The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

New Year, Same Challenges. Follow the Light!

by Mary C. Frances

We couldn’t have imagined we’d still be here last March.

No, we couldn’t have imagined then that we would still be here now but here we are physically distanced, doing drive-through worship, showing up on Zoom, Facebook Live, and YouTube.  And, somehow, some way…by the grace of God, it’s working, it’s all working.  And it needs to keep working for quite some time.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend some time talking with a public health expert.  Someone who lives in the world of exposures and workplace safety.  Someone who has no skin in the game except to keep people safe.  He said hunker down.  The worst is yet to come.  We have another 9-12 months ahead of us before we can feel safe gathering in groups indoors.  A year?!  Another year?  We definitely didn’t see that coming last March!  

But maybe that news could be freeing.  Rather than looking ahead for each corner we need to turn in order to go back to the way things were before, what if we let go of that and just focus on what’s ahead, focus on the new year?  What if we dove into the next year with creativity, energy, grace, and adaptability without worrying about being in our buildings?  Could this be our best year of ministry yet?

[Read more…]

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.  

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

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…

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

FaithX is Datastory Affiliate