The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Does the Future Have a Church? And in What Form?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

“Does the Church have a future?” is the wrong question.
The real question is, “Does the future have a Church?”
– Attributed variously

I think I agree… I would only add, “And if it does, in what form will that Church be?” 

It was a little over three years ago in 2017 that I published my research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. But I still prefer my working title, “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith.”

If the term “Singularity” sounds kind of astrophysics-y or SciFi-ish to you, good! It’s supposed to. Because institutional Christianity is entering a kind of wormhole that will deliver us into a context so different, it might as well be an entirely new universe. And what we do now to prepare our congregations and judicatories will determine whether they will survive and thrive or be consigned to oblivion.

The crux of the Religion Singularity is this: Christianity has become better at division than multiplication – we are producing new churches and denominations at an exponentially faster rate than we are producing new Christians. My 2017 projections indicated that by the end of the century there would be only 17,000 Christians per denomination and 67 Christians per worship center. And that’s PER not IN, which means that when you factor out the “Nones,” the average membership of those institutions could be less than half that, which means that all of our ecclesiatical institutions – from congregations to judicatories to denominations – will have become unsustainable in their current forms. 

And that’s B.C.: Before Covid accelerated those trends and crushed all of our familiar paradigms about what Church was supposed to be. This year, for the first time in the history of the U.S., fewer than half the population now “attends Church” (in either physical or virtual form).

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Adapting to the Covid New Normal: A Research-Based Blog Series

Introduction by Ken Howard

In some ways, it seems like we’ve spent an eternity of waiting since Covid-19 forced our congregations to close. Yet in other ways, it seems like too many things to change in too little time. Regardless of denomination or religion, it seems like a tsunami swept away all our normal ways of congregational life in a second, leaving us all to re-think, re-engineer, and rapidly iterate almost everything. It almost seems like God is making use of these “Covid Times” through which we are navigating to re-shape us as congregations, cutting off all our talking about all the ways our faith communities needed to change if they were to survive (let alone thrive), and telling us to get on with it.

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Give or Take: A Practical Real-World Experiment – and You’re Invited

by Ken Howard

I’m planning a real-world experiment in the social impact of giving and taking, and I’d like to invite your participation.

30 years ago, I designed a structured group experience to test a two-part hypothesis:

Part A: There are three kinds of people in world (I’m not the first to make this observation):

  1. Givers: People who give without thought of getting.
  2. Takers: People who take without thought of giving.
  3. Exchangers: People who are willing to give, but only if they get equal value in return.

Part B: It is better to give, than to take…or exchange. Not just better for the soul, but actually more productive.

The structured experience was called Stock Exchange. It involved dividing a large group of people into teams, giving them a task to complete, and inviting them to attempt to complete the task successfully in three successive rounds with different instructions on how the teams were to behave toward each other.

The task was simple: gather a specified number of four different colors of poker chips, knowing that the facilitator had distributed to the groups exactly the number of poker chips for all groups to succeed (though not in the amounts each group needed).

The instructions for the three rounds were also very simple:

Round 1 – Taking: Groups were instructed to look out only for themselves. They could ask for, beg for, or steal the chips they needed from the other groups, but could not give or exchange chips. (Do unto others before they do unto you.)

Round 2 – Exchanging: Groups were now allowed to make quid-pro-quo exchanges with other groups. They could only give as many chips as they got. (Do unto others exactly what they do unto you.)

Round 3 – Giving: Groups were instructed to look out not for themselves but for every other group. They were to gather up all the chips of each color of which they had an excess and distribute them to groups with shortages of those color chips. (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.)

Over 100’s of uses, the results of the three rounds have always seemed to follow this pattern:

Round 1: Taking – Everybody Loses: Resource inequalities develop rapidly. Because groups hoard their resources, every group ends up with a glut of one or two chip colors, but a dearth of all the others.

Round 2: Exchanging – Most Everybody Loses: Occasionally a group will succeed in the task but mostly none do, since quid-pro-quo exchanges cannot succeed in addressing resource inequalities.

Round 3: Giving – Everybody Wins: Because every group has every other group looking out for them, hoarding stops, resource inequalities are addressed, and all succeed.

But now I’d like to get a more scientific read on my hypothesis…and I’d like your help.

It’ll be easy as 1-2-3. All you have to do is:

  1. Click here to download Stock Exchange.
  2. Try it in your organization.
  3. Send me the result using the form below.

When I publish the results, you and your organization will be listed in the acknowledgement!

Looking forward to hearing from you.

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Adapt or Die

adapt or die

By Ken Howard

At a recent conference I was asked to speculate about what our parishes would look like a decade from now. My answer was brief: “One thing I can say with certainty is this: The only way our churches will look like they do now is if they have been stuffed and mounted and displayed in a museum of natural church history.”

The context in which our congregations exist is shifting so dramatically that mere tweaking of method and message can no longer return us to health, let alone vitality. We are facing radical change – radical as in going to the root – requiring of us both radical recognition and radical response.

As congregational leaders, we must confront the fact that our churches are dying. While we may wish they were timeless and eternal, at the core our churches are living human organisms, and dying is what all living organisms eventually do. But first they are born, live, adapt, create new life, and pass on their DNA to the next generation. We cannot insulate our churches from death without isolating them from the very process that would empower the next generation, not just to survive but also to thrive.

To guide our churches into a vital future, vestries and other church leaders must help our congregations to embrace their organic nature – to see death not as the ultimate failure but as the door to greater life. We need to help our congregations learn how to die in a way that plants the seeds of their resurrection. But how? How can we as congregational leaders learn this radical response and walk this counterintuitive, paradoxical path? How do we help our congregations live into a more incarnational Christianity that values organism over organization?

