The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Innovate for Building and Growing Community

by Steve Matthews, FaithX Senior Consultant
Growing Community

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand.
The arrogance of success is to think
that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

William Pollard
Online Small Groups

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I like working with FaithX.  As consultants we are invited to bring our whole selves to the table. We bring our experience, our vocation, our vision, and we are invited everyday to innovate for the benefit of the faith communities and judicatories we accompany.  

One way we experience innovation comes in the way Mary Frances, Ken Howard, and I collaborate with one another, and we also experience the excitement of innovation as we bring robust data to bear on the community contexts of the people we serve. We work with our partner DataStory to offer dynamic, informative, eye-opening resources to help organizations chart a path toward bolder and more creative visions than they might have been otherwise imagined.  

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Keeping Congregations Connected: Online Fellowship and Small Groups

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant
Online Small Groups

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

I was chatting with a good friend the other day. She’s a pastor; retired for about a year now after serving a very long pastorate.  In her retirement, she has been trying to find her way in a new congregation…as a participant, as a member.  Of course, she’d been at this new church for several months before the pandemic, but that is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the majority of members who have been there for decades—many, many decades.  And now the congregation is not only holding worship online but also the highly-revered small group, “coffee hour.”  Everyone comes to Zoom with their own home brew and pastry and the fellowship begins.  Or does it?

If you have ever been a visitor at a church and wanted to bolt for the door during coffee hour, you may have an idea what I am talking about.  Bad coffee, too much sugary food, and too many cliques—lots and lots of cliques.  Often, the longer people have been at a church the more they feel entitled to tune out visitors and use Sunday morning to catch up with their friends, and now we have moved this online.  Putting everyone in your church into one big Zoom call and letting the conversation rip is not going to feel inclusive, considerate, or welcoming.  Even for the most experienced Zoom users, Zoom can lend a sense of awkwardness to a conversation.  Only one person can speak at a time while everyone else watches.  People often hesitate in response because they aren’t sure if it’s their turn, so the chance to chime in is lost if you are at all meek. If the group is large, then most people are watching just a few people have a conversation.  What happens to the introverts? Will they even show up for this virtual fellowship? How will visitors navigate this?  Is this an improvement on our in-person fellowship?  I am afraid not.

So then what is an online congregation and an online small group to do?  How do we help people engage in fellowship in this modern COVID-19 world?  Do not lose hope, there are two things that can help:  

Zoom rooms and online small groups.

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Password-Protected Worship: A Missed Opportunity?

by the Rev. Ken Howard
Password-Protected

This blog post is part of a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post

Zoombombing

“Zoombombing” is when an uninvited person joins a Zoom meeting, usually for the purpose of gaining a few cheap laughs at the expense of the participants. 

Because Zoombombers sometimes use racial slurs, profanity, pornography, and other offensive imagery, faith communities have begun to password protect their online worship services in order to prevent univited Zoombomers from entering. 

I would like to suggest that password-protected online worship services are a huge missed opportunity for evangelism.

Here’s why…

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What we learned from our experiment with online worship

By the Rev. Ken Howard

Beyond Online Worship is a blog series on strategies and tools
for doing and being church in the face of the current pandemic.
Click here for the previous post

In our previous post we talked about how a faithful response to the current pandemic involves more than simply live streaming worship services (congregations do not live by worship alone), but involves finding creative and experimental ways to do and be all the things that churches (and other faith communities) are supposed to be and do, and especially how we exercise our “burden of care” to our neighbors and neighborhoods. And that our responses may ultimately lead to our congregations and the communities they serve surviving and thriving together. 

Subsequent posts will deal with each of those things in turn. But let’s start with what we learned from our recent experiment with online worship (last Sunday), in cooperation with Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, which reached 51 people on Zoom and 900+ on Facebook Live.

So what did we learn?

Online worship is not enough. Not bad for a first try, but after literally patting ourselves on the back (because COVID kept us from patting each others backs) for a few minutes after the second of the two services ended, what we learned was that, while online worship was necessary, it was not sufficient, and there were so many other things we needed to figure out how to do and be while social distancing. And that realization led to this blog series.

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Keeping Congregations Connected (a series): Beyond Livestream Worship

By the Rev. Ken Howard

This is the first in a multipart series on strategies and tools for faith communities in the face of COVID19

The COVID19 pandemic is not the first time Christianity has been faced with the moral question of how to respond in the face of pandemic. In fact, the question is nearly as old as the Church itself. One of the first times was during the third century Roman plague. Something likely akin to Ebola, the so-called Cyprian plague (after Bishop Cyprian of Carthage) which ravaged the Empire from 250-270 CE.

Just as they had in the Antonin plague of the second century, the powerful and well-to-do of the Empire fled the cities for the relative safety of their countryside villas, leaving the rest of the populace to fend for themselves. As attested to by both Christian and secular writers of the time, just as they did in the previous plague, the Galileans (as they were called) did the opposite, staying behind and even coming in from the countryside to feed the poor, care for the afflicted, comfort the dying, bury the dead, and to attend to public hygiene, doing this not just for the faithful but for their entire communities, Christian and non-Christian alike. It was, as Bishop Cyprian put it, their burden of care. Two remarkable things happened: they helped curb the contagiousness of the plague (the death rate was as much as 50% lower in cities with Christian communities) and the plague (or rather their response to it) helped make Christianity extremely contagious, so that it spread rapidly throughout the Empire.

Today we are faced with a modern plague but the question is the same: how are we called to live in the face of it. And our answers may ultimately lead to our congregations and the communities they serve surviving and thriving together. How might this be?

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