pandemic Archives | The FaithX Project

Dec 17 2020

New Year, Same Challenges. Follow the Light!

We couldn’t have imagined we’d still be here last March.

No, we couldn’t have imagined then that we would still be here now but here we are physically distanced, doing drive-through worship, showing up on Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube. And, somehow, some way…by the grace of God, it’s working, it’s all working. And it needs to keep working for quite some time.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time talking with a public health expert. Someone who lives in the world of exposures and workplace safety. Someone who has no skin in the game except to keep people safe. He said hunker down. The worst is yet to come. We have another 9-12 months ahead of us before we can feel safe gathering in groups indoors. A year?! Another year? We definitely didn’t see that coming last March!

But maybe that news could be freeing. Rather than looking ahead for each corner we need to turn in order to go back to the way things were before, what if we let go of that and just focus on what’s ahead, focus on the new year? What if we dove into the next year with creativity, energy, grace, and adaptability without worrying about being in our buildings? Could this be our best year of ministry yet?

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Dec 10 2020

Hanukkah Light

by Steve Matthews

What time is it?

It seems there is a timelessness to life right now, and probably not in a good way. Our “normal” patterns and ways of marking time are disrupted. Many people are unemployed, which affects the way they order their time. Others, like health care workers, clergy, and teachers (just to name a few) are working harder than ever – working in person and online and in all kinds of synchronous and asynchronous combinations. Thanksgiving patterns were different this year, and we can expect Christmas to offer challenges to our concept of “normal” time too.

Fortunately, there are practices that enable us to experience “time” in ways that are grounding and nurturing. On December 21 we will enter winter, and the changing of the seasons occurs regardless of who wins elections or what virus is afflicting us. Can we sense the changing day length? If we can’t appreciate the growing darkness, can we at least notice it and honor the rhythms of the earth that continue regardless of our human condition? Many of our religious cycles (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost) occur every year, and while the way they are expressed may change with the current pandemic or other world events, their invitations to a deeper spiritual life expressed inwardly and in our actions is not muted. These observances invite us to reflect and to celebrate God’s timeless and expansive love for us in ways that can embrace us in this current reality and even help us transcend the limited view of time our culture proffers.

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Nov 05 2020

10 Counterintuitive practices that will improve your stewardship (even during a pandemic)

By Ken Howard

In my more than 25 years in starting new congregations and redeveloping existing ones, I have gained a number of hard-won insights into what makes stewardship successful. These insights are the results of much congregational experimentation and reviewing giving research, and most of them go against the grain of our stewardship traditions. I offer this list ten DOs and DON’Ts below:

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Oct 08 2020

Engaging in Life and Ministry “Beyond Covid”

by Steve Matthews

What now? How long? What’s next? As a country we are in our 8^th month of this pandemic. We continue to protest/ explore/ address/ ignore our racial inequities. The west coast burns, and we round the alphabet on hurricane names in the gulf and Atlantic. Next month we will have a critical election for federal, state, and local leadership… and then there is the Supreme Court. There’s probably more, but suffice it to say, we have our hands more than full.

What does it mean to “be” church in the middle of all of this? It’s no wonder people yearn to get back into their church buildings and to return to “normal.” For many of us, these buildings represent a sense of belonging, beauty, safety, hope. These are places where we have experienced community and God’s love fleshed out. This is where many of us feel inspired and strengthened for the journey.

But here we are, and how are we as people of faith called to show up in this “now?” How do we look at our world in ways that help us move beyond reaction?

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May 27 2020

Innovate for Building and Growing Community

by Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant
Growing Community

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand.
The arrogance of success is to think
that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

William Pollard
Online Small Groups

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I like working with FaithX. As consultants we are invited to bring our whole selves to the table. We bring our experience, our vocation, our vision, and we are invited everyday to innovate for the benefit of the faith communities and judicatories we accompany.

One way we experience innovation comes in the way Mary Frances, Ken Howard, and I collaborate with one another, and we also experience the excitement of innovation as we bring robust data to bear on the community contexts of the people we serve. We work with our partner DataStory to offer dynamic, informative, eye-opening resources to help organizations chart a path toward bolder and more creative visions than they might have been otherwise imagined.

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