The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Ecclesiastical Autoimmune Syndrome – Part 7

This is the final post of a multipart series on Ecclesiastical Autoimmune Syndrome.
Click here for last week’s post.

Recovering from Ecclesiastical Autoimmunity Syndrome
By Ken Howard

For the last several weeks we have reviewed the causes and symptoms of Ecclesiastical Autoimmune Syndrome. Now we turn toward how to treat it. What follows are a collection of ideas about attitudes and practices that might help stop the downward spiral of E.A.S. and start the upward journey toward congregational and organizational health and vitality.

  1. Admit That We Have the Disease. Think of it as joining Autoimmunes Anonymous and beginning something like a 12-Step process of recovery (step one: admitting A.E.S. has taken control of your corporate life). Ecclesiastical Autoimmune Syndrome is not only an allergy to change, but also an addiction “to the way things are.” But it is worse than most other addictions, because we are born with it. Our addiction to homeostasis is part of our (sinful) human nature. Like any other addiction, the first step is admitting we have the disease. It’s also perhaps the hardest step, because since we have never not been infected, we don’t really know what “healthy” is, often mistaking the behavioral symptoms of E.A.S. as an heroic defense of “tradition.” Faith-based communities and organizations often have to get very close to death before the reality of the disease breaks through our denial, and sometimes not even then. So start by recognizing that your congregation or organization has E.A.S. and realize that you will always be in recovery. [Read more…]

Missional Planning: Defining Terms

The first post in a multi-part series on Missional Planning.

By Ken Howard

Our last several posts have focused on the principles and practices the comprise Vision-Guided Experimentation (VGE). For our next several posts, we will focus on putting VGE to use in congregations and adjudicatories (e.g., dioceses, districts, synods, etc.) by walking through the steps in developing an effective Missional Plan. But before we get down to the proverbial brass tacks of Missional Plan, perhaps we should define our terms. So what exactly is missional? And what exactly is a missional plan?

[Read more…]

Missional Context Analysis (Part 2): How to Get to Know Your Neighbor(s)

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts on Vision-Guided Experimentation.

By Ken Howard

In our last post, we spoke about the need to “get outside the building” by engaging in a Missional Context Analysis. After all, we cannot fulfill the command to “Love your neighbor,” unless we first get to know our neighbor. We called the process of getting to know our  neighbors (and our neighborhoods) “Missional Context Analysis.”

In this post we will be discussing the steps in the process of Missional Context Analysis. In it we will be using terms that have emerged in the development of our Missional Context Analysis tool, Datastory for Faith Communities. You don’t have to use our tool, of course. Nevertheless, the steps are the same.

[Read more…]

Rapid Iterative Prototyping: Validated learning within a context of tradition

by Ken Howard

This is the fourth post in an ongoing series on Vision-Guided Experimentation
click here for previous post

Faith Communities are living organisms made up of human beings. They “live and move and have their being,” sharing many of the characteristics of the people who populate them. Like them, one of things faith communities have to do in order to survive and thrive is sense, respond, and adapt to the environment in which they live.

Last week’s post was about the sensing part of that equation: Mission Context Analysis. We discussed ways of “Getting Outside the Building,” in order to learn more about the characteristics, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the people who comprise the neighborhoods we hope to serve.

This week’s post is about responding and adapting, employing a process we call Rapid Iteration Prototyping. Once we have gotten to know the needs and aspirations of the communities inside and outside the building and having discerned how God is calling us to respond to those needs and aspirations, the next step is creating actual ministries and programs to carry that out. And because of the rapid pace of change in our neighborhoods we have to be able to develop and test them quickly, discarding what doesn’t work and refining what does.

To do that, we start by creating what folks in the business startup arena call a Minimum Viable Product, or in our case a Minimum Viable Program or Ministry. We create a prototype of the program – not a “deluxe” version with everything WE might WANT in it but a much simpler version with only what we have VERIFIED they NEED. In the illustration above, we label this step “ADAPT,” in order to remind ourselves that since, as the proverb says, “there is nothing new under the sun,” that for this step to work we don’t have create a program “out of whole cloth,” but that creativity often takes the form of stealing and repurposing something someone else has already tried.

