The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

It’s time to give: GIVING TUESDAY NOW!

Help us provide discounted
data-grounded discernment services
to the congregations who need it the most
but can afford it the least

In the turbulent and uncertain times brought upon all of us by the COVID-19 crisis, faith leaders everywhere need data and strategies to help them rapidly and effectively adapt their ministries and programs to the realities of the novel Coronavirus pandemic. FaithX and our affiliates at Datastory have been working hard together to adapt our respective tools and services to the needs of these times.

When we launched FaithX in late 2016, we realized that there was often a gap between what congregations need and what they can afford. And when it comes to data-ground discernment tools and services, the congregations that need them the most are the ones that can afford them the least. And so we started our congregational scholarship fund to bridge that gap by underwriting a significant portion of their costs.

All donations received during Giving Tuesday Now
will go to the FaithX Congregational Scholarship Fund.

Help us bridge the gap!

Click here for our GIVING TUESDAY NOW page
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Want to help your congregation more effectively engage the neighborhoods it serves?

Click here to schedule a
no cost preliminary missional intelligence discussion
and receive a sample Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report
for your location

Those who engage a full Neighborhood Missional Assessment or other consultative program from FaithX will receive a complete NMIR in interactive (dynamic HTML) format.

Important Note: A Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report can also be a useful tool for identifying the prevalence of at risk groups within your membership and ministry areas, and a Neighborhood Missional Assessment can help you identify the neighborhoods where they are most prevalent.

We have reduced the cost of NMIRs and NMAs by 10% for the duration of the COVID19 pandemic.

Want to help your judicatory identify emerging missional opportunities and challenges within its boundaries?

Click here to schedule a demo/discussion
of MapDash for Faith Communities
for Strategic Missional Planning

Important Note: In the days ahead Datastory will be adding COVID-related data to MapDash to all current and future subscribers (including incidence of COVID-19, hospital locations and capacity, Twitter feeds, location of doctors).

Support FaithX

FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is carried out under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Nurturing community in your neighborhoods… even now!

by Steve Matthews
Nurturing community

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.

Click here for the previous post

True confession: in my pre-COVID days, I always had good intentions about being a good neighbor and nurturing community.  I thought about joining the neighborhood association, had casual conversations like “wouldn’t it be great to have a block party” but never made it happen, met people with whom I intended to get together but never did, but mostly, I would raise my hand and speak when passing, pick up trash when I saw it, and disappear into my backyard sanctuary for solitude, gardening, and fellowship with friends (most of whom are not neighbors).

This kind of describes a lot of pre-COVID churches I know, too.   They are friendly to their neighbors (the people and business owners), they care about the appearance of the neighborhood, they offer assistance to those in need… but often, friendly church members park in front of the church, enter the church doors, and find meaning and fellowship with people like them inside the walls, and work to grow and nurture what they find there.  

I can almost look back to those church days with some measure of nostalgia.  While it always felt uncomfortably comfortable, it was familiar, it was easy, and it was stable… or was it? It’s time to get real and let go of our attachment to what is comfortable, familiar, easy, and stable.  Those days are gone for a while… for a long while (or perhaps it was just a myth).  We are now pilgrims on a new journey.  We may not know where we are going or how we will get there, but we have left the building… and we have left the building together.   

[Read more…]

Password-Protected Worship: A Missed Opportunity?

by the Rev. Ken Howard
Password-Protected

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post

Zoombombing

“Zoombombing” is when an uninvited person joins a Zoom meeting, usually for the purpose of gaining a few cheap laughs at the expense of the participants. 

Because Zoombombers sometimes use racial slurs, profanity, pornography, and other offensive imagery, faith communities have begun to password protect their online worship services in order to prevent univited Zoombomers from entering. 

I would like to suggest that password-protected online worship services are a huge missed opportunity for evangelism.

Here’s why…

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Getting Out Ahead of COVID-19: Mapping Neighborhood Vulnerability and At-Risk Populations

by The Rev. Ken Howard
at-risk populations

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.

Click here for the previous post

From what I am hearing from most of my sisters and brothers of the cloth, it would not be overstating the case to say that the Coronavirus pandemic has turned their lives as faith leaders upside down, along with just about every idea they have about how faith communities are “supposed” to operate. It has begun to seem like every task has become incredibly urgent and they are running as fast as they can just to keep up with the havoc the COVID crisis is wreaking with their congregations and the (sometimes) at-risk populations they serve.

So how do we move past this “tyranny of the urgent” and get out ahead of COVID-19 with a little short-term organization and a little longer-term planning?

One way to do this is through data mapping and analytics. Data-mapping is a way to visualize all the data bombarding us – and our congregations and neighborhoods – in context. Analytics are a specialized form of data-mapping that help us analyze, evaluate, and make decisions based on the data before us.

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Before You Go Back to the Building: Preparing for the Recovery from COVID-19 (a free webinar)

FREE WEBINAR
Before You Go Back to the Building:
Preparing for the Recovery from COVID-19
April 28, 2020 | 4:00-5:00pm | On Zoom
click here to register

It’s fair to say that our ideas of how to be and do Church have been turned on their heads over the last several weeks, and many of us are just starting to think about what it might be like to return to some semblance of “normal.”  Some churches may have found new opportunities through online gatherings, but most of the people we have spoken with are anticipating being with their community in the church building again. Some judicatories have advised their congregations they can go back in early May, others at the end of May, while still others want to wait and see. The wisdom of any of these ideas remains to be seen, as does the question of whether the new normal will be anything at all like the old normal. As the old saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell God your plans,” but sooner or later we will be able to come out of isolation and have the opportunity to gather our communities in person again. 

So wouldn’t it would be a good idea to go back with a plan in mind: a plan based on a vision – a plan imbued with flexibility, a plan that is sensitive to a greatly-altered context, and a plan that is based on discernment grounded in data?

We want to help you with this. 

In this webinar we will provide you with tips on how to use demographic and analytic data to maintain context awareness as you develop your plan to make it through the transition into whatever our new normal will be. We will provide you access and orientation to a free tool (MapDash for COVID-19) that will ground your discernment in that kind of data. Data that can help you help your people and your neighborhoods survive and thrive in new ways in the aftermath and recovery from COVID-19.

click here to register for the webinar

[Read more…]

FaithX is Datastory Affiliate