The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Getting Outside the Building: Missional Context Analysis

The third in a series of blog posts on Vision-Guided Experimentation for faith communities

Click here to read the previous post

By Ken Howard

Vision Guided Experimentation (or VGE) is an emergent learning process which faith-based communities and organizations can use to help them quickly and effective adapt to rapid change while remaining sharply focused on their overarching vision: the seminal organizational belief out which all other organizational beliefs and values flow, which we called Minimum Viable Belief. In the last two posts we discussed the first step in VGE: discerning your congregation’s MVB. In this post, we turn to the next step in the process of Vision Guided Experimentation, which we call Missional Context Analysis.

Missional Context Analysis is about discerning the qualities, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the communities you are called to serve. I use the term “communities” rather than “congregations” as a reminder that faith communities are not just called to serve the people who show up for worship (the community inside the building), but also to serve their neighborhoods around them, and perhaps even the world as a while (the community outside the building). I use the term “missional” as a reminder that God is already at work in the world around us, and that a large part of our discernment is about learning the mission that God may already have in store for us with respect to our neighborhoods.

Speaking to business entrepreneurs, Steve Blanks once said, “No facts exist inside the building – only opinions… so get the hell outside.”[i]

In other words, it’s natural to trust our own assumptions, but we cannot make products our customers want and need unless we “get outside the building” and test our assumptions about what our customers want and need by actually asking or observing them.

Faith-based communities and organizations face the same dilemma, intensified by our tendency toward traditions. We stay inside our worship centers and offices, creating programs we believe our inner and outer communities want, without ever going out and asking.  So our next step is to “get outside the worship center” both figuratively and literally: deriving hypotheses from our MVB, refining those hypotheses against neighborhood demographic and lifestyle data, and then testing those refined hypotheses via direct interaction with the real people behind the numbers.

Essentially, there are three sets of questions we want to ask about our neighborhoods:

  1. Who are the people who make up the community? (Cue the “Sesame Street” theme)
  2. What are the issues the community is facing?
  3. What resources does the community have to deal with those issues?

Missional Context Analysis is crucially important, because the quality of the answers we get when we test your hypotheses depends the clarity and specificity of the hypotheses themselves. We begin by Getting Outside the Worship Center figuratively, exploring how to clarify implications for worship services, spiritual formation programs, congregational and community engagement, and administration. Then we work on Getting Outside the Worship Center literally, mapping out the populations, needs, and assets of the communities we serve, both inside and outside of our organization.

In the language of many Christian (and other) faith traditions, the practice of Missional Context Analysis is related to the idea of “call,” or the particular mission God has in store for a particular faith-based community or organization. While call can be independent of and preliminary to needs of those who we serve, understanding their need can help to refine a faith community’s sense of call. Getting outside the building can help the community inside the building get a clearer idea how God is already at work in the community outside the building, and how their sense of call relates to the ways that God is already at work there.

In future posts we will dig deeper into how to actually conduct a Missional Context Analysis and the tools that are available to do it, including our own soon-to-be released online missional context analysis tool, which we call Datastory for Faith Communities.                                                                                                                                        

[i] Steven G. Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2006), 7.

Adapting to Change without Forsaking Tradition

By Ken Howard

A common quandary I hear expressed by leaders of faith-based communities and organizations is…

How can I help my community adapt
to a rapidly changing world
without forsaking our traditions?

And my answer to this quandary is:

It depends…

Specifically, it depends on what you think traditions are good for.

If we think of our traditions as holy and unchanging, then there is nothing we can do to help our congregations adapt to the changes in the world around them. Eventually, they will wither and die and fossilize.

But only God is holy and unchanging. Which means that our traditions are cannot be. A better way to think of our traditions is as ways of doing and being Church that have been tested by time and found to be fruitful. They are only useful to the degree that they help help our faith communities focus on our relationship with God, understand and follow God’s call for us, and live in unity as the body of Christ. Indeed, the only reason they seem unchanging to us is that in ages past change in the world around the Church was glacially slow, which allowed the Church the luxury of changing its traditions over multiple lifetimes.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the freedom to change at a snail’s pace. The pace of change in the world around us is increasing exponentially by the day. Churches used to have generations to absorb and respond to racial, ethnics, or lifestyle changes in the composition of the neighborhoods we serve. But these days changes that were once measured in generations are now measured in years. Blink and your neighborhood has flipped. And the Church is changing just as fast. The Religion SIngularity, our research paper published last summer provides definitive evidence that many of our current institutional forms – both at the local and denominational level – will become unsustainable long before the end of the current century, and suggests that we have perhaps a 10-year window to begin exploring new ways of being Church.

All of which means if we are to maintain our ability to translate the Good News into the world around us, we need find a way to test and adapt our traditions much more quickly, while not losing sight of their ultimate purpose and meaning.

And that’s what Vision-Guided Experimentation (VGE) comes in. VGE is a collection of principles and practices that help faith-based communities and organizations become much more agile and experimental: testing and adapting traditions – or creating new ones – rapidly while remaining focused on their meaning and the vision they represent. Because change for change’s sake is no better that tradition for tradition’s sake.

In our last few posts we learned how to get very clear on our vision and ultimate meaning of our traditions – tracing our way up from the WHAT of our traditions to the ultimate WHY they represent – using the principle we call Minimum Viable Belief (MVB).

Once clear on our overarching vision or MVB, the question then becomes how to move rapidly through the process of testing and adaptation. This is what we will cover in the next several posts, as we discuss two closely-related practices we call Minimum Viable Program and Rapid Iteration Prototyping.