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Jan 11 2018

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

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:

Who are the people who make up the community? (Cue the “Sesame Street” theme)
What are the issues the community is facing?
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.

Jan 04 2018

MVB: Seven Steps to an Enduring Vision

By Ken Howard

Write the vision; make it plain… so that a runner may read it.
Habakkuk 2:2

This is the second of two blog posts on Minimum Viable Belief (click here for previous post), the term I have used to describe the driving vision of a faith-based community or organization. Minimum Viable Belief – or MVB – is the seminal belief or value that is so deep, so shared, so core to the community that it is the source of all other beliefs, values, and actions of the organization. It is the core source of meaning and purpose to the community and its members. Simply put, it is the “Why of Whys.” MVB is a vision that is so clear and plain that it creates and sustains an enduring organizational culture that can guide a faith community throughout its life, even when the community encounters turbulent times.

So far so good! But how does a faith-based community or organization discover, articulate, and communicate its MVB?

There are seven steps involved in discerning your community’s MVB:

Naming
Calling
Clarifying
Seeing
Dreaming
Visioning
Proclaiming

Allow me walk you through each of the seven steps, while providing real-life examples from my own former congregation, a mature startup in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [Read more…]

Dec 28 2017

Minimum Viable Belief: Discovering Your “Why Of Whys”

By Ken Howard

Okay. Let’s review.

Early this summer I published a research paper entitled, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in which I described an emerging phenomenon in which the total numbers of denominations and worship centers (local faith communities) worldwide is growing and splintering considerably faster than the total number of Christians, driving relentlessly downward the average number of Christians per denomination and worship center. This, in turn, will render both institutions unsustainable in their current forms by the end of this century. Ultimately, denominations may die out due to their lack of capacity for experimentation and change. However, local faith communities may be able to transform themselves into a new expression of Church. To do that, they need to develop the capacity to experiment with new ways of being Church without sacrificing the heart of Christianity. So how do they develop those capacities? That was the topic of last week’s blog post, in which I outlined the seven practices I call Vision Guided Experimentation. Today, we explore the first practice, Minimum Viable Belief (MVB), which underpins the practices that follow it.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
(Proverbs 29:18)

This verse from Proverbs is the reason why the first practice of Vision-Guided Experimentation is so important. Minimum Viable Belief (MVB) is all about vision. It’s about getting to your faith-based community’s “Why of Why’s” – the seminal belief from which all other organizational beliefs and values stem – so that you can make its vision so clear, core, and compelling that it becomes the primary motivator and compass for all members of the community, so that it both motivates them to get up in the morning and keeps them going all day no matter what frustrations they face.

Minimum Viable Belief is the overarching, transcendent, and seminal reason for your faith community’s existence, driving every other practice. It is a transcendent vision about how that organization wants to change the world, a vision so meaningful to the members of the community that they would rather fail in the service of that vision than succeed in the service of anything else. In the Christian tradition – as well as some others – we define this as a sense of call: an clear and overriding sense of what God desires for a faith community or a faith-based organization (or an individual) to do or to be.

Minimum Viable Belief is also about creating a organizational culture that is experimental, creative, and flexible, and yet grounded, focused, and faithful. MVB allows the community and its members to navigate around massive and complex obstacles while continuing to tack towards its ultimate goal. It empowers startup communities and organizations to be sufficiently self-directing, self-correcting, and tenacious that they can survive the departures of their founders and their transition to their community’s full scale.

A problem most faith communities have is that most of the time we never get past asking ourselves the question, “What?,” as in, “what programs should we offer?” And if we are going to do any tweaking of anything we do, it comes up here. Once in a while we dive a little deeper, asking, “How?,” as in, “How do we get this approved?” Unfortunately, we seldom get to “Why?,” as in “What is our motivation for doing this in the first place?” I say unfortunately, since just asking Why once is not enough: we tend to have a different Why for every What. Rather, we have to keep asking Why until we get to the “Why of Whys.” Exactly how you get to that transcendent Why is what this and the next blog post are about. [Read more…]

Sep 12 2016

From Certainty to Faith

By River Damien Sims

The first twenty five years of our life were filled with certainty. We knew who God was and that “He” made us in a certain way, no matter what. But in that certainty we were filled with fear, depression, and a horrible sense of being the “bad boy” because we were queer. The church in which we were raised, educated, and ordained told us we had to be straight or we were a “bad” boy, in fact we were “intrinsically evil.” The time came when we expressed those fears to our district superintendent and he reinforced our “badness” when he kicked us out of the ministry. Thus we lost all friends, all means of making a living, but most importantly that which gave meaning and purpose to our life—God.

