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.

FaithX and Datastory begin work on TEC missio:Engage! Pilot project

We are proud to announce that FaithX and Datastory were recently chosen as primary contractors for the Episcopal Church’s new missio:Engage! Initiative. Which means that Strategic Missional Consulting by FaithX and MapDash for Faith Communities by Datastory are now recommended resources for those joining the new missio:Engage! Community of Practice. Our work has has already begun on a missio:Engage! pilot project with the combined dioceses of New York and Central New York.

FaithX consultants worked with diocesan designees to collect key parochial report data, to be analysed for indicators of individual congregation vitality and sustainability, as well as for diocese-level indicators of missional opportunity. And Datastory is now in the process of analyzing this data and provisioning a diocese-specific missio map dashboard for each diocese.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

A Mentored Missional Journey

 

 

As we launch MapDash for Faith Communities at the Episcopal General Convention Expo, we will also be launching an exciting new companion consultative program: A Mentored Missional Journey to the Future of Your Diocese and Its Congregations.

Developed in collaboration with the Episcopal Church and shaped by input from diocesan and congregational leadership from around the U.S., this 12-month program of mentored missional assessment and planning is designed to prepare dioceses to engage the emerging “New Americas” through strategic ministry development, congregational redevelopment, and new church starts.

The Church has entered a time of accelerating change and escalating uncertainty. Neighbor-hood transformation, which once took place over generations, now happens almost overnight, increasingly causing us to fall out of touch – and thus out of love – with the people and neighborhoods God is calling us to engage.

This program is designed to provide dioceses – and through them, their congregations – the tools they need to learn about their communities at the speed of change and to guide diocesan leadership through the challenging journey of deeply and systemically discerning and engaging the missional opportunity inherent at the intersection of faith communities, neighbor-hoods, and the Spirit of God.

In short, we help you learn to fall in love with your communities again.

 

Participating dioceses will complete the program with:

  • A broader understanding of the health of their congregations, the demographic trends in their neighborhoods, and the opportunities for missional engagement between congregations and neighborhoods
  • A deeper level of discernment about what God is already up to in their communities and neighborhoods
  • A clearer vision for what God is calling them to be and to do in response to what they have learned about their communities and how God is already at work in them
  • A pilot-tested, living strategy for engaging identified missional opportunities that have been identified in their dioceses

 

Stages of the Journey

1 – Data Gathering/Provisioning the Dashboard

Gather, consolidate and organize diocese-specific congregational and community demographics, analytics, and diagnostic data into one place, where it can be easily displayed, manipulated, and explored.

2 – Missional Opportunity Assessment

Enable diocesan leadership team to acquire a God’s-eye view of the totality of congregations and communities that make up their diocese and assess the health of its congregations and the characteristics of its communities in order to identify, explore, and engage emergent missional opportunities.

3 – Strategic Missional Planning

Facilitate the creation of a living strategy for the diocesan leadership team that addresses the opportunities identified in missional assessment.

Estimated Timeline – 12 months

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Download an Illustrated PDF Handout about this Program

 

 

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.