Religion Singularity Archives | The FaithX Project

Jan 04 2018

MVB: Seven Steps to an Enduring Vision

Write the vision; make it plain… so that a runner may read it.
Habakkuk 2:2

This is the second of two blog posts on Minimum Viable Belief (click here for previous post), the term I have used to describe the driving vision of a faith-based community or organization. Minimum Viable Belief – or MVB – is the seminal belief or value that is so deep, so shared, so core to the community that it is the source of all other beliefs, values, and actions of the organization. It is the core source of meaning and purpose to the community and its members. Simply put, it is the “Why of Whys.” MVB is a vision that is so clear and plain that it creates and sustains an enduring organizational culture that can guide a faith community throughout its life, even when the community encounters turbulent times.

So far so good! But how does a faith-based community or organization discover, articulate, and communicate its MVB?

There are seven steps involved in discerning your community’s MVB:

Naming
Calling
Clarifying
Seeing
Dreaming
Visioning
Proclaiming

Allow me walk you through each of the seven steps, while providing real-life examples from my own former congregation, a mature startup in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [Read more…]

Dec 28 2017

Minimum Viable Belief: Discovering Your “Why Of Whys”

By Ken Howard

Okay. Let’s review.

Early this summer I published a research paper entitled, “The Religion Singularity: A Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity,” in which I described an emerging phenomenon in which the total numbers of denominations and worship centers (local faith communities) worldwide is growing and splintering considerably faster than the total number of Christians, driving relentlessly downward the average number of Christians per denomination and worship center. This, in turn, will render both institutions unsustainable in their current forms by the end of this century. Ultimately, denominations may die out due to their lack of capacity for experimentation and change. However, local faith communities may be able to transform themselves into a new expression of Church. To do that, they need to develop the capacity to experiment with new ways of being Church without sacrificing the heart of Christianity. So how do they develop those capacities? That was the topic of last week’s blog post, in which I outlined the seven practices I call Vision Guided Experimentation. Today, we explore the first practice, Minimum Viable Belief (MVB), which underpins the practices that follow it.

Where there is no vision, the people perish.
(Proverbs 29:18)

This verse from Proverbs is the reason why the first practice of Vision-Guided Experimentation is so important. Minimum Viable Belief (MVB) is all about vision. It’s about getting to your faith-based community’s “Why of Why’s” – the seminal belief from which all other organizational beliefs and values stem – so that you can make its vision so clear, core, and compelling that it becomes the primary motivator and compass for all members of the community, so that it both motivates them to get up in the morning and keeps them going all day no matter what frustrations they face.

Minimum Viable Belief is the overarching, transcendent, and seminal reason for your faith community’s existence, driving every other practice. It is a transcendent vision about how that organization wants to change the world, a vision so meaningful to the members of the community that they would rather fail in the service of that vision than succeed in the service of anything else. In the Christian tradition – as well as some others – we define this as a sense of call: an clear and overriding sense of what God desires for a faith community or a faith-based organization (or an individual) to do or to be.

Minimum Viable Belief is also about creating a organizational culture that is experimental, creative, and flexible, and yet grounded, focused, and faithful. MVB allows the community and its members to navigate around massive and complex obstacles while continuing to tack towards its ultimate goal. It empowers startup communities and organizations to be sufficiently self-directing, self-correcting, and tenacious that they can survive the departures of their founders and their transition to their community’s full scale.

A problem most faith communities have is that most of the time we never get past asking ourselves the question, “What?,” as in, “what programs should we offer?” And if we are going to do any tweaking of anything we do, it comes up here. Once in a while we dive a little deeper, asking, “How?,” as in, “How do we get this approved?” Unfortunately, we seldom get to “Why?,” as in “What is our motivation for doing this in the first place?” I say unfortunately, since just asking Why once is not enough: we tend to have a different Why for every What. Rather, we have to keep asking Why until we get to the “Why of Whys.” Exactly how you get to that transcendent Why is what this and the next blog post are about. [Read more…]

Dec 21 2017

The Religion Singularity Crisis: Avoid the Danger – Discover the Opportunity

By Ken Howard

It has been said that the Chinese word for “crisis” is formed from two ideograms: one which signifies danger, the other opportunity.