Then we begin the actual process of rapidly and repetitively testing and tweaking. We test the program with the intended audience (APPLY), ask them what they think about it (ASSESS), and then tweak the aspects of the prototype that are working and toss those that don’t. Then we repeat, learning and adapting more and more with each iteration, until we get it “right.”

Over the nearly 20 years I’ve been designing and refining this approach to ministry development and redevelopment, I’ve seen it applied to every aspect of congregational life, from startup to expansion, from evangelism to worship, from marketing to member giving.

Let me share an example from a church I served, about prototyping a program to engage and serve an underrepresented population.

[Read more…]

Getting Outside the Building: Missional Context Analysis

The third in a series of blog posts on Vision-Guided Experimentation for faith communities

Click here to read the previous post

By Ken Howard

Vision Guided Experimentation (or VGE) is an emergent learning process which faith-based communities and organizations can use to help them quickly and effective adapt to rapid change while remaining sharply focused on their overarching vision: the seminal organizational belief out which all other organizational beliefs and values flow, which we called Minimum Viable Belief. In the last two posts we discussed the first step in VGE: discerning your congregation’s MVB. In this post, we turn to the next step in the process of Vision Guided Experimentation, which we call Missional Context Analysis.

Missional Context Analysis is about discerning the qualities, needs, strengths, and aspirations of the communities you are called to serve. I use the term “communities” rather than “congregations” as a reminder that faith communities are not just called to serve the people who show up for worship (the community inside the building), but also to serve their neighborhoods around them, and perhaps even the world as a while (the community outside the building). I use the term “missional” as a reminder that God is already at work in the world around us, and that a large part of our discernment is about learning the mission that God may already have in store for us with respect to our neighborhoods.

Speaking to business entrepreneurs, Steve Blanks once said, “No facts exist inside the building – only opinions… so get the hell outside.”[i]

In other words, it’s natural to trust our own assumptions, but we cannot make products our customers want and need unless we “get outside the building” and test our assumptions about what our customers want and need by actually asking or observing them.

Faith-based communities and organizations face the same dilemma, intensified by our tendency toward traditions. We stay inside our worship centers and offices, creating programs we believe our inner and outer communities want, without ever going out and asking.  So our next step is to “get outside the worship center” both figuratively and literally: deriving hypotheses from our MVB, refining those hypotheses against neighborhood demographic and lifestyle data, and then testing those refined hypotheses via direct interaction with the real people behind the numbers.

Essentially, there are three sets of questions we want to ask about our neighborhoods:

  1. Who are the people who make up the community? (Cue the “Sesame Street” theme)
  2. What are the issues the community is facing?
  3. What resources does the community have to deal with those issues?

Missional Context Analysis is crucially important, because the quality of the answers we get when we test your hypotheses depends the clarity and specificity of the hypotheses themselves. We begin by Getting Outside the Worship Center figuratively, exploring how to clarify implications for worship services, spiritual formation programs, congregational and community engagement, and administration. Then we work on Getting Outside the Worship Center literally, mapping out the populations, needs, and assets of the communities we serve, both inside and outside of our organization.

In the language of many Christian (and other) faith traditions, the practice of Missional Context Analysis is related to the idea of “call,” or the particular mission God has in store for a particular faith-based community or organization. While call can be independent of and preliminary to needs of those who we serve, understanding their need can help to refine a faith community’s sense of call. Getting outside the building can help the community inside the building get a clearer idea how God is already at work in the community outside the building, and how their sense of call relates to the ways that God is already at work there.

In future posts we will dig deeper into how to actually conduct a Missional Context Analysis and the tools that are available to do it, including our own soon-to-be released online missional context analysis tool, which we call Datastory for Faith Communities.                                                                                                                                        

[i] Steven G. Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany (Raleigh, NC: Lulu.com, 2006), 7.

The FaithX Project, Inc. is 501(c)3 nonprofit organization with a religious and charitable purpose operated as a ministry by the Rev. Ken Howard under an extension of ministry from the Episcopal Bishop of Washington.