Hi friends, I’ve had a lot of emails lately by people who have read The Tangible Kingdom, asking about the MCAP. Strangely, I feel bad I haven’t taken a blog or two to give more detail about how we train leaders. So, if you’re interested, here’s the scoop.
Just to give you some background, well before The Tangible Kingdom book came out, we were flying around the globe offering a four day alternative church plant training called Zer0. Essentially, we wanted to help church planters consider how a missionary would start a church through incarnational means instead of throwing up a church service and hoping people would show up. The training went well, but we felt that frontloading the training wasn’t helping leaders process the tough transitions and unique opportunities and pitfalls associated with incarnational new works. We got flooded with emails weekly by folks, saying, “ok, what do I do now?”
At the same time, Adullam was growing like a weed here in Denver and we felt a ton of pressure to stay home instead of doing all the training. While sharing our dilemma with Alan Hirsch, he suggested we consider turning the four day training into a 7 month weekly apprenticeship so that we could stay home and help guys as they need it.
Thus, the MCAP (missional church apprenticeship practicum) was born.
What it is: Essentially, the MCAP is an online, collaborative learning environment around incarnational community and church planting. Online in that, you don’t have to get on a plane and leave your context. You just have to wake up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee an log on! We upload a 20 minute video each Wednesday that has some focus on the three main stages of missionary life and church formation. The three phases are:
1) Cultural engagement, 2) Community Formation, & 3) Structuring congregational forms that stay missional.
After the video is watched, we give you questions to relate to or practical homework to do with your community. You then post your responses and start to learn “collaboratively” from other practitioners. We do share our Adullam story and our concepts, but the MCAP is not “form-specific,” which means, we won’t tell you how to do church. You get to architect your own environment while at the same time learning, gleaning, and processing what you see others doing from around the US, Canada and other western contexts.
We’ve found that most participants really appreciate the creativity they are forced toward through watching so many other contexts.
In addition to the weekly training, we provide unlimited, real-time coaching and video conferencing so that you can get what you need when you need it.
The benefits have been huge. For the planter or existing pastor who want to move toward incarnational church, it gives you a safe fraternity of friends who understand the tensions associated with non-attractional ministry. For the denomination, it saves millions of dollars!!
Most denominations have put on average $50,000 to $250,000 into church plants after they’ve signed off on a leader after a week long assessment. The results have been devastating and have caused denominations to fear the next plant. The MCAP is our way to help you and your denomination “assess” your abilities and aptitudes toward church planting and it only costs $2500 for the year. One denominational leader started to cry when I told him that they could outsource their front end missional church plant training and that we would work with them to provide a real assessment. He realized all the money he could save and also how this process could help redirect leaders who were more gifted inside the church, back into the church. He said, “it’s a win/win. At the very least, we’ve helped all our leaders, both planters and existing pastors know who they are and where they can play best on the field. They’ll all be better missionaries regardless!”
We piloted the MCAP quietly for the first two years. We’ve seen about 100 leaders now benefit and speak highly of this unique environment and with the book being out, we now want to let people know that there is an alternative to attractional church and attractional church plant training.
If you’re interested, email me at hughhalter@gmail.com. I’ll quickly forward you on to Matt Smay who runs the MCAP and we’ll process your application. You can get more detailed info at www.missio.us. Click on MCAP.
Take care!
hugh
On last weeks trip to London, Amsterdam, and Beirut, I took a lot of personal time to re-evaluate my life, calling, failures and hopes for this next phase of life. Here’s a few of the things I believe God helped me see. Four or Five of these came to me after I fell asleep on a park bench in Amsterdam. I woke up and my camera had been taken, but it at least I got a few nuggets from God.
