The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

An Introduction to MapDash Analytics

To fully understand location-based data we need to organize and examine the data in four different ways. We have to:

  1. Visualize – Get your faith community’s data on an map, so you can explore it visually.
  2. Contextualize – Find your faith community’s place in the data, so you can examine its missional context.
  3. Analyze – Interrogate the data, to reveal what it means for your faith community.
  4. Socialize – Share your data, with leaders, members, the community, funders, and other stakeholders

Today’s post is about step 3, and the analytic tools MapDash for Faith Communities provides that help you reveal what demographic, lifestyle, and other data mean for your faith community or judicatory.

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Missional Planning for Congregations: What Is Our Neighborhood?

by Ken Howard

The second post in a multi-part series on Missional Planning.
Click here to read the previous post.

Now that we’ve clarified what “being missional” means in theory, we can move on to what it means to be missional in practice: specifically, how to develop a missional plan. We will walk through the process of developing a congregational missional plan.

When a congregation develops a missional plan, what it is really doing is discerning and then putting in writing how they as a faith community will fulfill Jesus’ command “Love your neighbor” in the larger community in which God has planted them. We can’t do this unless we can answer the question, “Who is my neighbor?” And we cannot do either unless we first get to know our neighbor.

Ultimately, a congregational mission plan is only as sound as the congregation’s knowledge of its neighbors…and its neighborhoods. Which is why half of the steps in developing a congregational mission plan involve conducting a thorough analysis of the congregations missional context. Missional Context analysis is about discerning the qualities, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the communities we are called by God to engage. We 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 the neighborhoods around them, and perhaps even the world as a whole (the community outside the building). We use the term “missional” as a reminder that God is already at work in that community, 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. We simply cannot stay inside our worship centers and offices, creating programs we believe our communities want and need, without ever going out and asking.

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Missional Context Analysis (Part 2): How to Get to Know Your Neighbor(s)

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on Vision-Guided Experimentation.

By Ken Howard

In our last post, we spoke about the need to “get outside the building” by engaging in a Missional Context Analysis. After all, we cannot fulfill the command to “Love your neighbor,” unless we first get to know our neighbor. We called the process of getting to know our  neighbors (and our neighborhoods) “Missional Context Analysis.”

In this post we will be discussing the steps in the process of Missional Context Analysis. In it we will be using terms that have emerged in the development of our Missional Context Analysis tool, Datastory for Faith Communities. You don’t have to use our tool, of course. Nevertheless, the steps are the same.

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