The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

7 Steps to Improved Vitality

Or what do you do after taking the Congregational Vitality Assessment

by the Rev. Ken Howard

So your leadership team has taken the Congregational Vitality Assessment. You’ve got your diagnostic scores and recommendations in hand, and you’re asking yourselves the question:

Now what?

The next step is to do a Missional Assessment: a seven step process to validate and help your congregation improve its vitality by leveraging its strengths to offset its weaknesses and more effectively engage the missional opportunities and challenges emerging in the neighborhoods you serve.

Here are the steps we recommend:

  1. Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
  2. Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
  3. Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
  4. Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
  5. Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
  6. Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
  7. Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, and build on successes.

The steps may seem simple at first glance. And in a way, they are fairly straightforward. But if you are looking for a quick and easy fix for your congregation’s vitality issues, you’re going to be disappointed, because the process of vitality improvement is neither quick nor easy. 

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Church in a New Reality: Now What?

by Mary Frances

This post is part of our Keeping Congregations Connected series and includes information on our upcoming webinar: Reopening Church in a New Reality: Re-Visioning in a Changing Context.

We used to say “The more things change, the more things remain the same,” but in 2020, that old saying has been turned on its head.  Today the one thing that remains the same is change. We live in a new reality. Each day we turn on the news or look at our social media feeds to find our way of life challenged as never before.  In the midst of so much change, how do we move forward? How do we think about thriving as the church rather than just surviving?

In the weeks after Covid-19 hit, churches across the country pivoted from in-person worship to online worship in the blink of an eye. I’m not sure the church has ever seen such a rapid change without major resistance! There were no committees, no focus groups, no church council discussions. It just happened. And it was good. Churches adapted to their new reality.

Then we began to address what other essentials needed to change.  Online giving took priority, new ways of doing pastoral care, phone trees were initiated, and members were contacted one by one.  “Are you okay?,” we asked.  “Do you need anything?”  “Can I pray for you?”  All was well.  Congregations were now safely ensconced on Zoom or Facebook Live.  Whew!

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