The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

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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Coming Soon: Online Congregational Vitality Assessment

By the Rev. Ken Howard

In 2017, FaithX released a prototype of the Congregational Vitality Assessment: a first-of-its-kind research-based diagnostic inventory for measuring congregational vitality and sustainability. In late 2018, FaithX and the Episcopal Church Foundation entered into a collaboration to bring the CVA online in digital format, where it could be made available for free to a wider audience. That collaboration is about to reach fruition. The CVA has now emerged from beta-testing with a tentative launch date of mid-to-late September.

The Congregational Vitality Assessment is designed to provide a congregation with an assessment of its Vitality (how healthy it is) and its Sustainability (whether it has the people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive). The vitality section carries the bulk of the assessment, measuring ten areas of congregational functioning, such as Vision and Mission, Leadership, Lay Empowerment, Worship, Formation, Stewardship, and more. The assessment can be completed by a single congregational leader, a congregational leadership group, or the entire congregation.

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Acting Outside the Box: Stewardship – Part 2

We are trying out a new occasional blog series in which people doing ministry can talk about outside the box wild ideas for ministry that they have tried and what they learned from them (whether or not the ideas work). We are calling this new series Acting Outside The Box, because just thinking about what’s outside the box is waaaay too passive. Ken Howard kicks off this series with some counter-intuitively productive stewardship strategies he’s run into (stumbled into, really) over the years.

The Power of Paradox
(part 2 in a series)

In last week’s post I talked about the awkwardness of stewardship season and how the use of religiously-loaded language sometimes backfires. I told the story of a formerly unchurched member family taking out a second mortgage to fulfill their pledge after the husband lost his job in the recession because they took the language of “pledge” so seriously.

Speaking of recessions, two of the largest increases in pledging (or should I say “Estimated Giving”) in two different churches I served took place during two rather large recessions.

What accounts for the difference? 

On both occasions, realizing that if we were in their shoes, we would have a lot of hesitation in making financial commitments in uncertain times, we decided that we would talk about the reasons for their potential hesitancy.  

We figured, “in for a penny, in for a pound,” as it were. And so we put all of our cards on the table. 

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