The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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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Webinar (June 17) – Reopening Church in a New Reality: Re-Visioning in a Changing Context

Reopening Church in a New Reality: Re-Visioning in a Changing Context

6/17/20 (Next Wednesday) | 1:00pm-2:00pm (ET)

Webinar Description:

Before we reopen our congregations in the wake of COVID-19, we have to get clear about the “WHY” of our congregations, so that we may adapt our ministries to the needs of our new contexts without losing our reasons for being. Come and explore with us what needs to change so the really important things can “remain the same.”

This webinar is the first in a 3-part series entitled: Reopening Church in a New Reality. The next two webinars will be:

  • 7/18/20 – Considerations for Leading a Hybrid Congregation (online and in the building)
  • 8/12/20 – Discerning Your Congregation’s Post-COVID Calling

Webinar Hosts:

  • Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant (Host)
  • Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant (Co-Host)
  • Ken Howard, FaithX Principal Consultant (Co-Host)

For More Info: mary@faithx.net

Click Here to Register

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FaithX Goes To Birmingham, Alabama

Next week, FaithX folk will be going to the Genesis conference on New Episcopal Communities. Aspiring church planters from dioceses around the country will be gathering, along with many of their bishops, for three days of information sharing, training, and coaching.

Ken Howard, our executive director and principal consultant, and Steve Matthews, one of FaithX’s two senior associate consultants, will be delivering plenary presentations and offering micro-coaching sessions with interested participants. Steve’s presentation is entitled, “Falling in Love with your Neighborhood” and Ken’s is entitled, “Grounding Discernment in Data: Missional Planning with MapDash for Faith Communities.”

Other topics at the conference will include: Convening and Nurturing Your Core Team, Hosting Transformative Conversations/Networking, What To Do When Things Don’t Go As Planned, Defining and Achieving Sustainability, and more.

FaithX will be offering a new consultative program, Strategic Missional Planning for Genesis Congregations, which has been customized to the needs of those church planters who will be applying for New Episcopal Communities Grants.

For more information on the New Episcopal Communities initiative, click here.

The Great Religion Singularity: McLaren’s Reflections on Howard’s Research

by Darren M. Slade, PhD

If things continue unchanged and unchallenged, then the death of institutional Christianity is precisely what will happen. And believers won’t have to imagine it. They will be forced to live through it. 

– Brian McLaren, Author/Speaker/Activist

Editor’s Note: This article is a review of Brian McLaren’s “Conditions for the Great Religion Singularity,” which in turn is a review of Ken Howard’s research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity.” We almost titled this blog post, “The Church’s Frightmare,” given the coincidence (if you believe in such things) that it would post on Halloween and the fact that the death of institutional Christianity can be a scary thing for we who are its adherents to consider. Indeed, after reading the original article, one clergy colleague quipped, “I’m so glad I’m retiring this year: this is just depressing and scary.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Schism.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Awakening.”

You’ve heard of the “Great Emergence.”

The Institutional Christianity now has entered a new era of
dramatic destabilization and deinstitutionalization…

THE GREAT RELIGION SINGULARITY

Can you imagine the death of Christianity? Can you imagine a world without the Christian Church? For many anthropologists, the death of Christianity is merely an eventuality like it has been for most human religions throughout time.1

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Broadening Our Reach – Increasing our Offerings

It’s been 12 months since Ken Howard and Matt Felton, respective founders of FaithX and Datastory, appeared at the exposition hall at the Austin Convention Center in Texas to launch Datastory’s new MapDash for Faith CommunitiesTM strategic missional planning platform along with FaithX’s Strategic Missional Consulting initiative. 

Much has happened in the last year with both FaithX’s missional consulting services and Datastory’s platform. And we’d like to bring you up to date on all the progress we have made in such a relatively short time.

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