It was on the streets of Hollywood as a whore, and terribly alone that we began to understand God in Christ as an always changing and moving, disturbing, and a totally grossing Mystery. All the gods–straightness, wealth, Jesus is the only One, white is best—all failed us. The following of the rules, being dressed in a certain way, being nice to the right people—all failed. They blocked the image of God in life. It was only in unmasking the image of the God who lives in our heart that we could see the panoply of the god images surrounding us, and come to an understanding of the process of life. It was coming to that understanding that we understood that God has always been in our life–from the moment our mother’s egg was fertilized and God knew who we were, and loved us for who we are. Being queer was a gift from that Mystery. God is in us now. And in that evolution growth became the purpose of life. Sister Joan Chittister says that “creation is the process of human growth, and that life is not a program of expectations, and the past is no longer a template forever, but the God of the future, beckoning us beyond ourselves, beyond the present into the eternal growth of God.” What is true of the individual is true of us corporately as well. God was no longer a certainty, but a mystery and our journey became one of faith. Holiness lies in the journey of faith, of questioning, and listening to that inner voice.

We have never returned to the “organized” church because it holds certainty as one of its “gods”, but we have moved out into the Mystery. In that Mystery we have learned obedience to that which is within us, to the One who created us, guides us; we have learned humility, that we are simply creatures of the Mystery, one among many, we have learned to come to view silence as our friend, to spend time simply in waiting, listening and praying, and from that silence we have learned our call to hospitality, to serving others, and that we are one with others, no divisions, simply children of the same Mystery. Community is found in loving our neighbor as ourselves without regard to race, creed, age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation or any other label we choose to place on others.

For us that Mystery is found to be best expressed in a creed prepared for children by the World Council of Churches:

“We believe in God, who loves us and wants us to love each other. This is our God.

We believe in Jesus, who cared for children and held them in his arms. He wanted a world where every one could live together in peace. This is Jesus Christ.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, who keeps working with us until everything is good and true. This is the Holy Spirit.

We can be the church, which reminds people of God because we love each other. This we believe.”

And in a summary of our own mission in life we prepared during our time on the streets in which we said:

“The best summary for my mission in life can be found in the statement that: ‘Obedience to Christ does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.'” To be a living mystery means to practice the works of mercy, and in the words of Dorothy Day “to live to the point of folly.” Or in the words of Toyohiko Kawaga “I am a free lance, a tramp, a vagabond. I must go until Christ’s work is done. I go like the wind.”

Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

Fr. River Damien Sims, sfw, D.S.T., D.Min. candidate

Fr. River Damien Sims is a member of the FaithX Network and an occasional contributor The Future of Faith. River is a priest in the Society of Franciscan Workers, an independent Catholic affiliation. He is the director of Temenos Catholic Worker, in San Francisco, California, USA, where he works with street youth and homeless. He has earned BA, MDiv, and Doctor of Sacred Theology degrees, and has received a certificate in spiritual direction from the Vincentian Renewal Center in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.

Aug 01 2016

Two Windows: One Open, One Closed (The Future of Faith)

By Ken Howard

Open and Closed Windows - Jack Challem (2009) — Open and Closed Windows – Jack Challem (2009)

If the Religion Singularity is true… If denominations and churches are growing/fracturing at a considerably higher rate than the worldwide population of Christians, driving a massive downturn in the size of those institutions… What is the future of religion? What is the future of faith?

Author Phyllis Tickle, called by some “the chronicler of the emerging church,” once suggested that the institutional church – in all its various forms – had perhaps an 18 month window in which to adjust themselves to the emerging paradigm of Church. Quite a bold prediction, don’t you think? I thought so at the time (I was inclined to be more gracious…24 months at least). And maybe she thought so, too, since this is what she said immediately after:

In general, short-range predictions are fairly dangerous things. Like loose boards on an aging country porch, they tend to fly up and hit one in the face. I try to avoid them for that very reason. On the other hand, sometimes something is not only compellingly obvious in and of itself, but so too is the need for its telling. Whether I am accurate in my observations or not remains to be seen … very soon, in this case … but the possibility of error does not eliminate the obligation to speak the truth as one sees it, any more than it defuses the urgency.

I’m feeling in a similar emotional space myself, since I now believe that Phyllis’ 18 months window was itself optimistic, and my analysis of the Religion Singularity is that there are two windows. One of those windows remains open and the other actually closed at least two decades ago. I seems to me that the window for denominations is closed and they will collapse sooner than we expect, certainly by the end of the century. But for those faith-based communities willing to do the hard, transformational work necessary to become more lean, agile, and experimental, a narrow window of opportunity remains open.

And what of those faith communities that would rather die than change?

I think that they will achieve their preference.

So the question is not wether to become a lean, agile, and experimental congregation…but how?

And that is a question for next week’s blog post.