The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Keeping Congregations Connected: Creating Neighborhood Community in the Context of COVID-19

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant

The post is part of our “Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19” blog series.

Click here for the previous post.

What opportunities for connection, joy, support, love, collaboration, and ministry in your neighborhood are just waiting to be noticed, named, and nurtured?  

This strange time we are living in seems to be a time of dichotomy.  Social distance but stay connected. Protect yourself for the sake of others.  Find unity in the diaspora. Celebrate life while we sadly count the deaths.  Yet the church was created for a time such as this.  Today the most pressing question in the church is how do we stay connected while we are all at least 6 feet apart?  How do we create community from behind our computer screens?

I think we find the answer in shifting from our well-worn model of large group gatherings to something smaller and closer to home: house churches, neighborhood groups, small groups, or fractals.  Call them what you will, but small groups of people gathering around the gospel are the very foundation of the church.  We find examples of them in the New Testament and more recently in the growing Christian church in China as well as the house church movement all around the world.  In 1950 the Christian church in China was close to 4 million people.  Today the church in China boasts over 67 million people.  And yet the church is still often underground, persecuted and unable to meet in groups of more than 10 people.  Ten people.  That number sounds so familiar.  It’s the number many states are using when they talk about lifting restrictions and allowing small groups to gather again with social distancing.  More dichotomies…gather at a distance!   

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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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Keeping Congregations Connected: Navigating Giving During the COVID-19 Crisis

By Mary Frances

We tend to expect charitable giving to go up during a national crisis, but then the COVID-19 crisis isn’t your typical crisis.  It’s hitting us in multiple places at once. Health, home, employment and financial security, both short- and long-term, all feel very much at risk right now.  So we might expect that congregational giving could go down at this time. Amazingly, people have the ability to rise to the current challenges. The Center for Disaster Philanthropy and its partners have been tracking donations since the start of the COVID-19 crisis.  As of March 26, 2020, people and corporations have donated over $2.9 billion dollars to disaster- and health-related organizations. People are still giving.  

Of course, those giving numbers are national and perhaps even reflect some international donations.  What can you expect at the local level? Can you expect your congregation to continue giving at the level it has in the past?  Can you expect giving to increase? The Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (NMIR) from FaithX can provide you with some answers.  This two-page report contains over 40 data points and several of them can guide your expectations and planning in a time like this.

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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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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.