The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Our Free CVA Webinar, the Glitch of all Glitches, and an Unforeseen Opportunity

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade… right?

The lemons…

Life dropped a huge pile of lemons on us today as we were starting our long-awaited Congregational Vitality Assessment webinar.

The lemons started falling as soon as we “opened the door” to attendees. Suddenly, we began to see a flood of emails and texts from people who couldn’t get in. 

The Glitch…

Apparently, the glitch to end all glitches had happened. As far as we could tell, the handoff from Eventbrite and Zoom wasn’t working right. Some people got in with no problems. Others got in quickly once we sent them the webinar link directly. And some couldn’t get in even with the direct link.

In any event, after 10-15 minutes of panic-y workaround, we were able to get around 50 people in the door, including some (but not all) of the people on the waiting list. As the doctor said in Young Frankenstein, “Could be worse… Could be raining.” Providentially, since we were all on Zoom, even if it had been raining, it wouldn’t have made it a total washout.

The Lemonade…

We already had planned to send all attendees the webinar video, presentation StoryMap, and resource link, so that helped.

The lemonade boils down to this: 

We were able to reopen the webinar so that everyone on the waitlist will be able to get the video and other resources.

AND… 

Reopening the webinar also means that any of you who hadn’t signed up for the webinar can now register after the fact, and get all the stuff the regular attendees are getting. 

How about that for turning lemons into lemonade?

Click here to register for webinar video, presentation “deck,” and resources

FaithX and ECF help Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma implement groundbreaking Congregational Vitality Tracking Platform

“I am delighted to begin using the CVA [and the CVA Judicatory Platform] in Oklahoma. While much of the Christian life (individually and in community) cannot be measured, there are many indicators of vitality that can be. More vitality in congregations means more lives that can be transformed by God’s grace.”     

– The Rt. Rev. Poulson Reed, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma

The Episcopal Diocese of Oklahoma has been the site of many firsts for the FaithX Project and our partners. 

In late 2017, the Diocese was one of a group of five judicatories that agreed to assist FaithX in beta-testing MapDash for Faith Communities as part of our collaboration with our affiliate Datastory to develop a first-of-its-kind online, interactive, map-based demographic and analytic platform.

In late 2020, they became the first of several judicatories to ask FaithX and our partner the Episcopal Church Foundation if we would consider developing a congregational vitality tracking platform that would allow judicatories to administer our Congregational Vitality Assessment diagnostic survey directly to their congregations, add judicatory-specific informational questions, receive anonymized survey results, track vitality and sustainability year-to-year, target their parochial interventions, and supplement their parochial reporting data with forward-looking diagnostics and recommendations. We love a good challenge, so we took them up on it.

Over the first half of 2021, Diocesan Director of Faith Formation and Discipleship Kate Carney Bond, along with other Diocesan staff worked closely with FaithX and our CVA partner, the Episcopal Church Foundation develop the platform: first by providing input for our prototype, then by providing feedback over several design iterations, and finally by beta testing in the month prior to our August 4 launch. In doing so, they also became the first judicatory to subscribe to the platform and take advantage of our $1,000 early-adopter custom setup discount.

And now the Diocese of Oklahoma has become the first of what we hope will be many to fully implement the Congregational Vitality Assessment Judicatory Platform. And the above quote from the Bishop of Oklahoma gives you a sense of how valuable they are finding this groundbreaking tool.

We will keep our readers apprised as additional judicatories come on board.

Meanwhile, visit CVAtool.org or email cva@CVAtool.org for more info about the CVA 2.0 diagnostic tool or CVA Judicatory Platform.

Or click here to register for our free webinar

Groundbreaking Free Congregational Vitality Assessment Tool Launches Version 2.0

Germantown, MD | New York, NY – The FaithX Project in partnership with the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) is pleased to announce the launch of version 2.0 of the Congregational Vitality Assessment Tool (CVA), available at no cost for immediate use.

After 10 years of research and implementation of a paper-based CVA tool, the digital version was built in early 2020. The Congregational Vitality Assessment tool is designed to provide a congregation with an assessment of its Vitality (how healthy it is) and its Sustainability (whether it has the people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive). The vitality section carries the bulk of the assessment, measuring ten areas of congregational functioning, such as Vision and Mission, Leadership, Lay Empowerment, Worship, Formation, Stewardship, and more. 

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Mission and Vision and Plans, Oh My!

How CVA 2.0 can put your congregation on the road to vitality

by the Rev. Hunter Ruffin, Rector – Epiphany Church, Tempe, AZ

Version 2.0 of the free Congregational Vitality Assessment will be officially released on August 5, 2021, along with our new, subscription-based CVA Judicatory Dashboard.

Click here for more information or to try a sample of the CVA

It’s a familiar narrative in just about every congregation these days: attendance numbers are shrinking, the children are fewer in number, and the people in the parish want to do something (anything!) to reverse the trend. The question that almost always looms large at the start of any such process is simple and, in its own way, profound: Where do we begin? 

 I entered a narrative similar to this when I accepted the call to serve as the next rector at Church of the Epiphany in Tempe, Arizona. In fifteen years’ time, the parish dwindled from an average Sunday attendance of 353 to an average Sunday attendance of 182 prior to the pandemic. It was clear that things were not going in the direction that any parish wants to see. It was abundantly clear that we needed to do something, but it was less clear what that something was.

After a lengthy discussion, lots of research, and even more prayer, the vestry discerned that they could do the visioning work without spending a lot of money on a consultant. Surely, we could find the resources we needed to launch a strategic visioning process that would fold in a good chunk of the parish. The thing that was less clear to us was whether we could do that whilst in the middle of a pandemic. After all, Zoom fatigue (can we shorthand this as Zoomtigue?) was already an affliction most of us suffered through on a daily basis.

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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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