Changing the Paradigm

If we as leaders are to help our congregations change their ways of doing Church, we first have to recognize that our old and familiar paradigm of Church is fading away, and that a new and unfamiliar paradigm of Church is emerging. And because the new paradigm is not yet fully present, we have to help our congregations learn to explore its pathways and boundaries.

Leading congregations in a time of paradigm shift is no easy task. Be wary of any who call themselves experts in times like these; when a paradigm shifts, everyone goes to zero. There are no experts, only fellow learners. While I do not claim to be an expert in the emerging paradigm of Church, I do have some experience in helping my own congregation – as well as a few other congregations and dioceses – to explore it. And I am willing to share some of what my congregation and I have learned since it was born in 1995.

My congregation began its journey into the emerging paradigm with an exploration of the Apostle Paul’s image of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12):

There are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (NRSV)

We began to ask ourselves what our congregation would be like if we took this passage seriously. If in this passage Paul is expressing his deeply organic understanding of the nature of Christian community, then how is God calling our own Christian community to live? As we engaged this question with imagination and prayer, our image of Church began to shift. We began to think of Christian community less as an organizational structure in which people occupy various fixed and static roles, and more as a living organism that grows, adapts to its environment, reproduces, thinks, and moves – one which has a vision and a calling implanted in its DNA by the Spirit of God.

As our paradigm of Church began to shift, our behaviors as leaders and as a congregation began to shift as well. We began asking ourselves additional “so what” questions. If we were to answer the call to become an organic, incarnational Christian community, how would we need to change:

  • The way we think of congregational unity?
  • The way we develop and articulate our congregational vision?
  • The way we think about the lifecycle of our congregation?
  • The way we organize to get things done?
  • The way we develop our leaders, followers, and various working groups.

What this Means

Wrestling with questions like these have led to profound shifts in how we think, what we do, and how we do it – shifts which are summarized in the following outline.

  1. Unity: Moving from boundary-set unity to centered-set unityWhen we think of church as an organization, unity is achieved by clearly defining boundaries. Leadership asks, “What characteristics (e.g., doctrines, practices, etc.) separate THOSE WHO ARE A PART OF US from THOSE WHO ARE APART FROM US?”

    When we think of church as an organism, unity is achieved by clearly defining focus. Leadership asks, “WHO is the center of our community?” (The answer was/is “Jesus”) and “HOW do we clarify our focus (on Jesus) and invite others to share with us in it?”

    The implication of this shift is that we avoid making others into copies of ourselves and instead allow all of us together to be transformed into God’s image.

  2. Vision: Moving from vision-setting to vision-birthing
    When we think of church as an organization, leadership creates and propagates an organizational vision. Leadership asks, “What is God calling this congregation to be and to do?”

    When we think of church as an organism, leadership facilitates the emergence of a shared vision from the congregation. Leadership asks, “How can we help our congregation discern what God is calling us to be and to do?” Leadership does this by paying attention to the gifts and callings of those participating in the life of the community and those God is calling into it.

    The implication of this shift is that we remind ourselves to remain attentive to the Spirit’s movement in our congregation and in the world around us.

  3. Moving from organizational permanence to congregational vitality

    When we think of church as an organization, leadership assumes current structures and processes are there for a good reason. Leadership asks, “HOW can we do WHAT we’re already doing more effectively?”When we think of church as an organism, leadership assumes nothing. Leadership first asks, “WHY do we exist?” then, “HOW do we organize and behave to fulfill that calling?“ then, “WHAT specific activities is God calling us to carry out?” Leadership also asks, “What does the congregation do that is so unique and valuable that it would be missed if the congregation ceased to exist?” and, “If our church were to die today, what would the community around us write as our epitaph?” Leadership pays attention to what feeds and energizes the congregation (and the leadership) and finds ways to do those more of those kinds of things, while letting those things that do not promote congregational vitality die.

    The implication of this shift is that we continuously rediscover and reconnect with our spiritual DNA, and allow ourselves to be watered and pruned by God’s Spirit.

  4. Moving from hierarchical structure to organic networksWhen we think of church as an organization, leadership (and followership) is organized and structured via power, position, and turf. Leadership asks, “What COMMITTEES should a healthy church have?” and “Who can we get to lead and staff them?”

    When we think of church as an organism, all congregational structures and processes are functional and provisional. Work is accomplished through small-group, co-led teams, which can expand and contract, as needed. Leadership asks, “What needs to be done?” then, “Who is called to be on a TEAM to do it?” then, “Which of its members are called to lead the team?”

    The implication of this shift is that we assure that our structures and processes are nimble and flexible, capable of growing and adapting to our context.

  5. Moving from individual perfection to interconnected completenessWhen we think of church as an organization, leadership strives to help every individual person and part of the organization become as self-sufficiently effective as possible. Leadership asks, “What does this person/committee need to be the best, most well-rounded person/committee possible?”

    When we think of church as an organism, leadership strives to help every person and part of the organization become more complete through interconnectedness with others. Leadership asks, “What connections can we forge between persons/teams that make them more complete in their interconnectedness?

    The implication of this shift is that we allow each person to give their best gifts and strengthen our organic interdependence as the body of Christ.

An Invitation to Exploration

What I have offered above is not intended to be a quick fix or a step-by-step guide. It cannot be that because the new paradigm is still emerging. Think of it rather as an example of the kinds of questions your vestry will have to ask yourselves and your congregations if you commit yourselves to this journey.

One thing I can promise is this: Embracing the organic and incarnational nature of Christian community can both make your congregations more vital in the present and enable them to face the “changes and chances” of the future with adaptability and resilience. And it will make your job as leaders more exciting and creative, and perhaps even fun.

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