CVA FAQs

• Vitality: Is the congregation thriving, surviving, or declining?
• Sustainability: Does the congregation have the people, financial, and contextual resources necessary to survive and thrive?

The CVA measures how effectively a congregation is carrying out ten vital areas of congregational functioning:

1. Vision, Mission, & Discernment
2. Lay Engagement & Empowerment
3. Context Awareness & Inclusion
4. Change Readiness
5. Dealing with Differences/Conflict
6. Spiritual Life & Worship
7. Formation, Education, & Training
8. Outreach
9. Leadership & Organization
10. Stewardship

The CVA measures two important aspects of congregational functioning:

1. Internal Sustainability: Whether the congregation has sufficient internal resources (people, financial, and other) to survive, thrive, and carry out its mission.
2. External Sustainability: Whether the neighborhoods the congregations serves have sufficient resources (people, financial, and other) to sustain a typical congregation.

We do not recommend administering the CVA to the entire congregation, as it tends to skew the results in several ways: not just regression to the mean, but because a congregation-wide administration of the CVA generally results in a non-representative sample: more Boomers and older GenX-ers and fewer Millennials and GenZ-ers, more insiders and fewer newcomers, fewer financially challenged people, etc. For this reason and for reasons of manageability, maximum group size should be no more than 25.

Best results are obtained by administering the CVA to a representative subset of the congregation. By representative group, we a group that captures the full diversity of your congregation, including but not limited to:

• Age (young and old)
• Gender and Sexuality (straight and LGBTQ)
• Ordination Status (ordained & lay)
• Race-Ethnicity-Language-Country of Origin
• Congregational Ministry (worship, formation, outreach, etc.)
• Any other criteria that makes sense for your congregation

To determine what your representative sample should look like:

1. Start with a core group composed of vestry, committee chairs, and committee members as the core of the group.
2. Study the makeup of your congregation.
3. Determine which groups are under-represented.
4. Invite someone representative of those groups, making sure each gets a personal invitation from a member of leadership explaining why you need their specifically input.

Before administering the CVA to the representative group, key leaders may want to take the Sample CVA first, in order to be able to better explain to the representative group what the experience of taking it is like and answer any questions they may have.

20-30 minutes max. If you take longer than that, you are thinking too long and hard about the answers. Do not overthink – respond quickly and move on.

If you don't know or are not confident about a certain answer, elect your best impression. It is valuable to know what a respondent's perception is. In the end we are measuring many things, including the perceptions from several viewpoints.

Prescriptive professional analysis tools for congregational life have been around in many forms for a while, and offer congregations concrete ways to view their mission, ministry, and corporate life together. However, no other vitality assessment tool to date is as thoroughly grounded in research and data, and most come with high price tags that are cost prohibitive for many communities of faith to use.

FaithX and ECF view congregational vitality to be the paramount issue for faith communities today. Yet those congregations that most need help addressing their vitality issues often can least afford it. Free access to the CVA is one way we are trying to address that need. There are no strings attached. Of course, since both FaithX and ECF offer consultative services, we hope you will keep us in mind if you them. FaithX will offer a 10% discount on services to any congregation that has taken the CVA.

Questions: The CVA asks the user to answer 5-10 question in each of 12 areas of congregational life: 10 focused on vitality and 2 on sustainability.

Click here for full question set

Single Church Version: When the individual or team has completed the CVA, the answers are scored, and the individual or team leader then receives summary scores of each of the ten vitality areas and two sustainability areas, along with suggestions of ways to improve in each of the areas.

Judicatory Version: Detailed spreadsheet reports are available for download. These reports show vitality scores from all congregations and organizations within the Judicatory, answer distribution for each question by congregation, and a report of complete responses.

Click on the images below for a more detailed look.

Report Screenshots

CVA diagnostic ratings are based on a criterion-referenced (not on a curve) 1-4 scale:

• 3-4: High
• 2-3: Moderate
• 1-2: Low

All CVA questions are grounded in research, and research suggests that using an endowment to underwrite operating expenses (including ongoing outreach) negatively affects individual and congregational stewardship over the long term. Endowments aren’t forever. That means that congregations that grow dependent on them are much more likely drive off the proverbial cliff when the money runs out.

There are several things a congregation can do after taking the CVA. These include:

1. Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
2. Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
3. Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
4. Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
5. Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
6. Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
7. Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, build on successes.

The above process is what we call a Missional Assessment. You can do it yourselves or you can engage FaithX to lead you through it (we meet with your congregational leader in four sessions over a 6-8 week period to guide you through the process).

Contact us at [email protected] for more information or to schedule a free 30-min discussion to weigh your alternatives.

Click here to review the research sources.

The CVA is updated at the end of any year in which vitality-related research is newly released or user feedback results in changes. For example, user feedback as so far led to:

• CVA Version 2.0: redesigned user interface, added section on “External Sustainability,” back-end improvements to support research and benchmarking, bug fixes.
• CVA Judicatory Dashboard: developed at request of multiple users, a subscription-based customized dashboard that allows, dioceses, synods, districts, and other judicatory bodies to administer the CVA to their congregations, add supplemental (non-rated) questions of their own, and have access to summarized results from all of their congregations.
• CVA Version 2.1 (release date: Sept. 2021): Spanish-language option, vitality improvement resources linked to scores/recommendations, new denomination-specific options.

Step 1 – Research: The CVA was based on 20 years of research from a variety of sources (click here) and will be refined as new research emerges.

Step 2 – Iterative Prototyping: CVA 1.0 (excel-based version) was the result of 10 years of iterative prototyping, using data and feedback gathered from hundreds of congregations representing a cross-section of race, ethnicity, and denomination.

Step 3 – Beta-Testing: CVA 1.1 (first online version) gathered data and feedback from hundreds of congregations across a similar cross section.

Step 4 – Soft Launch: CVA 2.0 (second online version) included a number of enhancements based on feedback from users of CVA 1.1, including a redesigned user interface and ethnically-sensitive language and terminology.

Step 5 – Ongoing Updates and Enhancements: based on user feedback and emerging research.

Absolutely. People of color were involved throughout the design, prototyping, and beta testing of the CVA. In addition, the FaithX Board of Directors, of which nearly half are people of color, continue to provide feedback for ongoing improvements in the CVA.

A CVA Spanish version of the CVA will be included in version 2.1, to be released before the end of 2021, if not sooner. We had hoped to have it in 2.0 and were almost there but ran out of time to do the final QC checks.

The cost of a subscription to the customized Judicatory Dashboard is $2,495 per year (plus an initial setup charge).

The subscription cost includes:

• Continued research on congregational vitality and sustainability.
• Continued refinement of the tool, including translating the questions and prescriptive recommendations into different languages and tailoring them to the ecclesiology terminology of different denominations.
• Annual updates and upgrades based on the above.
• A discount on FaithX services to judicatory subscribers.

The initial setup charge is typically $2,500 (with a $1,000 discount through September 1, 2021). The setup fee includes:

• Programming required to customize the dashboard to the specific judicatory and its needs, including:
  • Setting up an account for the diocese.
  • Setting up individual sub-accounts for each congregation.
  • Adding judicatory-specific questions.
• Onboarding Judicatory Staff, including:
  • Assistance in designing effective judicatory-specific questions.
  • Orienting and training judicatory staff.
  • Helping judicatory staff think through how to integrate the CVA and Judicatory Dashboard into their current congregational assistance mechanisms and parochial reporting.

In exchange for the discount, we ask early-adopting judicatories to provide us with feedback on the Dashboard and the onboarding process.

We will use that feedback to make final tweaks to the Dashboard before the hard-launch in September.