The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Does the Future Have a Church? And in What Form?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

“Does the Church have a future?” is the wrong question.
The real question is, “Does the future have a Church?”
– Attributed variously

I think I agree… I would only add, “And if it does, in what form will that Church be?” 

It was a little over three years ago in 2017 that I published my research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. But I still prefer my working title, “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith.”

If the term “Singularity” sounds kind of astrophysics-y or SciFi-ish to you, good! It’s supposed to. Because institutional Christianity is entering a kind of wormhole that will deliver us into a context so different, it might as well be an entirely new universe. And what we do now to prepare our congregations and judicatories will determine whether they will survive and thrive or be consigned to oblivion.

The crux of the Religion Singularity is this: Christianity has become better at division than multiplication – we are producing new churches and denominations at an exponentially faster rate than we are producing new Christians. My 2017 projections indicated that by the end of the century there would be only 17,000 Christians per denomination and 67 Christians per worship center. And that’s PER not IN, which means that when you factor out the “Nones,” the average membership of those institutions could be less than half that, which means that all of our ecclesiatical institutions – from congregations to judicatories to denominations – will have become unsustainable in their current forms. 

And that’s B.C.: Before Covid accelerated those trends and crushed all of our familiar paradigms about what Church was supposed to be. This year, for the first time in the history of the U.S., fewer than half the population now “attends Church” (in either physical or virtual form).

[Read more…]

Getting Outside the Building: Missional Context Analysis

The third in a series of blog posts on Vision-Guided Experimentation for faith communities

Click here to read the previous post

By Ken Howard

Vision Guided Experimentation (or VGE) is an emergent learning process which faith-based communities and organizations can use to help them quickly and effective adapt to rapid change while remaining sharply focused on their overarching vision: the seminal organizational belief out which all other organizational beliefs and values flow, which we called Minimum Viable Belief. In the last two posts we discussed the first step in VGE: discerning your congregation’s MVB. In this post, we turn to the next step in the process of Vision Guided Experimentation, which we call Missional Context Analysis.

Missional Context Analysis is about discerning the qualities, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the communities you are called to serve. I use the term “communities” rather than “congregations” as a reminder that faith communities are not just called to serve the people who show up for worship (the community inside the building), but also to serve their neighborhoods around them, and perhaps even the world as a while (the community outside the building). I use the term “missional” as a reminder that God is already at work in the world around us, and that a large part of our discernment is about learning the mission that God may already have in store for us with respect to our neighborhoods.

Speaking to business entrepreneurs, Steve Blanks once said, “No facts exist inside the building – only opinions… so get the hell outside.”[i]

In other words, it’s natural to trust our own assumptions, but we cannot make products our customers want and need unless we “get outside the building” and test our assumptions about what our customers want and need by actually asking or observing them.

Faith-based communities and organizations face the same dilemma, intensified by our tendency toward traditions. We stay inside our worship centers and offices, creating programs we believe our inner and outer communities want, without ever going out and asking.  So our next step is to “get outside the worship center” both figuratively and literally: deriving hypotheses from our MVB, refining those hypotheses against neighborhood demographic and lifestyle data, and then testing those refined hypotheses via direct interaction with the real people behind the numbers.

Essentially, there are three sets of questions we want to ask about our neighborhoods:

  1. Who are the people who make up the community? (Cue the “Sesame Street” theme)
  2. What are the issues the community is facing?
  3. What resources does the community have to deal with those issues?

Missional Context Analysis is crucially important, because the quality of the answers we get when we test your hypotheses depends the clarity and specificity of the hypotheses themselves. We begin by Getting Outside the Worship Center figuratively, exploring how to clarify implications for worship services, spiritual formation programs, congregational and community engagement, and administration. Then we work on Getting Outside the Worship Center literally, mapping out the populations, needs, and assets of the communities we serve, both inside and outside of our organization.

In the language of many Christian (and other) faith traditions, the practice of Missional Context Analysis is related to the idea of “call,” or the particular mission God has in store for a particular faith-based community or organization. While call can be independent of and preliminary to needs of those who we serve, understanding their need can help to refine a faith community’s sense of call. Getting outside the building can help the community inside the building get a clearer idea how God is already at work in the community outside the building, and how their sense of call relates to the ways that God is already at work there.

In future posts we will dig deeper into how to actually conduct a Missional Context Analysis and the tools that are available to do it, including our own soon-to-be released online missional context analysis tool, which we call Datastory for Faith Communities.                                                                                                                                        

[i] Steven G. Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2006), 7.

MVB: Seven Steps to an Enduring Vision

By Ken Howard

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 (click here for previous post), the term I have used to describe the driving vision of a faith-based community or organization. Minimum Viable Belief – or MVB – is the seminal 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 it 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:

  1. Naming
  2. Calling
  3. Clarifying
  4. Seeing
  5. Dreaming
  6. Visioning
  7. Proclaiming

Allow me walk you through each of the seven steps, while providing real-life examples from my own former congregation, a mature startup in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [Read more…]

Minimum Viable Belief: Discovering Your “Why Of Whys”

Minimum Viable Belief

By Ken Howard

Okay. Let’s review.

