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

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