey

This week’s blog post will be a little shorter than average, because Ken is away in Tallahassee much of this week guiding two dioceses – the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and the Episcopal Diocese of Central Gulf Coast – through the first of four sessions of the Mentored Missional Journey consultative program.

 

What is the Mentored Missional Journey?

A 6-month program of guided strategic missional assessment and planning designed to prepare dioceses to identify and engage emerging missional opportunities through strategic ministry development, congregational redevelopment, and new church starts using MapDash for Faith Communities. It was developed in collaboration with the Episcopal Church and shaped by input from diocesan and congregational leadership from around the U.S.

[Read more…]

A Mentored Missional Journey

 

 

As we launch MapDash for Faith Communities at the Episcopal General Convention Expo, we will also be launching an exciting new companion consultative program: A Mentored Missional Journey to the Future of Your Diocese and Its Congregations.

Developed in collaboration with the Episcopal Church and shaped by input from diocesan and congregational leadership from around the U.S., this 12-month program of mentored missional assessment and planning is designed to prepare dioceses to engage the emerging “New Americas” through strategic ministry development, congregational redevelopment, and new church starts.

The Church has entered a time of accelerating change and escalating uncertainty. Neighbor-hood transformation, which once took place over generations, now happens almost overnight, increasingly causing us to fall out of touch – and thus out of love – with the people and neighborhoods God is calling us to engage.

This program is designed to provide dioceses – and through them, their congregations – the tools they need to learn about their communities at the speed of change and to guide diocesan leadership through the challenging journey of deeply and systemically discerning and engaging the missional opportunity inherent at the intersection of faith communities, neighbor-hoods, and the Spirit of God.

In short, we help you learn to fall in love with your communities again.

 

Participating dioceses will complete the program with:

  • A broader understanding of the health of their congregations, the demographic trends in their neighborhoods, and the opportunities for missional engagement between congregations and neighborhoods
  • A deeper level of discernment about what God is already up to in their communities and neighborhoods
  • A clearer vision for what God is calling them to be and to do in response to what they have learned about their communities and how God is already at work in them
  • A pilot-tested, living strategy for engaging identified missional opportunities that have been identified in their dioceses

 

Stages of the Journey

1 – Data Gathering/Provisioning the Dashboard

Gather, consolidate and organize diocese-specific congregational and community demographics, analytics, and diagnostic data into one place, where it can be easily displayed, manipulated, and explored.

2 – Missional Opportunity Assessment

Enable diocesan leadership team to acquire a God’s-eye view of the totality of congregations and communities that make up their diocese and assess the health of its congregations and the characteristics of its communities in order to identify, explore, and engage emergent missional opportunities.

3 – Strategic Missional Planning

Facilitate the creation of a living strategy for the diocesan leadership team that addresses the opportunities identified in missional assessment.

Estimated Timeline – 12 months

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download an Illustrated PDF Handout about this Program

 

 

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.

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