visioning Archives

Oct 21 2021

MapDash & FaithX Testimony – SD Synod

by Pastor Jonathan Steiner
Director for Evangelical Mission and Associate to the Bishop for Stewardship & Outreach
South Dakota Synod, ELCA

This spring we began using MapDash with FaithX as a tool for our ministry. The South Dakota Synod is the network of roughly 200 Lutheran congregations across the state, and we have a variety of community contexts.

Using these tools has been a blessing for many of our congregations. The first way we are using them is to help congregations have accurate information about their communities when they are searching for a pastor. This helps them have a realistic picture of their context as they get started on that process. We have integrated the infographic and lifestyle index reports as part of our site study.

We have also been using MapDash as a tool for congregations as part of a revitalization strategy. When I meet with congregations, we ask them to take a couple hours to go through all the information in the reports, but then also dig into other areas of interest that they may have. A church with a preschool will want to learn more about child care spending and school data, while a church with a feeding ministry will be much more interested in poverty statistics.

Learning about their community doesn’t immediately give the congregation a vision for their future, but it certainly helps them dream about what their call is. I tell leaders that our call is where the needs of our neighbors meets the blessings we have on hand. FaithX and MapDash help congregations see what is going on around them, and identify where their gifts are needed.

Finally, these tools help us understand our network of congregations more fully. Using data about our own congregations, in addition to all the available information from MapDash, we are able to see opportunities in ministry. Perhaps that area is strong, and we can focus on partnerships, while that area is nearly empty, and so they need to focus on a strong structure in-house.

We are less than a year into our partnership, but we are excited to partner with FaithX for the MapDash tool. It has been a blessing to us and our ministries.

Learn More about MapDash for Faith Communities

Jan 04 2018

MVB: Seven Steps to an Enduring Vision

By Ken Howard

Write the vision; make it plain… so that a runner may read it.
Habakkuk 2:2

This is the second of two blog posts on Minimum Viable Belief (click here for previous post), the term I have used to describe the driving vision of a faith-based community or organization. Minimum Viable Belief – or MVB – is the seminal belief or value that is so deep, so shared, so core to the community that it is the source of all other beliefs, values, and actions of the organization. It is the core source of meaning and purpose to the community and its members. Simply put, it is the “Why of Whys.” MVB is a vision that is so clear and plain that it creates and sustains an enduring organizational culture that can guide a faith community throughout its life, even when the community encounters turbulent times.

So far so good! But how does a faith-based community or organization discover, articulate, and communicate its MVB?

There are seven steps involved in discerning your community’s MVB:

Naming
Calling
Clarifying
Seeing
Dreaming
Visioning
Proclaiming

Allow me walk you through each of the seven steps, while providing real-life examples from my own former congregation, a mature startup in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [Read more…]

Oct 31 2017

Latest Research: Conservative Denominations Joining Mainline In Decline

America’s Changing Religious Identity 2016:
A Research Review

By Ken Howard

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) has just published their findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas in a study entitled America’s Changing Religious Identity. Their findings add further confirmation those of our research, The Religion Singularity, published in the International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society in July, which projects that institutional Christianity will become unsustainable in its current forms before the end of this century.

Of particular significance is the finding that, despite decades insistence to the contrary by their proponents, theologically conservative denominations and congregations are not immune to the decline that has affected mainline liberal denominations after all, but rather are making up for lost time, matching or exceeding the current rate of shrinkage of their mainline brethren and sistren. In fact, it may even be worse for them than it looks, as millennials are abandoning conservative evangelical congregations at a rate faster than they are leaving other segments of institutional Christianity.

Also consistent with our findings in The Religion Singularity is the fact that “religiously unaffiliated” is one of the fastest growing and “religious” groups in America, growing at such a rate that they could become a significant majority of the U.S. population in less than 15 years (our projection based on PPRI statistics). Meanwhile, religiously unaffiliated is increasing as a portion of each new generation. More than a third (36%) of Americans 18-30 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to less than a tenth of those 80 or older.

Another finding of significance is how syncretized religious and political affiliation have become, with the two becoming so overlapped that political affiliation is fast becoming a predictor of religious affiliation and theological leanings. For example, if a person politically identifies as Republican, there is a 73% chance they will be a white conservative Christian, where white Christians make up only 29% of Democrats (14% of Democrats under 30).

Findings like these, Pew Research’s America’s Changing Religious Landscape (2015), and our own research, The Religion Singularity (International Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Society, 2017), are often greeted with a combination of fatalism (“We’re all gonna die”) and denial (“My church is growing, so this can’t be true”). But we see them as a vision-clearing wake-up call and a opportunity to rethink the way we do church so that, while we may see the end of institutional Christianity in this century, we can develop a Christ-following movement of faith-based communities from its remains.

Other findings include:

[Read more…]

Jan 03 2017

Adapting to Change without Forsaking Tradition

By Ken Howard

A common quandary I hear expressed by leaders of faith-based communities and organizations is…

How can I help my community adapt
to a rapidly changing world
without forsaking our traditions?

And my answer to this quandary is:

It depends…

Specifically, it depends on what you think traditions are good for.

If we think of our traditions as holy and unchanging, then there is nothing we can do to help our congregations adapt to the changes in the world around them. Eventually, they will wither and die and fossilize.

But only God is holy and unchanging. Which means that our traditions are cannot be. A better way to think of our traditions is as ways of doing and being Church that have been tested by time and found to be fruitful. They are only useful to the degree that they help help our faith communities focus on our relationship with God, understand and follow God’s call for us, and live in unity as the body of Christ. Indeed, the only reason they seem unchanging to us is that in ages past change in the world around the Church was glacially slow, which allowed the Church the luxury of changing its traditions over multiple lifetimes.

Unfortunately, we no longer have the freedom to change at a snail’s pace. The pace of change in the world around us is increasing exponentially by the day. Churches used to have generations to absorb and respond to racial, ethnics, or lifestyle changes in the composition of the neighborhoods we serve. But these days changes that were once measured in generations are now measured in years. Blink and your neighborhood has flipped. And the Church is changing just as fast. The Religion SIngularity, our research paper published last summer provides definitive evidence that many of our current institutional forms – both at the local and denominational level – will become unsustainable long before the end of the current century, and suggests that we have perhaps a 10-year window to begin exploring new ways of being Church.

All of which means if we are to maintain our ability to translate the Good News into the world around us, we need find a way to test and adapt our traditions much more quickly, while not losing sight of their ultimate purpose and meaning.

And that’s what Vision-Guided Experimentation (VGE) comes in. VGE is a collection of principles and practices that help faith-based communities and organizations become much more agile and experimental: testing and adapting traditions – or creating new ones – rapidly while remaining focused on their meaning and the vision they represent. Because change for change’s sake is no better that tradition for tradition’s sake.

In our last few posts we learned how to get very clear on our vision and ultimate meaning of our traditions – tracing our way up from the WHAT of our traditions to the ultimate WHY they represent – using the principle we call Minimum Viable Belief (MVB).

Once clear on our overarching vision or MVB, the question then becomes how to move rapidly through the process of testing and adaptation. This is what we will cover in the next several posts, as we discuss two closely-related practices we call Minimum Viable Program and Rapid Iteration Prototyping.