Last summer, we published a research paper entitled, “The Religion SIngularity: The Demographic Crisis Destabilizing and Transforming Institutional Christianity” in the Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society. The article describes an emerging phenomenon, which we have called the Religion Singularity: the runaway growth-by-fragmentation in the numbers of denominations and worship centers at a rate exceeding the growth in the total population of Christians worldwide.

The danger in this crisis is existential. If the long-standing current trend does not change – and it seems unlikely we can fight it – then it will drive down the size of those institutions to unsustainable levels by the end of this century. We may see the end of denominations and worshipping communities as we have known them.

But how do we find the opportunity in this crisis? The answer lies in point of view and preparation. Once we accept that denominations and worship centers will die in their current form, then we can prepare to ride out the change, so that we might survive and thrive in the midst of the current uncertainty into whatever form the resurrected body of Christ might take on the other side. Faith-based communities and organizations will need to find a way to achieve sustainability in the truest sense of the term: choosing to adapt to their changing environment while remaining true to their vision and mission. [Read more…]

Oct 31 2017

Latest Research: Conservative Denominations Joining Mainline In Decline

America’s Changing Religious Identity 2016:
A Research Review

By Ken Howard

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has just published their findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas in a study entitled America’s Changing Religious Identity. Their findings add further confirmation those of our research, The Religion Singularity, published in the International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society in July, which projects that institutional Christianity will become unsustainable in its current forms before the end of this century.

Of particular significance is the finding that, despite decades insistence to the contrary by their proponents, theologically conservative denominations and congregations are not immune to the decline that has affected mainline liberal denominations after all, but rather are making up for lost time, matching or exceeding the current rate of shrinkage of their mainline brethren and sistren. In fact, it may even be worse for them than it looks, as millennials are abandoning conservative evangelical congregations at a rate faster than they are leaving other segments of institutional Christianity.

Also consistent with our findings in The Religion Singularity is the fact that “religiously unaffiliated” is one of the fastest growing and “religious” groups in America, growing at such a rate that they could become a significant majority of the U.S. population in less than 15 years (our projection based on PPRI statistics). Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated is increasing as a portion of each new generation. More than a third (36%) of Americans 18-30 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to less than a tenth of those 80 or older.

Another finding of significance is how syncretized religious and political affiliation have become, with the two becoming so overlapped that political affiliation is fast becoming a predictor of religious affiliation and theological leanings. For example, if a person politically identifies as Republican, there is a 73% chance they will be a white conservative Christian, where white Christians make up only 29% of Democrats (14% of Democrats under 30).

Findings like these, Pew Research’s America’s Changing Religious Landscape (2015), and our own research, The Religion Singularity (International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2017), are often greeted with a combination of fatalism (“We’re all gonna die”) and denial (“My church is growing, so this can’t be true”). But we see them as a vision-clearing wake-up call and a opportunity to rethink the way we do church so that, while we may see the end of institutional Christianity in this century, we can develop a Christ-following movement of faith-based communities from its remains.

Other findings include:

[Read more…]

Aug 08 2016

Qualities for Sustainability: A Toolbox for Turbulent Times

Our last three articles have focused the nature and impact of the Religion Singularity…
namely an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable environment.
This we we shift toward what it takes to survive and thrive in that environment.

Peter Drucker once said, “Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

To this I would add the caveat, “…especially when you have to build the car while driving it.”

Forecasting even the immediate future in a time of escalating uncertainty and change is even more dangerous than being a passenger in Drucker’s car. Speculation in such circumstances can be little more than an educated guess: light on the educated and heavy on the guessing.