Early this summer I published a research paper entitled, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in which I described an emerging phenomenon in which the total numbers of denominations and worship centers (local faith communities) worldwide is growing and splintering considerably faster than the total number of Christians, driving relentlessly downward the average number of Christians per denomination and worship center. This, in turn, will render both institutions unsustainable in their current forms by the end of this century. Ultimately, denominations may die out due to their lack of capacity for experimentation and change. However, local faith communities may be able to transform themselves into a new expression of Church. To do that, they need to develop the capacity to experiment with new ways of being Church without sacrificing the heart of Christianity. So how do they develop those capacities? That was the topic of last week’s blog post, in which I outlined the seven practices I call Vision Guided Experimentation. Today, we explore the first practice, Minimum Viable Belief (MVB), which underpins the practices that follow it.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
(Proverbs 29:18)

This verse from Proverbs is the reason why the first practice of Vision-Guided Experimentation is so important. Minimum Viable Belief (MVB) is all about vision. It’s about getting to your faith-based community’s “Why of Why’s” – the seminal belief from which all other organizational beliefs and values stem – so that you can make its vision so clear, core, and compelling that it becomes the primary motivator and compass for all members of the community, so that it both motivates them to get up in the morning and keeps them going all day no matter what frustrations they face.

Minimum Viable Belief is the overarching, transcendent, and seminal reason for your faith community’s existence, driving every other practice. It is a transcendent vision about how that organization wants to change the world, a vision so meaningful to the members of the community that they would rather fail in the service of that vision than succeed in the service of anything else. In the Christian tradition – as well as some others – we define this as a sense of call: an clear and overriding sense of what God desires for a faith community or a faith-based organization (or an individual) to do or to be.

Minimum Viable Belief is also about creating a organizational culture that is experimental, creative, and flexible, and yet grounded, focused, and faithful. MVB allows the community and its members to navigate around massive and complex obstacles while continuing to tack towards its ultimate goal. It empowers startup communities and organizations to be sufficiently self-directing, self-correcting, and tenacious that they can survive the departures of their founders and their transition to their community’s full scale.

A problem most faith communities have is that most of the time we never get past asking ourselves the question, “What?,” as in, “what programs should we offer?” And if we are going to do any tweaking of anything we do, it comes up here. Once in a while we dive a little deeper, asking, “How?,” as in, “How do we get this approved?” Unfortunately, we seldom get to “Why?,” as in “What is our motivation for doing this in the first place?” I say unfortunately, since just asking Why once is not enough: we tend to have a different Why for every What. Rather, we have to keep asking Why until we get to the “Why of Whys.” Exactly how you get to that transcendent Why is what this and the next blog post are about. [Read more…]

Latest Research: Conservative Denominations Joining Mainline In Decline

America’s Changing Religious Identity 2016:
A Research Review
click on image to download document

By Ken Howard

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has just published their findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas in a study entitled America’s Changing Religious Identity.  Their findings add further confirmation those of our research, The Religion Singularity, published in the International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society in July, which projects that institutional Christianity will become unsustainable in its current forms before the end of this century.

Of particular significance is the finding that, despite decades insistence to the contrary by their proponents, theologically conservative denominations and congregations are not immune to the decline that has affected mainline liberal denominations after all, but rather are making up for lost time, matching or exceeding the current rate of shrinkage of their mainline brethren and sistren. In fact, it may even be worse for them than it looks, as millennials are abandoning conservative evangelical congregations at a rate faster than they are leaving other segments of institutional Christianity.

Also consistent with our findings in The Religion Singularity is the fact that “religiously unaffiliated” is one of the fastest growing and “religious” groups in America, growing at such a rate that they could become a significant majority of the U.S. population in less than 15 years (our projection based on PPRI statistics). Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated is increasing as a portion of each new generation. More than a third (36%) of Americans 18-30 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to less than a tenth of those 80 or older.

Another finding of significance is how syncretized religious and political affiliation have become, with the two becoming so overlapped that political affiliation is fast becoming a predictor of religious affiliation and theological leanings.  For example, if a person politically identifies as Republican, there is a 73% chance they will be a white conservative Christian, where white Christians make up only 29% of Democrats (14% of Democrats under 30).

Findings like these, Pew Research’s America’s Changing Religious Landscape (2015), and our own research, The Religion Singularity (International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2017), are often greeted with a combination of fatalism (“We’re all gonna die”) and denial (“My church is growing, so this can’t be true”). But we see them as a vision-clearing wake-up call and a opportunity to rethink the way we do church so that, while we may see the end of institutional Christianity in this century, we can develop a Christ-following movement of faith-based communities from its remains.

Other findings include:

[Read more…]