The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Groundbreaking Free Congregational Vitality Assessment Tool Launches Version 2.0

Germantown, MD | New York, NY – The FaithX Project in partnership with the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) is pleased to announce the launch of version 2.0 of the Congregational Vitality Assessment Tool (CVA), available at no cost for immediate use.

After 10 years of research and implementation of a paper-based CVA tool, the digital version was built in early 2020. The Congregational Vitality Assessment tool 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. 

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Data-Grounded Discernment for Capital Campaign Planning

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without a vision is a nightmare.”
Soichiro Honda, Japanese engineer and industrialist

This is not another “How To” webinar on capital fundraising. There are literally hundreds of programs out there that can bring to bear the time-tested expertise necessary to address “How” to mount a capital fund drive for “What” you tell them you want to construct or renovate or buy. The only problem is that unless you ground congregation’s “What” in a “Why” related to a clear and overarching congregational vision and a deep and thorough understanding of its mission to the world around it before you start, your fundraising efforts may turn out to be an exercise in tweaking the status quo: a missed opportunity for better engaging its members and people in the neighborhoods around them.

On Wednesday, May 26 from 1:00-2:00pm ET, The FaithX Project invites you to attend a webinar entitled “Data-Grounded Discernment for Capital Campaign Planning,” offered in collaboration with the Gathering of Leaders, the Episcopal Church Foundation, and Core Capital Campaigns. This webinar will provide participants with an understanding, a process, and tools to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their congregations and the missional opportunities and challenges of their communities, and in doing so clarify their vision of what God is calling them to be and to do, and the role a capital campaign can play in in getting them there.

Click Here to Register for this Webinar
Click Here for a List of Upcoming Webinars

The Doctor is In!

by Mary Frances

First, let me just preface this post by saying very clearly and emphatically that this is NOT a political post.  Second, let me lay out a scenario that may feel quite familiar to you.  You are on a Zoom meeting with your congregational leadership team (council, vestry, whatever you call them).  The topic is going back to in-person gatherings – worship, meetings, Sunday School, choir, etc.  Half your team is pushing for the doors to be wide open.  The other half is expressing more caution, a desire to wait a bit longer.  You feel caught in the middle.

It’s not hard to feel caught these days.  Information and misinformation is flying everywhere and changing on a daily basis.  Last week, Tucker Carlson declared that we should shame people for wearing masks in public and if you see a child wearing a mask in a store, you should call the police to report child abuse (yes, this is true, you can look it up).  Then the next day, the CDC said it would be okay for vaccinated people to gather outdoors without masks with social distancing.  The people in your congregation are, most likely, watching one side of this or other but probably not both.  Now your pro-gathering crew is pushing harder.  Now your cautious group is vacillating.  “What if we have gatherings only for vaccinated people?,” they ask.  You go back to your opening devotion about loving your neighbor and welcoming all.  How on earth do you navigate this maze of craziness that you couldn’t have even imagined just over a year ago?  This is definitely NOT anything you were taught in seminary. 

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Navigating the Info Maze

by Mary Frances

One of my clients called the other day.  The leadership of the congregation was trying to sort out how to reopen safely.  Did people really need to register to come to church?  How would they make sure they were staying 6ft apart?  What would they do about people who didn’t want to wear a mask? How would they distribute communion?  Every time they settled on an answer for one thing, another would pop up.  They navigated their way through Sunday worship and then turned their attention to the upcoming list of long put off funerals.  How many people could attend a funeral?  Would it be live streamed?  What to do about the traditional funeral lunch?

These are just a few examples of the many challenges facing congregations today.  And, of course, congregations are made up of individuals who have a wide range of opinions, information, and experiences.  My mother-in-law called a few days ago.  She has some underlying health conditions and her doctor had advised her to wait on getting the vaccine.  But she, like many of us, is anxious to get out and see friends, and to resume something like the life she used to have.  So, she had just decided to get the J&J vaccine because there have been fewer side effects when the news came out that it was being paused because of a rare but dangerous side effect. She was devastated.  On the other side of the spectrum, a business owner I know posted on Facebook that she doesn’t even own a mask; that we all need to overcome our fears and limitations in order to overcome this situation.  Really?

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Mapping Systemic Racism in Rural America

A Reflection and a Webinar

by Ken Howard

Click here to register for the webinar

Why is FaithX offering webinars on systemic racism?
I thought y’all did data-grounded missional discernment and demographic mapping.

We at FaithX get this question often these days. 

And my own first, somewhat snarky response is usually, “Exactly!”

But I then offer a somewhat longer and more serious explanation: That we at FaithX felt we had to bring our expertise and experience to bear on Systemic Racism because it is the frequently-unnoticed ‘base map’ underlying all the work that we have done since we launched in late 2016.

Of course, the more obvious thing revealed in visual form by our mapping was the clear, continuing, and pernicious segregation of race and ethnicity. But as we dug down deeper into various issues affecting neighborhoods, we also saw the impacts of systemic racism visually revealed there as well. We saw historical evidence of how in places where “redlining” was imposed, actions taken in the aftermath of the Great Depression had reverberated down the decades with impacts that continue today. Not just an almost one-to-one relationship between official redlining in the 30’s to the unofficial patterns of segregation we see today, but a relationship between the patterns of racial and ethnic predominance today and a host of negative impacts from chronic-diseases, to access to health care and insurance, to local government educational spending, to educational attainment. And we believed that the visual evidence that was so emotionally convincing to us that it would not only be equally compelling to others but would define for them concrete issues in their own communities that they could take concrete actions to address. Rural America may not have experienced official “redlining,” but the presence and the impacts of Systemic Racism are as real there as anywhere else.

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