Yet speculate we must, asking such questions as, “How do we lead a faith-based community or organization into a future that it is breaking in rapidly and uncontrollably all around us, and the final shape of which is impossible for us to predict?” We have hinted that this involves the capacity for experimentation, but perhaps we can be a little more specific. To let’s frame the question a little differently, “What are the qualities necessary for us to make successful voyage through the unpredictable environment generated by the Religion Singularity?”

Agility

To survive and thrive in an unpredictable environment, our organization must develop agility. Agility means the power to move quickly and nimbly around obstacles and toward opportunities. But agility also means the capability to make vital decisions swiftly and effectively, deftly pivoting between paths containing varying degrees of danger and opportunity.

Vision

Perhaps equally important as cultivating the capability of agility is nurturing our capacity for vision. All the agility in the world will literally get us nowhere if we don’t know where we are going, which is a near-impossibility in an unpredictable environment. Our inability to know with any certainty what will be the future physical form of the worshipping community makes it difficult to distinguish between those paths the move us toward that form and those that move us away from it. Yet even when we can’t know precisely the place we want to end up, we can still know what we want to be like when we get there. Knowing that we can evaluate the possible paths before us based on whether they move us toward or away from that vision. This is why our faith-based communities and organizations must possess vision in order to in an uncertain environment.

Lean

To put it bluntly, it is impossible to be simultaneously fat and agile. The more mass we gain, the more inertia comes with it. More inertia means we will have a lot more trouble changing direction, which by definition decreases agility. This means that if we want our organization to acquire the capability for agility, we must also help it become lean. For us to becoming lean we must shed all forms of excess “weight” by eliminating all forms of waste.

[bctt tweet=”To put it bluntly, it’s impossible to be simultaneously fat and agile.
—Ken Howard” username=”faithxproject”]

If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that our faith-based communities and organizations contain many forms of waste. Traditionalism, dogmatism, clericalism, and any other “-ism” – in which a created form is worshipped nearly as much as the Creator – are ways in which we enable waste. Another way we enable waste is our failure to exercise good stewardship of our congregation members’ time, talents, and treasure. If we truly desire to be become lean, we must help our faith-based communities and organizations jettison every unproductive organizational process and structure. Meanwhile, in the place of those things we have discarded as waste, we must leverage the unique gifts, skills, and callings of every person in our congregations and organizations to the fullest, knowing that getting lean reduces our inertia, which results in greater agility. Finally, if we are to get lean in a strategic fashion, we must have a clear and transcendent vision, so that we might distinguish between those aspects of organizational structure and process that support the vision – and must be kept – and those that do not – and must be eliminated.

Contextual Attentiveness

In order to identify and steer clear of obstacles and move toward opportunities, we must be able to help our faith-based communities and organizations actively and continuously monitoring their environments for obstacles and opportunities.

Common Cause Community

In order to minimize competition and maximize collaboration between our faith-based communities and organizations and other faith-based communities and organizations serving our communities, we must be able to make common cause with those that have similar visions and are heading in similar directions. In set theory this is known as centered-set community, in which membership is determine by shared vision and goals, and it is the opposite of bounded-set community, in which membership is defined based on boundary conditions: all the ways in which our distinguish our organizations from others. Faith-based communities and organizations in turbulent environments must share the attitude of Jesus that “whoever is not against us is for us.”
(Mark 9:40, Luke 9:50)

Rapid Hypothesis Testing

When operating in an unfamiliar and rapidly changing environments, we as leaders of faith-based communities and organizations will frequently be making “educated guesses” as to the most effective course of action. To thrive in such an environment, we have to be able to rapidly make and test strategic hypotheses, quickly discarding strategies that fail the test and continuing with and perhaps tweaking strategies pass it, repeating this process as often as needed.

Actionable Metrics

To effectively test hypotheses we are making,
we must know how to develop evaluative measures
that provide us with the data necessary
to help us understand how well our chosen strategies are working,
and whether and how we need to adjust course.

And this last capability brings us full circle, back to Agility.

To survive and thrive in escalating uncertainty and accelerating change, we must be able to help the faith-based communities and organizations we lead do all of these things quickly, adroitly, and as often as needed.

[optinform]