The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Tools for Data-Grounded Discernment During Leadership Transition

By Katie Romano Griffin,
Faith Board Member and Associate Minister at Cedar Lane Church

Over time, all religious communities evolve to be more homogeneous. Mine is no exception. Leadership transitions, while often a time of grief and uncomfortable change for a congregation, are one of the best times for a congregation to realign its mission and purpose with the needs of the larger community and transform from what my colleague Abh Janamanchi calls a Sacred Society (closed to larger community needs) to a Holy Community (a place of love and holy experience connected to the greater community). 

In the midst of the pandemic (which is its own kind of transition process), our congregation engaged FaithX to help us with exploring our own strengths and weaknesses, along with the missional opportunities and challenges in the community we serve. For the latter, they introduced us to a tool called a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (or NMIR for short). As someone who has worked with congregations in transition on church growth, I can see how this tool could be useful on both sides of the transition process. 

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Thinking Strategically about Your Next Leader

By Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant

This is post #2 of a 3-part series on Thinking Strategically about Missional Planning and a Church’s Next Leader

Click here to read the last post

I remember when I was interviewing for my first call.  Someone asked me how long I thought I would stay, should I receive the call.  My answer was pretty standard, “Typically a first call is in the three-to-seven-year range,” I said.  One of the committee members was crestfallen.  She said, “I thought you would be here to marry my children!”  That was 20 years ago and none of her children are married yet.

We tend to have lots of notions, romantic and other, about who our next leaders should be and what we expect of them.  But what if, instead of some a set of unclarified, unspoken expectations, we entered into a call process with a clear idea of where we were headed and who we needed to take us there?

Last year I consulted with a congregation doing just that kind of work.  They were about to enter the call process; completing all the forms the judicatory sent to them.  Yet they wanted to be sure about what they put on those forms and how it would serve them in the future.  It turned out this congregation had lots of empty nesters and their child, youth and family ministries were dwindling.  And, so as we talked, they sounded like most churches in their situation.  “We want more families with kids,” they said.  And, I thought, “Doesn’t everyone?”  

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Transforming our Understanding of Strategic Missional Planning

By Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant

Editor’s Note: This is the beginning of a 4-part series on Strategic Missional Planning in different contexts. Next week’s post will be on strategic missional planning for leadership transition.

Remember the good ol’ days when we felt we could project the trajectory of our congregations and judicatories with some degree of confidence?  Remember what it was like to be able to cast a vision based on thoughtful discernment and a sense of stability – believing that in five years we might just reach our goals?  

The world has certainly changed in a year, and we are reminded again that we are not in control.  A couple of nights ago I had a very dramatic and involved dream.  All night long, I was battling evil “Transformers.”  You know, the Paramount Pictures, 200-feet-tall monsters that have the ability to change themselves from a walking robot to a fire-shooting four-wheel vehicle of destruction.  They are very adaptable based on the threat and the weaknesses they see in their opponent.  In reaction to their threats, I was also called to be very adaptable (mostly in the strategic way I hid from them).  It was an exhausting night.

2020 was an exhausting year, and we as faith communities continue to be called toward adaptability.  In 2021 it is possible to plan and to be adaptable… and even strategic, but we won’t do it in the same way we did prior to 2020.  We need to recommit to those spiritual practices that ground us in God’s love, to the practices that enable us to listen to one another and our neighbors at a deep level, to practices that encourage us to accompany our hurting neighbors in a more courageous and prophetic way – and we need to understand our world better in order to move forward together based on our current reality.

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Announcing our 2021 Webinars (Part 1)

Co-sponsored by Gathering of Leaders and Episcopal Church Foundation

After ending 2020 on a high note (our webinar on Covid-19 Impact and Recovery Planning sold out!), we are announcing our webinar schedule through June and our webinar topics through April.

As always, we remain open to your suggestions and requests (submit to info@faithx.net). 

Here is our webinar schedule through May 2020:

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