The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Does the Future Have a Church? And in What Form?

By the Rev. Ken Howard

“Does the Church have a future?” is the wrong question.
The real question is, “Does the future have a Church?”
– Attributed variously

I think I agree… I would only add, “And if it does, in what form will that Church be?” 

It was a little over three years ago in 2017 that I published my research paper, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. But I still prefer my working title, “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith.”

If the term “Singularity” sounds kind of astrophysics-y or SciFi-ish to you, good! It’s supposed to. Because institutional Christianity is entering a kind of wormhole that will deliver us into a context so different, it might as well be an entirely new universe. And what we do now to prepare our congregations and judicatories will determine whether they will survive and thrive or be consigned to oblivion.

The crux of the Religion Singularity is this: Christianity has become better at division than multiplication – we are producing new churches and denominations at an exponentially faster rate than we are producing new Christians. My 2017 projections indicated that by the end of the century there would be only 17,000 Christians per denomination and 67 Christians per worship center. And that’s PER not IN, which means that when you factor out the “Nones,” the average membership of those institutions could be less than half that, which means that all of our ecclesiatical institutions – from congregations to judicatories to denominations – will have become unsustainable in their current forms. 

And that’s B.C.: Before Covid accelerated those trends and crushed all of our familiar paradigms about what Church was supposed to be. This year, for the first time in the history of the U.S., fewer than half the population now “attends Church” (in either physical or virtual form).

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Rapid Iterative Prototyping: Validated learning within a context of tradition

by Ken Howard

This is the fourth post in an ongoing series on Vision-Guided Experimentation
click here for previous post

Faith Communities are living organisms made up of human beings. They “live and move and have their being,” sharing many of the characteristics of the people who populate them. Like them, one of things faith communities have to do in order to survive and thrive is sense, respond, and adapt to the environment in which they live.

Last week’s post was about the sensing part of that equation: Mission Context Analysis. We discussed ways of “Getting Outside the Building,” in order to learn more about the characteristics, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the people who comprise the neighborhoods we hope to serve.

This week’s post is about responding and adapting, employing a process we call Rapid Iteration Prototyping. Once we have gotten to know the needs and aspirations of the communities inside and outside the building and having discerned how God is calling us to respond to those needs and aspirations, the next step is creating actual ministries and programs to carry that out. And because of the rapid pace of change in our neighborhoods we have to be able to develop and test them quickly, discarding what doesn’t work and refining what does.

To do that, we start by creating what folks in the business startup arena call a Minimum Viable Product, or in our case a Minimum Viable Program or Ministry. We create a prototype of the program – not a “deluxe” version with everything WE might WANT in it but a much simpler version with only what we have VERIFIED they NEED. In the illustration above, we label this step “ADAPT,” in order to remind ourselves that since, as the proverb says, “there is nothing new under the sun,” that for this step to work we don’t have create a program “out of whole cloth,” but that creativity often takes the form of stealing and repurposing something someone else has already tried.

Then we begin the actual process of rapidly and repetitively testing and tweaking. We test the program with the intended audience (APPLY), ask them what they think about it (ASSESS), and then tweak the aspects of the prototype that are working and toss those that don’t. Then we repeat, learning and adapting more and more with each iteration, until we get it “right.”

Over the nearly 20 years I’ve been designing and refining this approach to ministry development and redevelopment, I’ve seen it applied to every aspect of congregational life, from startup to expansion, from evangelism to worship, from marketing to member giving.

Let me share an example from a church I served, about prototyping a program to engage and serve an underrepresented population.

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Adapting to Change without Forsaking Tradition

By Ken Howard

A common quandary I hear expressed by leaders of faith-based communities and organizations is…

How can I help my community adapt
to a rapidly changing world
without forsaking our traditions?

And my answer to this quandary is:

It depends…

Specifically, it depends on what you think traditions are good for.

If we think of our traditions as holy and unchanging, then there is nothing we can do to help our congregations adapt to the changes in the world around them. Eventually, they will wither and die and fossilize.

But only God is holy and unchanging. Which means that our traditions are cannot be. A better way to think of our traditions is as ways of doing and being Church that have been tested by time and found to be fruitful. They are only useful to the degree that they help help our faith communities focus on our relationship with God, understand and follow God’s call for us, and live in unity as the body of Christ. Indeed, the only reason they seem unchanging to us is that in ages past change in the world around the Church was glacially slow, which allowed the Church the luxury of changing its traditions over multiple lifetimes.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the freedom to change at a snail’s pace. The pace of change in the world around us is increasing exponentially by the day. Churches used to have generations to absorb and respond to racial, ethnics, or lifestyle changes in the composition of the neighborhoods we serve. But these days changes that were once measured in generations are now measured in years. Blink and your neighborhood has flipped. And the Church is changing just as fast. The Religion SIngularity, our research paper published last summer provides definitive evidence that many of our current institutional forms – both at the local and denominational level – will become unsustainable long before the end of the current century, and suggests that we have perhaps a 10-year window to begin exploring new ways of being Church.

All of which means if we are to maintain our ability to translate the Good News into the world around us, we need find a way to test and adapt our traditions much more quickly, while not losing sight of their ultimate purpose and meaning.

And that’s what Vision-Guided Experimentation (VGE) comes in. VGE is a collection of principles and practices that help faith-based communities and organizations become much more agile and experimental: testing and adapting traditions – or creating new ones – rapidly while remaining focused on their meaning and the vision they represent. Because change for change’s sake is no better that tradition for tradition’s sake.

In our last few posts we learned how to get very clear on our vision and ultimate meaning of our traditions – tracing our way up from the WHAT of our traditions to the ultimate WHY they represent – using the principle we call Minimum Viable Belief (MVB).

Once clear on our overarching vision or MVB, the question then becomes how to move rapidly through the process of testing and adaptation. This is what we will cover in the next several posts, as we discuss two closely-related practices we call Minimum Viable Program and Rapid Iteration Prototyping.