The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

New Paradigms: Figuring Out What Comes Next

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant

Here and there in the world
and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation,
usually hidden, but sometimes manifest,
and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ.”

Paul Tillich

Paradigm: a typical example of something or model

The Oxford Dictionary

These are certainly some strange times we are living in. I admit that on some days I wake up and think to myself, “I can’t believe we are living through this.”  And it gets worse by the day. Six weeks ago the clergy who I coach were busy trying to figure out how to do online worship.  Today those same people are trying to figure out how to lead an online funeral or how to console the weary and grieving in their community from afar. These are awful times, indeed. Yet in the dark there is light, in the storm there is quiet and in crisis, opportunity.

For decades the Church has been in decline and while there have been many who claimed to know how to reverse that trend, change has come hard for the Church.  Since the Church is at its core a gathering of human beings and human beings are inherently resistant to change, righting the ship has been more than difficult. We haven’t known how to connect with our communities, we haven’t known how to innovate and bring people along with us, and we have often been more interested in the days gone by than the days yet to come. 

Cue the Covid-19 pandemic.

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Worship in the Midst of COVID-19: Clinging to Old Paradigms Can Be Fatal

By the Rev. Ken Howard

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis. This blog will help congregations better worship together during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Click here for the previous post

Church pastor dies a week after contracting COVID-19

This article was published on the Chicago Sun Times Wire Service on Monday, March 30. In this short but moving piece about assistant pastor Angel Escamilla, assistant pastor of the local Assemblies of God church, the lead pastor describes Angel as having had “the spirit of a dove, the strength of a warrior, the faith of Abraham and when he prayed you knew he was talking to Heaven.” 

What the first article didn’t say is that he contracted COVID-19 after two weeks of the entire worship team gathering at the church’s worship center to livestream services. It didn’t report that the pastor had told the team that livestreaming from the church was an essential service, and those who didn’t feel that they were essential were welcome to stay home if that made them feel more safe. It didn’t convey the fact that several members of the worship team had also tested positive for COVID-19 and were sick or that the lead pastor had encouraged them to withhold this information from the congregation out of “pastoral concern.”

All of that news was broken by a local investigative reporter in a piece published the very next day.

This is what happens when we forget that with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, our old paradigms of worship have crumbled and the new paradigm of worship together during the Coronavirus pandemic has not yet fully risen from the ashes of the old. 

In fact, the task before us is not figuring out how to adapt old ways to a new situation, but rather working together, by trial and error, to create an entirely new paradigm from scratch. In other words, we have to turn our thinking Inside Out. Because, as Jesus said, “New wine explodes old wineskins.” 

Or as Simon Sinek put it , “Start with Why”

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Not Retired: Losing my “religion” to join God in the world

by Ken Howard

It’s been over two years since I left my last church to startup FaithX and, I swear, hardly a week goes by that some clergy colleague doesn’t ask me about how I’m enjoying retirement. The exchange usually goes something like this:

Colleague: So how are you enjoying retirement?

Ken: I’m not.

Colleague: Not enjoying retirement?

Ken: Not retired.

[at this point I explain how what I’m doing is a different different kind of ministry]

It’s not just the fact that people (often the same ones) keep getting wrong that irks me. What truly troubles me is the unexamined assumptions behind the sometimes spoken but usually unspoken exchange that follows:

Colleague: What? Wait! You left your congregation, right?

Ken: Yep.

Colleague: And you didn’t accept a call to a new congregation, right?

Ken: Yep.

Colleague: Then how can say you’re not retired?

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Do NOT Plant a Church, Unless…

By Ken Howard

 

This is gonna be a short one. And many of my fellow church-planting colleagues may not like it.

But if a young clergyperson with aspirations of becoming a church planter came to me today and asked my advice about how to go about it, this would be my advice:

DON’T

Why? Because the picture they have in their head about what a church looks like is some variation of the typical church model that Christian clergy and their congregants have been carrying around in our collective consciousness for more than hundreds, if not thousands of years.

It probably looks something like this…

A dedicated church building. On a dedicated church lot. With a dedicated clergyperson. And dedicated members.

Somebody recently asked me if we would still see churches like this in the future. My response was, “Only if it were stuffed and mounted and displayed in a museum of church archeology.”

Because this model of church is dead. Walking dead. But still dead. It is unsustainable. Because the way the trends are heading, there will simply not be sufficient numbers of Christians per worship center to keep it afloat, either financially or communally.

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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.