The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Online Worship Beyond Covid: Who is Your Target Audience?

On March 1, 2020, few mainline congregations offered an online worship opportunity to their communities.  By the end of March 2020, the majority of mainline congregations had found a way to provide an online presence for those seeking to continue to worship during the Covid shutdown.  For the most part, we saw that online services were shorter, had less music, less time (if any) for communion, and some even had online coffee hour afterward.  Services remained posted online and available for days, weeks or months after the original airing and continue to be viewed.  Many leaders boasted of having people attend their online worship services from other states and even other countries.  It was an unusual time for our country and for the Church.  

The sense of crisis has passed and, from what we have learned, our attention to the online worship community has passed along with the crisis.  As you can see from the Episcopal Pulse survey above, the majority of congregations continue to offer streaming but only 3% offer an online worship service that is actually designed for an online community.  Instead, what we offer is the opportunity to observe other people worshiping, and that has really never been a draw for anyone except shut-ins who have had no other option.  

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How will the Covid Endemic Impact Your Congregation?

by Mary Frances

About once a month I gather with leaders from a group of congregations to talk about changes they can make in order to do a better job of living into their mission, vision and values.  At our next meeting we are going to talk about how to assess the effectiveness of the changes they have made.  So often, we allow major decisions to hinge on a handful of stories without ever taking the time to thoroughly evaluate what we are doing.  Now that we are moving from the Covid pandemic to the Covid endemic, this might be the time to start a thoughtful and thorough evaluation of what you are doing to live out your mission, vision and values as well as why.  

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FaithX selected as Experiment Manager for Episcopal Pulse project

The FaithX Project is pleased to announce that we have been selected by ​TryTank Experimental Lab as Experiment Manager to develop the proof of concept for Episcopal Pulse, a project the purpose of which will be to put a proverbial “finger on the pulse” of the Episcopal Church on a regular basis through brief one- or two-question survey that respondents will be able to complete in under a minute (or maybe two if they want to give it extra thought).

The experiment, which will take place over several months, starting in July of this year and continuing into the first half of 2022, will have three major components:

  1. Selecting appropriate technology to host Episcopal Pulse polling.
  2. Recruiting an advisory committee to assist us identifying critical questions for our regular pulse polls.
  3. Implementation through pilot testing, then scaling Episcopal Pulse to full implementation.
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Όμικρο

By Steve Matthews 

25 years ago I spent two semesters learning Greek in seminary.   I never expected that my refresher course would come by way of a pandemic — first Delta and now Omicron. As Omicron begins to spread from state to state, we wait again in uncertainty.  Will the current vaccines work?  Is it more contagious?  Are its effects more severe?  We wait as we have before. “Omicron at Advent”… there’s a sermon there.

But it’s not exactly like it was before.  We have learned things.  We are creative, resourceful, and resilient.  We can lean into that.  We know we can go “hybrid” in our worship.  We know about wearing masks, and getting the “jab,” and practicing social distancing.  We also know that there are those people who need more support than others.  At FaithX one of the ways we identify people more impacted by Covid is by utilizing a data tool called the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI).  The SVI uses U.S. Census data to determine the social vulnerability of every county and tract. The CDC ranks each county and tract on 15 social factors, including poverty, lack of vehicle access, and crowded housing, and groups them into four related themes:

  • Socioeconomic
  • Housing Composition and Disability
  • Minority Status and Language
  • Housing and Transportation 

The closer a neighborhood is to the number “1” the more vulnerable that population is to environmental pollution and weather extremes, to poor health access, and to other social problems.  Think about it:  If you make little money, if you have a disability, if you are reliant on public transportation, if you do not speak English well, if you live in a densely populated apartment complex, you are more likely to fall through the cracks. 

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FACT 2020: How Congregations Have Changed in the Last 20 Years

by Darren Slade, PhD – FaithX Director of Research

The organization, Faith Communities Today, along with 21 other Christian faith traditions, just released the results of the largest national survey of congregational trends in the United States. Spanning two decades of research (from 2000‒2020), the “Twenty Years of Congregational Change” reports findings from interviewing 15,278 congregations among 80 separate denominations and religious groups.

What’s significant about this particular survey is that it tracks multiple levels of change within American congregational life during both the pre- and early COVID era, much of which was predicted by the FaithX Project and its groundbreaking “Religion Singularity” research.

Continue reading to learn about some of the major highlights and results of the survey.

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