The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Engaging in Life and Ministry “Beyond Covid”

by Steve Matthews

What now? How long? What’s next?  As a country we are in our 8th 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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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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Keeping Congregations Connected: Online Fellowship and Small Groups

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant
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 was chatting with a good friend the other day. She’s a pastor; retired for about a year now after serving a very long pastorate.  In her retirement, she has been trying to find her way in a new congregation…as a participant, as a member.  Of course, she’d been at this new church for several months before the pandemic, but that is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the majority of members who have been there for decades—many, many decades.  And now the congregation is not only holding worship online but also the highly-revered small group, “coffee hour.”  Everyone comes to Zoom with their own home brew and pastry and the fellowship begins.  Or does it?

If you have ever been a visitor at a church and wanted to bolt for the door during coffee hour, you may have an idea what I am talking about.  Bad coffee, too much sugary food, and too many cliques—lots and lots of cliques.  Often, the longer people have been at a church the more they feel entitled to tune out visitors and use Sunday morning to catch up with their friends, and now we have moved this online.  Putting everyone in your church into one big Zoom call and letting the conversation rip is not going to feel inclusive, considerate, or welcoming.  Even for the most experienced Zoom users, Zoom can lend a sense of awkwardness to a conversation.  Only one person can speak at a time while everyone else watches.  People often hesitate in response because they aren’t sure if it’s their turn, so the chance to chime in is lost if you are at all meek. If the group is large, then most people are watching just a few people have a conversation.  What happens to the introverts? Will they even show up for this virtual fellowship? How will visitors navigate this?  Is this an improvement on our in-person fellowship?  I am afraid not.

So then what is an online congregation and an online small group to do?  How do we help people engage in fellowship in this modern COVID-19 world?  Do not lose hope, there are two things that can help:  

Zoom rooms and online small groups.

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Where can I go to escape your Spirit? The Case for Communion while Social Distancing

by Ken Howard
Communion while Social Distancing

Where can I go to escape your Spirit?
Where can I flee to escape your presence?
Psalm 139:7 (New English Translation)

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 invite you to suspend your preconceptions and join me in a theological Eucharistic thought experiment. Or, borrowing from my Jewish origins, a midrash on the midrash by the author of Psalm 139.

Imagine you are a clergy person officiating at the celebration of Holy Communion. You arrive at the point in the liturgy where the rubrics call upon you to hold your hands over the bread and wine and speak the words of consecration. 

What is the correct distance between your hands and the elements? Do you have to be in contact with the bread and the wine? What if you only touch the chalice and paten? Does it work if your hands are an inch away? Two inches? Three? A foot away? How about a yard? What if you took four steps back from the altar? Would it still work if you said the words of consecration while standing at the back of the church and holding your hands in the general direction of the altar? Would Communion still “work” while social distancing?

Of course it would. Some of the locations might be “irregular,” but all of them would still be valid.

Why?

Because the real presence of Jesus Christ when we celebrate communion is not brought about by the “magic hands” of the celebrant, but by the strange work of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus told his disciples that he would be present as body and blood whenever they ate bread and drank wine in his Name, he neither prescribed a specific liturgy by which it had to be done nor described either the physics or metaphysics of how it would work. How is simply an undefinable mystery. He. Just. Said. He’d. Be. There.

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Nurturing community in your neighborhoods… even now!

by Steve Matthews
Nurturing community

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.

Click here for the previous post

True confession: in my pre-COVID days, I always had good intentions about being a good neighbor and nurturing community.  I thought about joining the neighborhood association, had casual conversations like “wouldn’t it be great to have a block party” but never made it happen, met people with whom I intended to get together but never did, but mostly, I would raise my hand and speak when passing, pick up trash when I saw it, and disappear into my backyard sanctuary for solitude, gardening, and fellowship with friends (most of whom are not neighbors).

This kind of describes a lot of pre-COVID churches I know, too.   They are friendly to their neighbors (the people and business owners), they care about the appearance of the neighborhood, they offer assistance to those in need… but often, friendly church members park in front of the church, enter the church doors, and find meaning and fellowship with people like them inside the walls, and work to grow and nurture what they find there.  

I can almost look back to those church days with some measure of nostalgia.  While it always felt uncomfortably comfortable, it was familiar, it was easy, and it was stable… or was it? It’s time to get real and let go of our attachment to what is comfortable, familiar, easy, and stable.  Those days are gone for a while… for a long while (or perhaps it was just a myth).  We are now pilgrims on a new journey.  We may not know where we are going or how we will get there, but we have left the building… and we have left the building together.   

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