The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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?”

agile scottieAgility

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.

teamworkCommon 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 Testingprototype-review-refine

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.

MWM-portrait-small-RGB-POSActionable 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]

Prospective Grief: Why Church Leaders Resist the Religion Singularity

By Ken Howard

This article is the third in a series on the Religion Singularity. Click here for Part 1. Click here for Part 2.

Ken Outdoor Headshot Square

Organizing and sharing the data about the Religion Singularity continues to be an eye-opening experience for me. It has been enlightening to observe the responses of different groups of people. I’ve observed a couple interesting trends, especially among church people.

A continuing revelation has been how much more receptive to the data secular leaders are than church leaders. Business people, especially entrepreneurs, tend to see the trends and recognize the implications before I finish explaining them. Church leaders, on the other hand, are much more resistant. Some have trouble seeing the implications implied by the data, those who do become very defensive, and it’s hard to get them to see past the danger to the opportunity. And the more ensconced they are in the institutional church and the higher in the hierarchy they are, the more resistant they tend to be.

It’s not that they don’t recognize church decline. Everyone knows that churches are facing tough times. It’s the unwillingness to acknowledge that church demographic trends point to the end of the church as we know it. It’s thinking we can still tweak our way out of trouble or somehow revitalize the current model of church. Because if the Religion Singularity analysis is correct, it’s like thinking that the Titanic can dodge the iceberg.

And I continue to be astonished that no one in the church noticed the implications of this data before I did. After all, I’m no genius and it wasn’t rocket surgery. The demographic data I used have been around for decades and is updated every year. All it required was a spreadsheet and simple subtraction. It’s just that nobody had ever done the math. Perhaps I might have missed the implications, too, had I not stumbled into an science museum exhibit about Ray Kurzweil’s book on the Technological Singularity while I was pondering it.

In any event, I’ve been pondering the source of this resistance. And today, as I was riding my bike to the coffee shop where I do my writing, it came to me. It’s because of grief – a prospective grief at the coming death of the institutional church. And before they can see the potential resurrection of the church in a new form, they have to go through familiar stages of grief laid out by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance.

It became even clearer to me when I saw the following graph,[1] a slightly tweaked, seven-stage version Kübler-Ross’s work, and it left me feeling a lot more sympathetic to the resistance I’ve been experiencing, and a lot more patient with the people offering that resistance. Most of us ordained leaders have a love/hate relationship with the church, but the frustration and anger we feel at the church from time to time is actually born of the love we have for what we know it could be.

Stages of Grief

Change Curve

It’s no wonder we find ourselves resistant to see its impending death, even if we believe there will be a resurrection on the other side.

We’ve got a lot of grief work to do before we can be at peace with the work God is asking us to do.

And we at The FaithX Project can provide a little help through the process.

 

[1] Graph courtesy of Jo Banks at What Next consultancy.

Related articles

The Religion Singularity: What Is It? And Why Should You Care?

This post is the first in a five-part series on the Religion Singularity.

Religion Singularity is a term I first coined in a paper entitled “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith,” presented earlier this year at the 2016 Conference on Religion and Society in Washington, DC.

If the term “Singularity” sounds to you kind off astrophysics-y to you, bringing up visions of black holes and wormholes, good. It’s supposed to. Because if you are a leader of a faith community, how you prepare your congregation for the Religion Singularity will determine whether crossing its event horizon will consign your faith community to oblivion or deliver it into a entirely new universe.

In a nutshell, the Religion Singularity can be boiled down to three trend lines:

  • Denominations. It took the institutional Christianity 1900 years to get to 1,600 denominations worldwide, by 2000, the number stood at 34,200, and by the year 2100, there will be over 240,000.
  • Worship Centers. In 1900 there were 400,000 worship centers worldwide, by 2000, about 3.5 million, and by 2100, over 66 million.
  • Christians.  Here’s where the rub begins. 600 million Christians in 1900, 2 billion in 2000, and 4.3 billion by 2100. Growing solidly, but currently at about half the rate of denominations and worship centers.

