Hugh Halter

Hi friends, sorry for the gap in coverage lately. Matt and I had a good stint in Scotland and Ireland the last few weeks.  We enjoyed a great time with church leaders and even a little golf at St. Andrews.  It’s still quite amazing to be in contexts where less than 1% of the population is in church.  We had better take our call to incarnational life and leadership much more serious if we are going to avoid going where they’ve gone.  Arrogance and or blindness should be the only reason to shirk off the call for change in the church.

On a positive note, everywhere we went, we talked about the need to create resources for those in the existing church to reorient people back to the missional way of God.  The problem in the past has been that we have separated the idea of spiritual formation from missional practices.  It’s time to redefine discipleship as “becoming like Jesus” and call people deep spiritual formation on the streets.

Matt and I have been working to create such a resource.  I’m happy to announce that The TK Primer is now available. We’re more excited about this tool than we were about the release of the book.  Quite simply because we want every Christian to understand their way in God’s missional call.

The Primer is not a workbook.  We’ve realized that you can’t train, program, or preach people into incarnational life and community. The only way people will live like Jesus lived is if they have a heart change born of time with God and people on the streets.  In book lingo, unless people find their own Fiona’s that grab their hearts, they’ll probably settle for church attendance and personal devotional times. Prideful, fearful pastors will call this discipleship but any leader who takes Christ’s call to make disciples seriously, will never settle for this!
The Primer is a spiritual formation journal that walks someone through an 8 week process to deal with the barriers to real apprenticeship. That is Individualism, Consumerism, and Materialism.  This is an individual process, but one must do it with friends. Each week has 7 days of content and follows this format.

Day one: Exploration of the concept

Day two: Meditation of scripture on the concept

Day three: Change element: what will life have to be like to change around the concept

Day Four: Action day: baby steps into new life

Day Five: Community Day: where they process their personal journey together

Day Six: Calibration Day: Serious reorientation to the new habit

Day Seven: Sabbath Communion

The primer can be used with existing small groups to move them beyond “just a bible study” and more into incarnational commmunty or it can be used as a preparation for mission.  In adullam, we use this 8 weeks to prepare people to live the Adullam way and so it serves as a great assimilation process, re-decipleship process, membership curriculum, or small group training.

You can only find it on our Tangible Kingdom website. There, you’ll also find a basic video from yours truly to help you use the primer well.

If you’re an existing pastor and desire to use this tool to reorient your church, we’d recommend you check out the MCAP training program. The Morph Class is specifically design to give you an effective grid to work from using the Primer. You can find out about the MCAP at the Missio web site.

Take care,

hugh

A few months ago, I made a mistake and blogged about Adullam’s intentional fight against consumerism.  I let the cat out the bag that we were going to take a season (about 4-6 months) and meet only twice a month for our normal all church worship gathering. We did this for two primary reasons.  First, we looked back and realized that most of our conversion or transformation stories happened during spontaneous community time on the weekends.  As people bounced off each other, ate together, played together, helped each other, and shared conversation about God, really cool stuff happened.  Weekends in Denver are really the best time for this so we thought it would be missiologically appropriate to give God back the best time of the week.  The second reason was to help filter through Christians that had “transferred” to us.  We noticed that they were inspired by the Adullam story and Adullam way, but just came to church every week.  Consumerism was a deep concern for us and we wanted more for them.
So we made the shift about four months ago.  So what happened?  Not sure yet. I’ve heard many of our people love it, some struggle but feel the tension is good for them, and others have been honest to express that maybe Adullam isn’t for them.
Here’s an email to that affect. “Hey Hugh, to get right down to it Village stuff just doesn’t work for us.  Any sort of home group – regardless of the name – is just us being at home with kids running around, like any time at home.  For us, we need a place to go where we can participate and the kids can be taught and everyone gets a break. We are pretty worn out by the time Sunday rolls around and we enjoy a break from the rest of the week.   When Adullam stopped meeting weekly a few of us families tried to cram into our apartment a few times and it sort of fizzled after that.
Regarding the church Gathering, if we didn’t have kids I think it would be perfect for us.  It’s a spontaneous, visceral, and ‘bare-knuckle’ kind of church.  I was excited in the beginning about it, and it’s still a great group of people.  But for our kids we want something more – something long term. The way it works now, I’m not sure Adullam is sustainable for families.  I guess for us with three little kids, we need a church where there is weekly consistency and resources for kids. This is good for them and it’s good for us.    Take care.”
Because of my overdeveloped pecs, sawed-off military haircut, and some candidly tough blogs and writings about church folk, people assume I’m a heartless drill sergeant who gets his kicks off of watching soft evangelicals whimper through the pain of mission.  Actually, when I got this email, the Winter-warlock melted. I felt his pain, I admitted to him that I don’t like small groups, nor did I enjoy twelve kids running through my house, pooping on my carpet, or screaming while I tried to diatribe through Romans.  I didn’t blame him at all, and I sincerely wanted to give him a man-hug, and start doing church services for him again.
The reality of life does leave people working their backsides off during the week, struggling to find good family time, recover from all the stress, etc.  Therefore on one side of the dilemma, I believe it’s a great ministry that each church has to provide a place of spiritual solace for folks.  I really mean that.
On the other side of the argument is what happened with two of our villages that same week.  In a few hours I’m about to drive across town to help one of our communities, perform a dedication for one of their children.  We do quite a few baby dedications in our normal church services, but this village wanted to do it in their home with friends from the neighborhood, family, and some of their Adullam friends.  This village last night took all their adults out for a date together while another village watched all their kids.  Apparently, they trade off so that the adults can take a break together.  Then last night in our village, a bunch of the ladies got together to do a book club gathering at a home in our neighborhood where the homeowners have never been to church.  Apparently, the husband eventually came downstairs and they got talking about life and before they knew it, the couple was asking about Adullam and shared how ever since their wedding, thought they should try a church.  Sounds like they’ll be joining us for Easter next week.
As you can see, just this week in Adullam reflects the tension of consumerism, a churches role in trying to create pathways for people to move from fans to followers to fellow kingdom partners.  I share this story not to suggest that we’ve made the right choice to make it this hard.  Maybe we need to adjust.  I suppose if Adullam had the resources we would gladly provide a weekly service, maybe multiple times so anyone struggling to keep their heads above water could at least have a community to worship with.  But Adullam still has no full-time staff or building of our own.  Thus, our pathway of discipleship may not be able to accommodate what a larger, more resourced church may be able to do.  On the other side, maybe we’ll have a higher percentage of our people move deeper into mission because of our narrow way, and I suppose many larger churches would love the nimbility we have.  Sometimes I think it’s just a matter of helping people think outside the box.
The first emailer, may never have thought that they could actually get more solace by trading babysitting with kids, and over time, he may find that integrating kids into mission might be more fun and spiritually formative than just dropping the kids off every Sunday for the next ten years.
And this is the point of this chapter.  Every church has the same call. The main thing of making apprentices of Jesus is a non-negotiable. But each church has its own context, resources, and processes they must navigate in order to win the day over consumerism. Sometimes all it takes is helping people think outside the box. Although there’s always pain in not being able to meet everyone’s desired wants or felt needs, I think long term, we’re better to push than to pander or perform.