🔒As churches struggle, parishes embrace business consulting firm to find new path

Churches, like most for- and nonprofit institutions, need financial, operational and marketing guidance in order to satisfy their religious and secular ambitions.

Houses of worship, too, are not immune to the mounting pressures for satisfying their financial, staffing and programming obligations, particularly as fewer people in Connecticut and nationwide attend church.

Signs of tough times abound. One Protestant congregation in Hartford’s North End a year ago put its sanctuary on the market for $1 million. There are currently 22 church or religious properties for sale in Connecticut, according to online commercial realty listing website LoopNet.

Inside and outside Connecticut, the Catholic Church has shuttered schools and church buildings and consolidated parishes to save money. A recent Gallup poll found only 50 percent of Americans belong to a church, synagogue or mosque — an all-time low.

So, where do faith leaders and their congregants turn when their paths turn rocky and uncertain?

Several Hartford area houses of worship have found a secular adviser-partner in Fathom LLC. The 12-year-old West Hartford consultancy, co-founded by Brent Robertson, over the years has counseled some of the region’s most influential employers: Bloomfield health insurer Cigna, nonprofit Foodshare Inc., aerospace manufacturer Kaman Corp., and West Hartford accounting-consultancy blumshapiro, among them.

In spring 2018, a mutual acquaintance put Fathom in touch with Erica Thompson, senior pastor of one of Hartford’s oldest churches, Asylum Hill Congregational, in the city’s West End.

In 12 months since, Thompson says, Fathom has met periodically with Asylum Hill leadership and many of its 1,200 members separately and together, to harvest their input and concerns about the tenor and direction of their church. Many felt their church had lost its way following the cloudy departure two years ago of a popular minister and the retirement of another, she said.

The results from Fathom’s engagement, on which Thompson says the church has spent about $50,000, have been palpable.

For example, Asylum Hill Congregational drew 1,000 people to this year’s Easter service — a number that hadn’t been seen in a decade.

“One of the things we aspire to be is a ‘big tent’ church,’’ she said. “But one where there’s diversity in all the ways we think of diversity.’’

Amid all that, Thompson said Fathom helped her church realize it could, and should, do more to welcome everyone.

For instance, Robertson said Fathom arranged a church “conversation’’ centered on Asylum Hill’s longstanding posture as a sanctuary to Hartford’s lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) community. The church has since held conversations or outreach around other church and community issues.

Conveying brand

Scott Thumma is a sociology professor at The Hartford Seminary and directs its Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Thumma says the rising partnerships between churches and secular advisers on finance, operations and marketing are a response to a growing social-media culture and other modern-day pressures on their congregations and ministers.

Rarely, Thumma says, are minister-candidates exposed to finance and marketing in seminary. That’s the value of organizations such as Fathom, he said.

“Churches really need someone who can help them think about what colors go well together or how to convey their brand,’’ Thumma said. “You’re taught in seminary how to communicate with people in the pews. But you’re not taught modern approaches to reach out to others’’ beyond the pews.

To attract or retain churchgoers, houses of worship across Connecticut and the U.S., observers say, are tinkering with everything from pew colors to distributing “welcome’’ cards that visitors fill out so congregations can network with them later. Others are reviving or fortifying their youth and young-adult ministries to sustain their flocks. Some now allow worshipers to watch live or tape-delayed church services or tithe online.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research published a 2015 study that established a connection between congregations with a strong vision and identity and growth.

“To the extent religion has become a consumer-oriented marketplace,’’ study author David A. Roozen wrote, “it should not be surprising that congregations that stick out from the crowd are more likely to be growing … ."

‘Outside the box’

Robertson says he and Fathom’s advisers apply the same guidelines and routines to church clients as they do secular ones.

His approach, whether a business, nonprofit or church: Identify what clients want to achieve, and then, thinking creatively “outside the box,’’ plot a course to achieve them. Along the way, Fathom’s clients learn which milestones to focus on to stay on track.

Often, Robertson said, clients have all the pieces in place, or at least identified, to help them break out of what may look like the right path or aim, but in reality is a rut.

“We help bring out what that organization stands for, … we help bring those ideas to the surface,’’ he said.

Fathom’s work with the Asylum Hill Congregational caught the attention of a much smaller, half-century old West Hartford flock at Flagg Road United Church of Christ.

“We’re a church that’s off the beaten path,’’ said Flagg Road Pastor Mark Diters. “It’s struggled that way since its start in the ‘60s. … We’ve always been a church that’s a niche.’’

After a seemingly healthy beginning, when the congregation peaked at between 120 and 140 members, Diters said creeping disillusionment with religion in general, and with Flagg Road’s leadership in particular, eroded its headcount to the current 80 or so — mostly educators and artists.

Among ideas that Robertson and Fathom brought to Flagg Road was the formation of six “action teams’’ tasked with, among other things, drawing together members with like-minded interests who can stoke and focus fellow members’ worship attendance and other church engagement.

Working with Fathom, too, has benefitted Flagg Road’s shepherd.

“It has increased the energy, which has increased my ability to do more,’’ Diters said.

He and Thompson say other congregations could benefit from Fathom’s guidance, although they concur not all spiritually minded will appreciate it.

Just as in the private sector, fear and uncertainty about change or anything new generates as much trepidation in the pews, they say.

“For churches, it’s a unique process,’’ Diters said of Fathom’s intervention. “I think some churches might not be comfortable with it.’’

Asylum Hill’s Thompson says the challenge for today’s church is getting its message to parts of the secular community that have yet to hear and receive it.

Indeed, she points to a more concrete exemplar from the Christian church, when another “counselor’’ taught and preached precepts that were viewed as radical and roiled the religious elite of His day.

“The ministry of Jesus was, in His time, about as innovative and creative as one could get,’’ Thompson said. “It was countercultural. He was not doing the ministry most folks were doing.’’