Inventing the Future of Faith-Based Communities and Organizations
Date: March 26, 2017 (The 4th Sunday in Lent)
Preacher: The Rev. Ken Howard
Location: Church of the Holy Apostles, Arbutus, Maryland.
Text: John 9:1-41
Jesus said, ‘I came into this world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.’
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, the term I have used to describe the driving vision of a faith-based community or organization. Minimum Viable Belief – or MVB – is the one 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 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:
Allow me walk you through each of the seven steps, while providing real-life examples from my own congregation, a mature startup in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [Read more…]
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.
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.
Organizing and sharing the data about the Religion Singularity continues to be an eye-opening experience for me. It has been enlightening to observe the responses of different groups of people. I’ve observed a couple interesting trends, especially among church people.
A continuing revelation has been how much more receptive to the data secular leaders are than church leaders. Business people, especially entrepreneurs, tend to see the trends and recognize the implications before I finish explaining them. Church leaders, on the other hand, are much more resistant. Some have trouble seeing the implications implied by the data, those who do become very defensive, and it’s hard to get them to see past the danger to the opportunity. And the more ensconced they are in the institutional church and the higher in the hierarchy they are, the more resistant they tend to be.
It’s not that they don’t recognize church decline. Everyone knows that churches are facing tough times. It’s the unwillingness to acknowledge that church demographic trends point to the end of the church as we know it. It’s thinking we can still tweak our way out of trouble or somehow revitalize the current model of church. Because if the Religion Singularity analysis is correct, it’s like thinking that the Titanic can dodge the iceberg.
And I continue to be astonished that no one in the church noticed the implications of this data before I did. After all, I’m no genius and it wasn’t rocket surgery. The demographic data I used have been around for decades and is updated every year. All it required was a spreadsheet and simple subtraction. It’s just that nobody had ever done the math. Perhaps I might have missed the implications, too, had I not stumbled into an science museum exhibit about Ray Kurzweil’s book on the Technological Singularity while I was pondering it.
In any event, I’ve been pondering the source of this resistance. And today, as I was riding my bike to the coffee shop where I do my writing, it came to me. It’s because of grief – a prospective grief at the coming death of the institutional church. And before they can see the potential resurrection of the church in a new form, they have to go through familiar stages of grief laid out by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.
It became even clearer to me when I saw the following graph,[1] a slightly tweaked, seven-stage version Kübler-Ross’s work, and it left me feeling a lot more sympathetic to the resistance I’ve been experiencing, and a lot more patient with the people offering that resistance. Most of us ordained leaders have a love/hate relationship with the church, but the frustration and anger we feel at the church from time to time is actually born of the love we have for what we know it could be.
It’s no wonder we find ourselves resistant to see its impending death, even if we believe there will be a resurrection on the other side.
We’ve got a lot of grief work to do before we can be at peace with the work God is asking us to do.
And we at The FaithX Project can provide a little help through the process.
[1] Graph courtesy of Jo Banks at What Next consultancy.
