This Summer I’ll be speaking at MissionShift which is a conference put on by Ed Stetzer. Ed will be writing the forward to our new book AND…the gathered and scattered church due out in April with Zondervan and Leadership Network. Ed asked me to respond to a few questions that he’ll be posting on his site soon. Just thought I’d share some thoughts.
Ed: Tell us briefly how you came to the work with Adullam and what all fills your days?
Hugh: Adullam happened by accident. We share the story in The Tangible Kingdom but essentially, we showed up in Denver as a small missionary team, began engaging culture and trying to model some dna of the kingdom (inclusive community/communion with God/blessing) and we found that the kingdom started to become tangible to people. Eventually, the house was full of a lot of spiritually disoriented God seekers, some coming to faith and some just coming with us in community and we had to figure out how to hold a growing network of incarnational communities together. That’s what we call Adullam, a ‘congregational network of incarnational communities.
I don’t really have a typical day anymore. Since our story came out, I do spend a few days a week traveling and training leaders, but when home, I still try to give my time either to leaders or people trying to find our story both Christian and non-christian. Adullam is about 300 people but we don’t have any full time staff so we’ve learned to centralize a few things, but mostly we’re all out with people during the week. I do oversee our villages (our communities) and do a lot of coaching, and I also spend a few hours preparing for our weekly gathering.
Ed: What do you see in the church that is giving you hope that we are doing better at engaging in God’s mission?
Hugh: The biggest hope is in the conversations that are going on. It used to be a fight to ask people to consider moving away from purely attractional forms of church, but a much greater percentage want to move forward. What’s most exciting is how the existing church is not only in the conversation, but is asking for help and now innovating some really cool movements of incarnational community. For instance, I was blessed to train 300 of Austin Stone’s small group leaders through our TK primer and we’re hearing some great stories of moving small groups into missional/ incarnational communities.
Ed: You recently published “Tangible Kingdom.” Tell us about the book.
Hugh: Like I said, it’s just our story. We do try to unpack words like “missional” “kingdom” by giving stories so that leaders and Christians can actually see themselves living our story. We don’t bash attractional church, but we do try to encourage a ‘sub-structure’ of church we call an incarnational community and we show that it has a much greater ability to dive deep into culture, deliver the gospel, and make disciples than the existing church structures. The new book AND…the gathered and scattered church, which Ed has written the forward for, will be out in April with Zondervan/Leadership Network/Exponential and will help both church plant and existing churches find a balance of scattering their people into incarnational communities while retaining functional gathered structures that don’t pandor to consumers.
Ed: Obviously, the word “missional” is spoken of, used by, and claimed by many groups. Instead of giving another definition for the word, can you tell the readers an example of where you and your wife are seeking to live missionally?
Hugh: Sure, missionality for us is just giving up our home, our time, our kids, and our own schedules so that sojourners have access to us all the time. My son has severe epilepsy so we’ve always had to center ministry out of our home. We’re open for business three to four times a week, and the house always seems like grand central station. For instance tonight is the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics so Cheryl sent out an Evite to many friends and many sojourners. We’re tired, but we allow God to “send” us as a family for God’s mission.
Ed: In terms of missionSHIFT and the Missional Manifesto, what would be a great end-game in your mind for this event and process?
Hugh: I think if we can continue to unite both mega and micro into some similar DNA and processes then we’ll be on good footing together.
AND cover
