The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

New Paradigms: The First Year

“…here and there in the world and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation, usually hidden, but sometimes manifest, and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ.”   – Paul Tillich

Paradigm: a typical example of something or model

About a year and half ago, FaithX made this invitation to our blog readers:

“FaithX is forming a working group called New Paradigms. We envision it to be a multi-denominational group of people who are interested in exploring, naming, and experimenting into some new paradigms for living as Christians in the world today, for what the Church can become. We will gather online on a regular basis, publish articles and blogs, offer webinars, and perhaps, eventually, an online conference. If you are interested in joining us, please email us info@faithx.net.”

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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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New Date for Congregational Vitality Webinar: January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm

Dear Readers,

We have received a large number of requests from both current and perspective registrants to delay our Assessing & Addressing Congregational Vitality webinar for a week, in light of the events of last week and in deference to the upcoming inauguration. To that end, we are pushing the webinar back one week.

The new date and time is:
January 27 (Wed) from 1:00-2:00pm 

If for some reason you are unable to attend the new date, you have two options:

  1. Request a refund through EventBrite.
  2. Stay registered and receive the webinar recording.

Hope to see most of you on the 27th!

Blessings and thanks!
Ken+


The Rev. Ken Howard
Executive Director – FaithX
www.faithx.net

* FYI, In response to our poll of registrants, all but one said they could accommodate the date change, and that person said they would choose option 2.

Coming Soon: Online Congregational Vitality Assessment

By the Rev. Ken Howard

In 2017, FaithX released a prototype of the Congregational Vitality Assessment: a first-of-its-kind research-based diagnostic inventory for measuring congregational vitality and sustainability. In late 2018, FaithX and the Episcopal Church Foundation entered into a collaboration to bring the CVA online in digital format, where it could be made available for free to a wider audience. That collaboration is about to reach fruition. The CVA has now emerged from beta-testing with a tentative launch date of mid-to-late September.

The Congregational Vitality Assessment 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. The assessment can be completed by a single congregational leader, a congregational leadership group, or the entire congregation.

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A Tale of Two Faith Communities (Vitality-Based Discernment in Action)

by Ken Howard

In our early days of consulting with congregations and dioceses around issues of congregational vitality and sustainability, I had the opportunity to consult with two imperiled congregations: an inner city congregation and a suburban congregation (represented in the above maps on the left and right, respectively). In both cases, our work was pro-bono. In both cases, we were brought in at the request of the bishops and for obvious reasons, will not be identifying the congregations, their dioceses, or their bishops. 

With the exception of their locations – different cities in different dioceses, one in the inner city, one in the near suburbs – both congregations were in very nearly the same condition:

  • Depleted membership: under 50 and falling. 
  • Bare bones attendance: under 25 and falling.
  • Aging out: Few if any children (mostly aging Boomers),
  • Unable to afford a full-time pastor.
  • Majority of revenue from rental income.
  • Majority of operating expenses from a rapidly-decreasing endowment (both said that if they really stretched it they could eke out another 10 years before they went under).
  • Spiking increase in Giving per Household (both congregations were proud of this, but it’s usually a last ditch attempt to stave off the seeming inevitability of closure).

Discussions with imperiled congregations are always fraught with emotion: denial, fear, anger, sorrow, guilt, resentment, and more. This is probably a big reason why, in most cases, congregations and their judicatory leaders avoid talking with each other about it (though both have seen the proverbial “writing on the wall”) until it’s too late to turn things around. And even then, there is a lot of “crap” to cut through, because most imperiled congregations have had a long time (sometimes decades) to come up with great (often blame-ridden) reasons about why the judicator should invest lots of resources to keep them afloat, most of which begin, “If only judicatory would [insert “Hail Mary” solution here].”

One of the great advantages of doing data-grounded Neighborhood Missional Assessment with an interactive, demographic analytical tool like MapDash for Faith Communities is that it cuts through the crap and rapidly facilitates transparent discussions about the vitality and sustainability of the congregation, and mutual discernment and planning around what, if any, strategies might revitalize the congregation.

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