The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Forecasting Emerging Missional Opportunities – Creating the Missional Opportunity Index (Part 2)

As you learned in last week’s post, the Missional Opportunity Index (MOI) is a version of what marketing professionals call a Market Texture: a map-based representation of emerging market conditions based on a predictive algorithm composed of relevant correlated demographic factors. To generate the MOI, the program starts by creating a quarter-mile-square matrix across the entirety of a diocese, district, or other judicatory. Then it “drops a pin” on one of those thousands of points, samples the population with a 15-min drive from that point, and extracting 5-year projections of four demographic factors that drive Missional Opportunity (MO).

These four opportunity-related factors are:

  • Population Growth.Increasing population in an area is directly related to MO, as it represents an influx of new and unaffiliated people and/or a rapidly increasing rising generation.
  • Diversity Growth. Increasing diversity in an area is directly related to MO, becauseeven if area population has plateaued, it represents turnover in the current population. 
  • Generational Balance.Increasing imbalance between older and younger cohorts is inversely related to MO, as rapidly increasing or decreasing median age predicts reduced financial resources.
  • Qualified Population (a measure of population vs. competition).The number of same denomination worship centers competing for the population with a 15-min DriveTime is inversely correlated to MO.

The MOI map below represents Missional Opportunity in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland. The map represents areas of high MO in medium-to-dark green, areas of moderate MO in yellow-to-light-green, and areas of low MO in orange-to-dark red. It forecasts that several areas of high Missional Opportunity will be emerging in the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland over the next five years, each of which will require different missional strategies to effectively engage.

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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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Dioceses of Georgia and Central Gulf Coast begin the Mentored Missional Journey

This week’s blog post will be a little shorter than average, because Ken is away in Tallahassee much of this week guiding two dioceses – the Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and the Episcopal Diocese of Central Gulf Coast – through the first of four sessions of the Mentored Missional Journey consultative program.

 

What is the Mentored Missional Journey?

A 6-month program of guided strategic missional assessment and planning designed to prepare dioceses to identify and engage emerging missional opportunities through strategic ministry development, congregational redevelopment, and new church starts using MapDash for Faith Communities. It was developed in collaboration with the Episcopal Church and shaped by input from diocesan and congregational leadership from around the U.S.

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Measuring Missional Opportunity

 

By The Rev. Ken Howard

Click here for last week’s post on Measuring Vitality and Sustainability

Last week we discussed how we approach assessing the vitality of congregations based on key parochial report trends and their sustainability based on key demographic projections. We described how we transform those trends and projections into a Congregational Vitality Index and Congregational Sustainability Index and how dioceses other judicatories can use these indexes to perform a system-wide triage of their congregations in their current form and location.

This week we turn from how to assess our current congregational resources to how to predict and discover emerging missional opportunities in the communities around us.

Quantum physicist Niels Bohr famously said, “Prediction is difficult, especially about the future.”

But discovering emerging missional opportunities wasn’t as difficult as it might sound. Or more accurately, once we did the hard work of correlational research necessary to assess congregational sustainability, it wasn’t so hard to take the next step into the predictive analytics of missional opportunity.

Basically, it required taking our existing diagnostic algorithms for sustainability (population growth, diversity growth, generational predominance, and “qualified population”), and transforming them into positive markers in a new algorithm for missional opportunity.

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