I’ll pause for a moment while you do the math…

Religion Singularity Small
Source: “Status of Global Mission 2014,” Bulletin of Missionary Research (January, 2010): 1.

Got it? See the problem?

That’s right…

Sometime during the last century we crossed an event horizon, and now we are caught in the gravitational well of the Religion Singularity. If trends hold – and there’s no reason to think they won’t since they’ve been moving along at the current pace for decades – we are going to see catastrophic drops in the sizes of both denominations and worship centers.

Worst case scenario: by 2100 we are looking at an average denomination of just under 18,000 and an average worship center size of under 70.

Decline in Denoms and Worship Ctrs

Which means…

Denominations? Unsustainable. Dead within the next 100 years. Hard to see a way around it. The Religion Singularity will be a black hole for denominations.

Worship Centers? Unsustainable in their current, church-centric form. But… if they can find ways to become more lean, vision-driven, creative, and experimental, they may find a way to turn the Religion Singularity into a wormhole that will deliver them into a new way of being Church.

So if you are a leader of a congregation, you have a choice…

What’s it going to be?

Black hole?

Or Wormhole?

Click here to read the full paper: “Singularity: The Death of Religion and the Resurrection of Faith” (on Academia.edu).

Click here for Part 2

What’s at Stake? The Religion Singularity and the FaithX Project

Velociraptor_Fossil_Wall_Frieze_Natural_VFWFN

By the Rev. Ken Howard

With a little under two weeks left in our Kickstarter crowd funding campaign, it is important to be clear about what’s at stake in the FaithX Project.

After more than five years of analyzing worldwide demographic trends affecting Christianity, I believe I can say with a high degree of confidence that Christianity is has entered a singularity of change and uncertainty unlike anything it has experienced since its inception. The institutional religion we have come to know as Christianity is dis-integrating at a rate that it will become unsustainable in its current form beyond the current century. The faith-based communities and organizations that make up institutional Christianity will have to adapt or die.

It’s a difficult message to digest. With new and breakaway denominations and faith communities coming into existence at a faster rate than ever before, and the number of new believers growing, it is tempting to think that all is well and all will continue to be well. But the Church is no less likely than other organizations to fall prey to the very human logical fallacy of thinking that just because it has been around in more-or-less its current form 2,000 years, it always will be. And the hard truth is that the total population of Christians is only growing at about half the rate of denominations and faith communities, driving the size of those institutions inexorably downward. [click here to read the research paper on Academia.edu]

To paraphrase Jesus, Those faith communities and organizations that rigidly hold onto their old ways of being will perish. Only those willing to let old ways die and experiment faithfully with new ways of being, will survive…and thrive.

To survive and thrive in the face of the singularity of uncertainty and change that is the twenty-first century, faith-based communities and organizations will have to become more lean, creative, and experimental. The FaithX Project is about providing the leaders of such communities with the tools they need – research-based principles and experimental practices – to discover the future that God holds in store for them: to face the singularity with courage and navigate it with agility.

We plan to disseminate these principle and practices widely through three channels: 

  • A Research-Based Book with practical, real-world examples, designed to equip new, experienced or aspiring leaders to prepare faith-based communities and organizations to survive and thrive amid escalating uncertainty and change.
  • A Global, Online Community of practice, in which leaders on the front lines of faith-community development can come together to share lessons learned from successes and failures, develop best practices, explore new applications and seek advice and support from other practitioners.
  • A Supported Consultancy to provide local faith-based communities and organizations with needed coaching and training at a cost they can afford.

Each of these three parts requires adequate resources of time and funding to do well. Which is why we are doing a Kickstarter campaign to fund it and why we hope you will prayerfully consider becoming a FaithX Project Backer (just click here).

I’m excited about this project. I’m excited about the potential it holds for the future of faith-based communities and organizations. I’m especially excited about the possibilities inherent in bringing together experience and insights from practitioner across multiple disciplines, and in creating resources with the active input of those we hope will benefit from them. I hope you share my excitement. And I hope you will help me bring it to fruition, not just as backers, but also as partners, practitioners, and fellow explorers of the undiscovered future that lies before us all.

Faithfully,
unnamed
Ken Howard
Founder

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