The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Tools for Data-Grounded Discernment During Leadership Transition

By Katie Romano Griffin,
Faith Board Member and Associate Minister at Cedar Lane Church

Over time, all religious communities evolve to be more homogeneous. Mine is no exception. Leadership transitions, while often a time of grief and uncomfortable change for a congregation, are one of the best times for a congregation to realign its mission and purpose with the needs of the larger community and transform from what my colleague Abh Janamanchi calls a Sacred Society (closed to larger community needs) to a Holy Community (a place of love and holy experience connected to the greater community). 

In the midst of the pandemic (which is its own kind of transition process), our congregation engaged FaithX to help us with exploring our own strengths and weaknesses, along with the missional opportunities and challenges in the community we serve. For the latter, they introduced us to a tool called a Neighborhood Missional Intelligence Report (or NMIR for short). As someone who has worked with congregations in transition on church growth, I can see how this tool could be useful on both sides of the transition process. 

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7 Steps to Improved Vitality

Or what do you do after taking the Congregational Vitality Assessment

by the Rev. Ken Howard

So your leadership team has taken the Congregational Vitality Assessment. You’ve got your diagnostic scores and recommendations in hand, and you’re asking yourselves the question:

Now what?

The next step is to do a Missional Assessment: a seven step process to validate and help your congregation improve its vitality by leveraging its strengths to offset its weaknesses and more effectively engage the missional opportunities and challenges emerging in the neighborhoods you serve.

Here are the steps we recommend:

  1. Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
  2. Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
  3. Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
  4. Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
  5. Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
  6. Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
  7. Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, and build on successes.

The steps may seem simple at first glance. And in a way, they are fairly straightforward. But if you are looking for a quick and easy fix for your congregation’s vitality issues, you’re going to be disappointed, because the process of vitality improvement is neither quick nor easy. 

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