The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

A Priest and A Data Geek Walk Into A Bar: Sneak Preview of Ken’s Esri User Conference Presentation

On Tuesday, July 9 at 11:15am, Ken Howard, our executive director and principal consultant, will deliver a presentation on data-grounded strategic missional planning at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego, CA.*

The presentation, “Grounding Discernment in Data: Strategic Missional Planning Using MapDash for Faith Communities” will describe how FaithX collaborated with Datastory to adapt interactive GIS technology to provide a platform and a process to help congregations and their judicatories learn the stories of their neighborhoods, identify missional opportunities and challenges emerging from those stories, and develop effective strategies for engaging them. Ken has been asked to deliver this 20-minute presentation as part of Esri’s Expo Spotlight Theater, which will also be spotlighting how other nonprofit organizations put GIS data to work in their respective areas of focus.

Since few of you will be attending the Esri User Conference and many of you have asked about the presentation, we thought it would be a good idea to give our faithful readers a sneak preview.  

Click here to view Grounding Discernment in Data

This presentation is in the form of a datastory:
an interactive presentation tool.
To view the presentation, simply scroll up through the “slides.”

*Esri is an international supplier of geographic information system software, web GIS, and geodatabase management applications.
The company is headquartered in Redlands, California.
The company was founded as Environmental Systems Research Institute
in 1969 as a land-use consulting firm.

Support FaithX

FaithX is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and Ken’s faith-based consulting practice at FaithX is done under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.

Want to learn more about missional opportunities
in your congregation’s neighborhood?
Click here for a free Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report

Want to learn how your judicatory can identify
emerging missional opportunities within its boundaries?
Click hereto schedule a free demo of MapDash for Faith Communities by Datastory
and Strategic Missional Planning by FaithX

FaithX & Datastory at New Story Festival

Just a little over a month from now, FaithX and Datastory will be participating in the New Story Festival, which is being held on March 29-31 in Austin, Texas.

The New Story Festival is a new annual gathering for community, creativity, and the common good: a bold experiment for a better world, embodying imagination, spirituality, social action, and playful connection – defined above all by the practice of love.

Ken Howard of FaithX and Matt Felton of Datastory will be program presenters and will also be exhibiting MapDash for Faith Communities. FaithX and Datastory are also festivals sponsors. And because FaithX is a partner organization, those who register through the FaithX portal get a $20 discount.

As the Festival website says, the world runs on stories – the narratives that fuel the ways we live in this world and relate to one another. Our stories can liberate or oppress, encourage reconciliation or further separation, inspire new life or even bring death. But when we become conscious of our stories, we can begin to change them. Believing that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better,” the New Story Festival seeks to lead us into a better story – one that encourages growth and liberation, healing and harmony; a story where the downtrodden are uplifted and everyone is included.

[Read more…]

The FaithX Project, Inc. is 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a religious and charitable purpose operated as a ministry by the Rev. Ken Howard under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Bishop of Washington.