Faith Alive Enters New Era
At its February meeting, the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) expressed its commitment to maintaining the Faith Alive brand, and to the continued need for solid Reformed faith formation resources to be made available for congregations.
The BOT also endorsed a plan that would lead to Faith Alive becoming part, in some fashion, of an overall faith formation program or ministry for the CRC. For this to happen, a change in governance will have to occur.
“Exactly what that is (a faith formation focus) and how that will happen is in discussion,” says Mark Rice, director of Faith Alive.
Despite the changes, he says, it is crucial to note that Faith Alive is not going “out of business, or closing its doors. Faith Alive is not going away.”
A review of Faith Alive is part of a larger denominational effort to consider an organizational realignment framework for a phased convergence of ministry functions within the CRC.
For Faith Alive that will likely be focusing on faith formation.
But faith formation, says Rice, is a broad term that encompasses all the ways in which congregations build an active and sustained faith commitment to Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God among their members.
“It includes such diverse functions as education, worship, leadership development, and congregational revitalization, and others,” he says.
Presently, many CRC agencies and ministry offices, such as Home Missions, Pastor-Church Relations, Disability Concerns, Faith Alive, and others, all do important work in these areas.
This move means Faith Alive will probably produce or help produce resources that are especially focused on meeting the current needs of congregations, rather than attempting to reach a wider Reformed audience in the traditional manner of publishing, getting books ready to hit the market and then needing to promote books and other materials, says Rice.
It may also mean serving as a conduit by creating a web of distribution streams among churches that have created their own effective faith formation ministry tools which should be shared with other churches.
For Faith Alive and others this will probably mean there will not be much lag time between discerning what churches and their members need on their faith journey and providing it to them.
Faith Alive has experienced declining revenues since 2006 and initiatives and strategies designed to generate revenue growth have not significantly altered the trend.
“Cash reserves have been used to support these new initiatives and to cover bottom line losses, and are in danger of being completely depleted,” says Rice.
Faith Alive’s financial difficulties coincide with the emerging emphasis on the need to significantly focus on faith formation as a central strategic theme for denominational ministries.
As a result, these challenges could very well lead to good things for churches and their members.
To make this happen, the denominational administration will propose to the BOT at its May 2013 meeting a plan to sort through how the CRC can best undertake faith formation and how it can work best with churches.
This will likely include integrated teams of denominational staff that will come closer to congregations, listening and discerning and working alongside them and classes.
The goal will be to implement strategies, share best practices, and create resources that will better serve the faith formation needs of the congregations.
The CRC has produced Sunday school materials for over 100 years and Faith Alive as an agency was formed over 45 years ago.
For over 25 years it has financially operated as a self-supporting publishing ministry of the CRCNA mostly dependent on sales of product for financial stability for its core publishing functions.
Congregations and individuals should not hesitate to order materials, as they have always done, from Faith Alive with confidence in its continued ministry, says Rice.
The Banner ran a story on this topic as well
