The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

MapDash Evangelism Project: Valdosta, GA

Bishop Russell Kendrick and the Central Gulf Coast team

On February 27, the bishops of the Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast and their leadership teams gathered at the Grace Cafe, a ministry of Christ Episcopal Church, in Valdosta, Georgia, to continue their work on the MapDash Evangelism Project. The session was led by the Rev. Ken Howard, executive director and principal consultant for FaithX Strategic Missional Consulting. The MapDash Evangelism project is funded by an evangelism grant from Province IV of the Episcopal Church. MapDash for Faith Communities is a product of Datastory, a GIS firm in Baltimore, Maryland. MapDash is collaborative creation of Datastory and FaithX.

At this third working meeting of the project, the bishops and their teams began mapping out living missional strategies for their respective dioceses. A living missional strategy is different from a strategic plan in that a strategic plan tends to be a highly-structured, multi-year document, while a living strategy is emergent, model based, and adaptive.

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FaithX & Datastory at New Story Festival

Just a little over a month from now, FaithX and Datastory will be participating in the New Story Festival, which is being held on March 29-31 in Austin, Texas.

The New Story Festival is a new annual gathering for community, creativity, and the common good: a bold experiment for a better world, embodying imagination, spirituality, social action, and playful connection – defined above all by the practice of love.

Ken Howard of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be program presenters and will also be exhibiting MapDash for Faith Communities. FaithX and Datastory are also festivals sponsors. And because FaithX is a partner organization, those who register through the FaithX portal get a $20 discount.

As the Festival website says, the world runs on stories – the narratives that fuel the ways we live in this world and relate to one another. Our stories can liberate or oppress, encourage reconciliation or further separation, inspire new life or even bring death. But when we become conscious of our stories, we can begin to change them. Believing that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,” the New Story Festival seeks to lead us into a better story – one that encourages growth and liberation, healing and harmony; a story where the downtrodden are uplifted and everyone is included.

[Read more…]

FaithX on the Road

Over the next several months, FaithX will be traveling to onsite strategic missional planning consultations and exhibiting (and speaking) at several large gatherings across the country, many of them with our collaborators Datastory.

Here is a taste of our schedule, both so far and into the months ahead:

January

Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing Michigan. Ken is working with key leaders in the diocese to assist them in employing the missional intelligence capabilities of MapDash for Faith Communities as part of a several-month project that will culminate in a “State of the Diocese” report. The report will provide an assessment of the vitality of the diocese and its congregations, identify demographic trends and emerging missional opportunities, and describe strategies to address what they find.

February

2/20-2/23 – CEEP annual conference, Boston, Massachusetts. FaithX and Datastory will be exhibiting at the annual conference of the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes (CEEP). Ken Howard and Steve Matthews of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be there demonstrating the power and the possibilities of MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting.

March

3/29-3/31 – The New Story Festival, Austin, Texas. Ken and Matt will be delivering a presentation entitled “Datastories – How Missional Intelligence Can Help Us to Love Our Communities,” and will be exhibiting Datastory’s MapDash and FaithX’s strategic missional consulting. FaithX and Datastory are Festival Sponsors.

TBA – Episcopal Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast at Valdosta, Georgia. This will be the third of four sessions of the dioceses’ Datastory Evangelism Project, in which both dioceses are using MapDash to identify emerging missional opportunities and challenges, and develop data-grounded strategies to engage with them.

Later in 2019

8/5-8/10 – ELCA Churchwide Assembly, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Planning is underway for FaithX and Datastory to exhibit at the biennial Church Wide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America. Matt Felton will again be representing Datastory, while Ken Howard and Mary Frances will be representing FaithX.

Join our mailing list and keep abreast of where we are going next.


For more information about MapDash for Faith Communities and strategic missional consulting, or to invite Ken Howard to speak at a conference, contact Ken Howard at ken@faithx.net.

Our Newest Ad for MapDash and Strategic Missional Consulting

We are happy to highlight for you our latest combined ad for Datastory’s MapDash for Faith Communities and FaithX’s Strategic Missional Consulting.

We hope to see it featured soon in Net Results Magazine, North America’s most enduring and most trusted evangelism and church growth magazine. It is a wonderful resource, not only for church planters and church redevelopers, but for anyone seeking to be more effective in missional work. One of senior associate consultants, Mary Frances, was recently asked to be a senior writer for the magazine. If you haven’t already subscribed, we encourage you to check it out.

Click Here for a PDF Copy of the Ad

Dioceses of Central Gulf Coast & Georgia First Subscribers to MapDash for Faith Communities

FaithX and Datastory are happy to announce that the Dioceses of Central Gulf Coast and Georgia became the first official Episcopal dioceses to purchase subscriptions to MapDash for Faith Communities and enroll in the Mentored Missional Journey.

Datastory is now in the process of provisioning dashboards for both dioceses: uploading location and parochial report information for all of their congregations, from which they will generate diocesan-level analytic data maps, including Congregational Vitality, Congregational Sustainability, and Missional Opportunity. Their dashboards will also include congregational neighborhood data, including MissionWebs and DriveTime Analysis, as well as a map layers for a host of local neighborhood demographic, lifestyle, issue, and resources data. They will be receiving their fully-provisioned dashboards on or about August 30. [Read more…]

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