The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Tools for Data-Grounded Discernment During Leadership Transition

By Katie Romano Griffin,
Faith Board Member and Associate Minister at Cedar Lane Church

Over time, all religious communities evolve to be more homogeneous. Mine is no exception. Leadership transitions, while often a time of grief and uncomfortable change for a congregation, are one of the best times for a congregation to realign its mission and purpose with the needs of the larger community and transform from what my colleague Abh Janamanchi calls a Sacred Society (closed to larger community needs) to a Holy Community (a place of love and holy experience connected to the greater community). 

In the midst of the pandemic (which is its own kind of transition process), our congregation engaged FaithX to help us with exploring our own strengths and weaknesses, along with the missional opportunities and challenges in the community we serve. For the latter, they introduced us to a tool called a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (or NMIR for short). As someone who has worked with congregations in transition on church growth, I can see how this tool could be useful on both sides of the transition process. 

[Read more…]

Church Attendance in Decline: Announcing NMIR 1.3

by Mary Frances, Senior Consultant

Recently, Gallup announced that church membership had declined below 50% for the first time in recorded history.  In 2000, 70% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque.  And in the brief period of two decades, in 2020 that number has dropped to 47%.  This news was not lost on a client of mine who brought it up in a recent coaching session.  He shared the sentiments of many of his older churchgoers: we need to grow the church!  But what does evangelism mean in the nearly post-pandemic world of 2020?

The conversation that stemmed from that was one that I am deeply passionate about.  It’s time to stop thinking about growing the church.  Yes, I said it.  Stop worrying about growing the church.  Start thinking about the neighborhood in which the church resides.  Start thinking about the community, the people, the strengths, the weaknesses and risk factors, and the resources available to your community.  We need to think about our communities because the revitalization of the church starts with the revitalization of the community.  Usually, we think about it in reverse.  We think about revitalizing the church and then promise we will turn our attention outward once we are in better shape.  But how can a church be strong if the community itself is in decline, is struggling, and is challenging in any number of ways?  I believe that the church will be revitalized as it turns its attention outward, to be in relationship and to be a resource to the community where it lives.

[Read more…]

Liberating Structures for Ministry

by Mary Frances

A few months ago, I stumbled on a Facebook invitation for something called Liberating Structures for meetings.  It turns out this is a collaborative of folks who think that meetings shouldn’t be boring, they shouldn’t be predictable, and most of all they shouldn’t be required if they aren’t really necessary.  I suppose that the last year of more Zoom meetings than usual helped to pique my interest and so I dove into a couple of weeks of webinars (yes, more Zoom meetings) and started to learn about this interesting group of ideas and tools. 

The more these ideas percolate in me and the more I get to try on these new ideas, the more I think we need something like Liberating Structures for ministry.  We could start with “are all these meetings really necessary?,” but then we could get down to the meaty stuff like “why are we doing this?”  and “is this really important anymore?”  or “are we just doing this because we have always done it?”  And my favorite, “is our leadership organized to hinder or help support ministry?”

[Read more…]

Creating Deeper Community Connections

Deeper Community

Dear Readers,

After many requests, we have decided to postpone our webinar – Creating Deeper Community Connections – from February 17 to February 24 at 1:00pm ET to allow prospective participants to devote their entire attention to the celebration of Ash Wednesday on the 17th.

To register for the webinar, click here.

If you already registered and are okay with the new date, don’t worry: your registration will be automatically transferred to the new date.

If you are already registered and the date doesn’t work for you, simply go to the Eventbrite webinar registration page, request a refund, and we will happily comply.

Meanwhile, we hope to see you on the 24th.

Have a great Ash Wednesday!

by Mary Frances

Click this link to register
for our webinar on this topic on February 17, 2021 at 1:00pm
sponsored by FaithX, ECF, and the Gathering of Leaders

When I was in my last parish call, I was fortunate to receive a detailed demographic report from one of the big companies offering such things.  I spent hours pouring over the pages and pages of information.  Median age, median income, race, education, and more.  The whole thing was at least 20 pages long and eventually I realized that it just wasn’t going to do me any good.  First, I didn’t really understand what to do with this information.  Second, I didn’t know where some of these population groups were.  I understood there was a growing Latino population in town, but I didn’t know where they were.  I knew that the number of people experiencing homelessness was growing, but aside from the few who came to the door of the church, was there a place these folks gathered?  Sought shelter?  I just didn’t know and, perhaps more importantly, I didn’t know how to find out.
Today we have clarity on two of the issues I raised above.  We now have demographic reports that are clear, concise, and point to community strengths, weaknesses, and risk factors.  The Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report from FaithX provides over 40 relevant data points – in just two pages! And when we dig deeper into those data points we can determine how and where a community is growing or not, where there is affordable housing or not, and predominant population groups based on age, race, and gender.  We can also determine at a glance if there are concerns about medical coverage, the growing cost of daycare or how many people in your neighborhood are falling into poverty.  These numbers are vital to going beyond anecdotal evidence to understand the joys and concerns of the community in which we are planted.

[Read more…]

A Tale of Three Churches: Strategic Missional Planning in Imperiled Congregations

By The Rev. Ken Howard

On the surface, they were three different congregations in two different parts of the country – one in a northern urban city, one in a mid-Atlantic suburb, and the other in a suburban southern resort area – but otherwise seemed very much the same. But all three were imperiled (e.g., in their judicatories’ version of hospice care), and their human and financial resources were dwindling rapidly.

Their average Sunday attendance was between 30 and 40, with Christmas and Easter attendance hovering around 60, in worship spaces with a capacity of 3-10 times that total. They were rapidly drawing down their endowments, none of which were above $25,000, and roughly two-thirds of their normal operating income was from rentals. Their giving per household was exceptionally high (a point of pride), but this is frequently the case with congregations that know at some level they are in danger of closing soon. They were still imperiled.

That’s when we were called in…

We took all of them through a process we call Neighborhood Missional Assessment, in which we explored the missional opportunities and challenges in the neighborhoods they serve, their vitality strengths and weaknesses, and whether and how they could leverage their strengths to better engage the opportunities and challenges, as well as address their weaknesses. We ran Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Reports to explore key demographic trends and projections that define neighborhood missional opportunities and challenges, and MapDash for Faith Communities to dive more deeply into the demographics and projections they deemed relevant. We used our free Congregational Vitality Assessment to explore their vitality in 10 areas of congregational life, as well as their likely sustainability (with those whose judicatories subscribed to MapDash, we explored their vitality and sustainability scores). And we did trend analysis and projection on their weekly attendance, membership, and income to determine when they each would flatline (all within 10 years).

Here is what we found and how each congregation responded to combat their being imperiled…

[Read more…]