The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 1)

A good hockey player plays where the puck is.
A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Wayne Gretzky
(Canadian professional ice hockey player – 1979 to 1999)

Missional opportunity is like hockey in this respect: If you wait to engage it after it has already emerged, it is already too late to engage it effectively. If you do want to engage missional opportunity effectively, you have to be there, prepared and ready, where and when it emerges, because if you wait, you will be forced to play a losing game of reactive catch-up after the fact.

Say you are considering starting a new congregation. If you wait until a growing community has developed a sufficient number of people to populate and financially support a house of worship, the rising price of real estate will have made purchasing the property on which to construct it cost prohibitive (if there are any suitable properties that have not already been snapped up by builders or more forward-thinking denominations). Similarly, if your established congregation waits to adapt its ministries to its changing neighborhood until the transformation is complete, one-time newcomers may have set down roots in congregations that loved them enough to adapt to them. No, you have to be willing to take the risk of predicting where and when the opportunity is going to be doing what is necessary to be there.

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Engaging the New Year

By Ken Howard

At FaithX, we are looking forward to engaging 2019 and we hope you are, too!

Our plans include:

Our FaithXperimental blog will include articles on:

  • Missional Engagement. Best practices for identifying engaging missional opportunities as they arise.
  • Mission Development and Redevelopment. Strategies for redeveloping existing congregations and planting new congregations, and how to know when each is appropriate.
  • Congregational Vitality and Sustainability. Articles on how to assess the health and long-term sustainability of congregations, and what to do about it.
  • Innovative and Experimental Faith Communities. We will be continuing our “Spotlight” articles, shining a light on more innovative and experimental faith communities, strategies, and ministries. If you would like to suggest a Spotlight article on your faith community or ministry, click here.
  • Contributions by Guest Bloggers. To let us know if you would like to be an occasional FaithXperimental contributor, click here.
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Why does MapDash for Faith Communities Cost More?

 

“Why Is MapDash for Faith CommunitiesTM cost more than other demographic programs?”

It’s a question we get asked a lot. And it is true that an annual diocesan subscription to MapDash is more expensive than other programs, though renewal costs in subsequent years are somewhat less than the first year. And this is before adding the cost of guided strategic missional assessment and planning that we recommend for the first year.  Which brings us to a second question we get asked a lot…

“Why would I want to pay more for MapDash and even more for several days of consultation over a 3-6 month period? Why can’t we just use the cheaper program and do the missional assessment and planning work ourselves?”

I know, that’s actually two more questions. And all three are reasonable questions to ask.

And yes, of course you could do all those things. You could pay a lot less by subscribing to a less expensive program and doing all the demographic assessment and planning without any help.

But there are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t do those things… and why you should invest more in MapDash subscription and in guided strategic missional planning.

There’s a reason that MapDash for Faith Communities is costs more.

It has to.

It has cost more because it is loaded with judicatory and congregational analytics that aren’t available anywhere else.

Analytics are what the name implies: practical faith community metrics derived from an analysis of key internal and/or external factors. And MapDash for Faith Communities contains eight faith community analytics unavailable elsewhere:

  • Congregational Vitality Index (CVI)
  • Congregational Sustainability Index (CSI)
  • Sustainability–Viability Margin Index (SVMI)
  • Missional Opportunity Index (MOI)
  • Missional Context Report (MCR)
  • MissionWebs
  • DriveTime Analysis (15 min)
  • Study Area Stats

Of course, we could provide MapDash for Faith Communities at a lower cost if we left out these eight judicatory-specific analytics. But that would make it less valuable.

Which brings us to a second reason that you should invest more in MapDash…

Because it IS more valuable.

The analytics it provides makes MapDash exponentially more valuable.

Where else could you go to get an annually updated assessment of vitality for every congregation in your judicatory with a single mouse-click? Or a five-year projection each congregation’s sustainability?

Where else could you go to see every area of projected emerging missional opportunity in your judicatory at a glance? Or every area of emerging missional challenge?

Where else could you go to see the area of greatest influence and attraction of every congregation in your judicatory? Or the areas of greatest competition among congregations?

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FaithX Site Suffers Malware Attack… and a few of you can help

 

Late last week FaithX.net suffered a malware attack. The malware in question had an innocuous name – I mean “Hello Dolly” sounds harmless, right? Indeed, we didn’t realize it was an attack when we first discovered the program on our Plugins page. But it did one heck of a lot of damage – before we identified and removed it, about a third of our files we gone and the menu structure was scrambled.

Some of the files were old and unused. Some were simple and easily recreated. But one page in particular was a real loss…

 

Our “Testimonials Page”

Every link to our Testimonials page instead took us to the dreaded “404 Page Not Found” page. Better than the “white blog screen of death,” I suppose. But still quite a blow.

We’ve been able to find many of the lost testimonials in the sender’s original emails (so glad I’m so bad at deleting old emails). And we’ve restored many others from memory. But others are seemingly nowhere to be found.

 

So here’s how a select few of you can help…

If you are one of those people who provided us with a testimonial for MapDash for Faith Communities, our Missional Journey consulting program, or one of our consultants – Mary Frances, Steve Matthews, or me – and could send it to us again or recreate it, we would be forever grateful.

If you are not one of those people, but have been using MapDash or worked with one of us, or even had a demo and were impressed, and are willing to write a sentence or two about it, that also would make us very happy.

If you fall into either of those groups, and you want to help, just jot a few thoughtful words in an email and address it to ken@faithx.net, and you can be one of…

The Few, the Proud, the Testimonializers

Our Newest Ad for MapDash and Strategic Missional Consulting

We are happy to highlight for you our latest combined ad for Datastory’s MapDash for Faith Communities and FaithX’s Strategic Missional Consulting.

We hope to see it featured soon in Net Results Magazine, North America’s most enduring and most trusted evangelism and church growth magazine. It is a wonderful resource, not only for church planters and church redevelopers, but for anyone seeking to be more effective in missional work. One of senior associate consultants, Mary Frances, was recently asked to be a senior writer for the magazine. If you haven’t already subscribed, we encourage you to check it out.

Click Here for a PDF Copy of the Ad

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