Institute For The Future

Research Manager Rachel Lyle Hatch interviewed for Trinity News

Lindsay Lunnum, a young parish priest writing for the Trinity News, the magazine of Trinity Wall Street Church in New York City, recently interviewed IFTF Research Manager Rachel Lyle Hatch on forecasting and IFTF's work with the Episcopal Church.

The interview broke down the methods and reasons for forecasting and touched on some of the ongoing work IFTF has done in collaboration with the Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes, which can be found here.

Below is an excerpt from the article:

LL: I know that they’re different for every community, but can you name some of the pain points that you’ve seen the Episcopal Church identify and some forecasts that these groups are working towards?

 

RLH: There are groups that have been working with one of our tools, The Book of Provocations, at the parish level. They’re doing some analysis of the dilemmas that they face and trying to decide how to mitigate them. One parish, for example, is in a time of transition, so they’ve used the book to look at what they need to grieve together as a parish and what they can dream together for the future.

There’s also a parish that’s using this for discernment around environmental stewardship. The foresight, as they looked at the forecast, is global climate change. The insight that they drew from that is a realization that they are one of several Episcopal parishes that are in close proximity to each other and that they’re duplicating resources in a resource-scarce world and in a very resource-scarce future. That’s led them to beginning conversation about whether any of those four parishes, including their own, should be combined. They’re talking about what that would do in terms of environmental impact and also how they might serve their community differently if that were what the future looked like for them.

 

The rest of the article can be found at Trinity Wall Street's website.