The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Stewardship Outside-The-Box: Changing GIVING Language Changes GIVING Behavior

by The Rev. Ken Howard

Pledge-Aholics Anonymous

For the first decade of my ordained ministry, I always hated stewardship season. I alway felt like I was being a bit dishonest with my congregation. I started out every “stewardship season” preaching about stewardship as a spiritual practice, when what we really wanted was for them to open up their wallets. And by the end of the season, we were increasingly talking about how much more of their money we needed to meet our budget (while still cloaking the need in spiritual terms). 

The Perils of Archaic (Yet Loaded) Language

With more and more newcomers having smaller and smaller religious vocabularies, words like “pledging” and “tithing” seemed less and less helpful. With each successive generation, they  sounded increasingly remote and archaic, yet at the same time increasingly loaded: like the way the rite of Holy Matrimony used to require the bride and groom to “plight their troth.” I was always having to translate, explaining that the word “pledge” was not as ominous as it seemed: “It’s only a best estimate of what you think you can give,” I would say, “You can change it at any time if your financial circumstances change.”

But increasingly, my explanations weren’t getting through. It seemed like every year people were taking longer to turn in their pledges, like they were taking it too seriously.

Sometimes, WAY too seriously…

A parishioner called during the annual pledge drive to apologize for the size of her family’s pledge (they were a young couple with two small children). This was their second pledge drive: for the second time in their lives they were considering what they would pledge to give. There were hints of guilty feelings and tearfulness in her voice as she said, “Father Ken, I’m calling to say we are so, so sorry that we will not be able to pledge as much this year as last. My husband lost his job this year and we had to take out a second mortgage to fulfill the pledge we already made.”

I was horror struck. 

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Using the Pandemic to Procrastinate in Ministry

Procrastination Can Be the Death of Ministry

This post about using the pandemic as an excuse to procrastinate is written by Mary Frances, Senior Associate Consultant at the FaithX Project.

At the end of the year, I hear a common refrain from my clients: That’ll have to wait until the new year.  It’s a variation on a theme that we are all too familiar with.  I’ll start my diet right after the holidays.  I’ll start my new exercise routine in January.  I’ll deal with that problem tomorrow.  Kids love to use it as a way to procrastinate.  I’ll do my homework after this show.  I’ll do the dishes after this game.  Later, tomorrow, after…waiting.  Over the course of the last year there is a new variation on this theme:  after the pandemic.  We will deal with outreach after the pandemic.  We will get to know our community more deeply…. after the pandemic.  We will talk about stewardship, formation, new worship formats, you name it, it can all be done after the pandemic. 

After the pandemic really was an appropriate response a year ago, when everything was a mad scramble to get online and make radical changes in the blink of an eye.  Funny thing about this pandemic though, it didn’t just go away; it’s still here….and we don’t know how much longer it will be around, how much longer it will impact our ministries, how much more change it will require of us.  It’s still here.  Sure, there are vaccines, but there are also variants.  Every time we think there is light at the end of the tunnel, someone comes along to tell us the tunnel is longer than we thought. This is no time to procrastinate.

So, how much longer can we say after the pandemic without admitting it’s just a form of procrastination and avoidance?  What if, instead of after the pandemic, we started to ask: What can we do now? What is God asking of us today?  How can we connect with our members, visitors and community more deeply than ever before?  What is ONE thing we can do now that we couldn’t do before?  What is ONE thing that just can’t wait until after the pandemic?

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Vitality Check

By Linda Buskirk for ECF Vital Practices

Occasionally, we like to publish posts from guest bloggers, especially when they say nice things about us. This week’s post is an article written by Linda Buskirk of Buskirk Solutions for Episcopal Church Foundation’s “Vital Practices for Congregations” blog. The free, online Congregational Vitality Assessment to which Linda refers was created by FaithX and brought online in a collaborative partnership by FaithX and ECF.

2020 has been a year of difficult “reality checks.”  Yes, it’s dangerous out there.  Yes, you should wear a mask. Yes, you need to figure out Zoom.

Now a new opportunity for a vitality check is available, designed to help focus congregational leadership and planning. 

The Congregational Vitality Assessment (CVA), is now offered at no cost thanks to a partnership between the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) and The FaithX Project.  The CVA provides congregations with an assessment of Vitality (healthiness) and Sustainability (level of people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive, or even thrive). The vitality section of the CVA measures ten areas of congregational functioning, such as Vision and Mission, Leadership, Lay Empowerment, Worship, Formation, and Stewardship.

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10 Counterintuitive practices that will improve your stewardship (even during a pandemic)

By Ken Howard

In my more than 25 years in starting new congregations and redeveloping existing ones, I have gained a number of hard-won insights into what makes stewardship successful. These insights are the results of much congregational experimentation and reviewing giving research, and most of them go against the grain of our stewardship traditions. I offer this list ten DOs and DON’Ts below:

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Adapting to the Covid New Normal: A Research-Based Blog Series

Introduction by Ken Howard

In some ways, it seems like we’ve spent an eternity of waiting since Covid-19 forced our congregations to close. Yet in other ways, it seems like too many things to change in too little time. Regardless of denomination or religion, it seems like a tsunami swept away all our normal ways of congregational life in a second, leaving us all to re-think, re-engineer, and rapidly iterate almost everything. It almost seems like God is making use of these “Covid Times” through which we are navigating to re-shape us as congregations, cutting off all our talking about all the ways our faith communities needed to change if they were to survive (let alone thrive), and telling us to get on with it.

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