The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Data is not Destiny!

FaithX and MapDash in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland

by Mary Sulerud

Ever since my first training in using MapDash, the words spoken by the Rev. Ken Howard, FaithX founder, have echoed in my head every time I opened up my laptop and connected it to a projector to introduce the program to another congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland.

“Data is not destiny,” he said.

I always start with those words; then I quickly add something he also shared that day…

“It really helps to begin with dreams
that have some relationship with reality on the ground.”

I graduated from an Episcopal Seminary in the 1980’s, amid several successive ambitious national evangelism campaigns by the Episcopal Church. The prevailing truism of the time was: Attract young families with children and your congregation will be sustained and you will thrive in ministry. Our congregations learned that lesson all too well.

The trouble was that while that may have been true in another era, it was already losing ground in many places by the time I graduated in 1988. In effect, we were sending people out to find the membership equivalent of the Holy Grail. But we rarely asked congregational leaders to look at the reality of their own neighborhoods and to discern if the demographic reality of our neighborhoods was in any way related to the characteristics of the people who sat in the pews on Sunday.

What is changing in the congregations of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland is that they are employing MapDash to explore neighbors and neighborhoods. And while MapDash is an important and useful tool in a wide variety of settings, I am increasingly finding that it is most helpful to congregational leaders who are undertaking strategic planning in their congregations.

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Looking Back on 2019

by Ken Howard

2019 was a good year for FaithX. It had its ups and downs – a rollercoaster ride, for sure, at times – but all-in-all, both despite and because of it all, we came through 2019 much stronger, with a clearer vision of who we are and where we are going, and with many successes to energize us. 

We’ve come a long way since we launched in December of 2016. Back then it was just me as FaithX’s executive director/principal (and only) consultant, a 4-person volunteer board of directors, and one client, the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland and its two newest congregations. 

Over the next two years, we would establish our affiliation with Datastory, collaborate with them to prototype, develop, beta test, and launch the next-generation demographic analysis and missional planning platform, which would become known as MapDash for Faith Communities, added about a dozen clients, two associate consultants, a blog coordinator, a volunteer research director, and publish a ground-breaking research paper entitled “The Religion Singularity.” 

In 2019 we broadened our reach even further. We expanded our work not only into more Episcopal dioceses, congregations, and organizations, but more importantly, branching out into more than five additional “denominations” (i.e., including the non-denominational movement), and have begun discussions with interfaith and non-Christian faith traditions. We launched a new peer-reviewed journal about religion and ministry. We worked with Datastory to develop and launch the new Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report, and we designed the consultative Neighborhood Missional Assessment program to help congregations identify emerging missional opportunities and challenges in the neighborhoods they serve. 

And so I’d like to offer my appreciation to all of those who have joined FaithX on our experimental missional journey through the end of religion as we know it into the future of faith in whatever form God is calling it into being…

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Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 2)

As you learned in last week’s post, the Missional Opportunity Index (MOI) is a version of what marketing professionals call a Market Texture: a map-based representation of emerging market conditions based on a predictive algorithm composed of relevant correlated demographic factors. To generate the MOI, the program starts by creating a quarter-mile-square matrix across the entirety of a diocese, district, or other judicatory. Then it “drops a pin” on one of those thousands of points, samples the population with a 15-min drive from that point, and extracting 5-year projections of four demographic factors that drive Missional Opportunity (MO).

These four opportunity-related factors are:

  • Population Growth.Increasing population in an area is directly related to MO, as it represents an influx of new and unaffiliated people and/or a rapidly increasing rising generation.
  • Diversity Growth. Increasing diversity in an area is directly related to MO, becauseeven if area population has plateaued, it represents turnover in the current population. 
  • Generational Balance.Increasing imbalance between older and younger cohorts is inversely related to MO, as rapidly increasing or decreasing median age predicts reduced financial resources.
  • Qualified Population (a measure of population vs. competition).The number of same denomination worship centers competing for the population with a 15-min DriveTime is inversely correlated to MO.

The MOI map below represents Missional Opportunity in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. The map represents areas of high MO in medium-to-dark green, areas of moderate MO in yellow-to-light-green, and areas of low MO in orange-to-dark red. It forecasts that several areas of high Missional Opportunity will be emerging in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland over the next five years, each of which will require different missional strategies to effectively engage.

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