EFCA Missional Summit – September 09

Hugh Halter – The Tangible Kingdom,
Zondervan

• Community, Communion & Mission are the three things you build around.
  
• Pure Religion, integrated community…caring for people's real need, a place where people feel that they can discover their spiritual journey, mixing saints and sojourners in the same community.
  
• Mix Saints and Sojourners in life…don't make it a worship service, but include talk about God, about the Kingdom, share Scripture.
  
• Your church will emerge from where you live…but church is community. Convergence of saints and sojourners.
  
• We need to talk not so much about the missional, but much more about the incarnational.
  
• Our posture in saying the truth is just as important as the truth…John 1…the word became flesh. Don't just be proclaimers, but incarnaters, that is where the sticking value is in our homes and with those sojourners we rub shoulders with.
  
• Church needs a balance of the gathered (modalic – those structured) and scattered (sodalic – those just wanting to continue to expand). Paul did both…went to places evangelistically (sodalic), then established leaders (modalic). We need to bring both together in the church…whether from organic plant to established church, or from established church to organic outreach.
  
• Help existing churches do an R&D pilot project that is safe for them, but also allows them to try a new approach also.
  
• Gathering people and scattering them are both important.
  
• Moving the church toward the world is really a heart issue.
  
• Both the house church and the mega-seeker church can both be consumer oriented.
  
• Barriers to the tangible kingdom…individualism, materialism, consumerism.
  

What did Jesus order? Make disciples!

• What did He mean by disciples? Not just adherents or attenders. He wants people who are like Him, that is what a disciple is.
  
• Engaging culture costs very little. Developing community costs very little. Developing structures is where we begin to see more costs involved.
  
• When a tornado develops a vortex, all the forces on the inside pushing out create suction…so the church should seek to create vortex.
  

Process of Apprenticeship

• Evangelism training is not good news for most people…teaching people to live incarnationally is.
  
  • Observance - Observe stories – 2 to 3 months – but then a call to come and die
    
  • The Talk – the death talk…you must die to self to become alive to others.
    
  • Preparation – 8 – 10 weeks of spiritual formation process done with friends outside the group
    
  • Public sending at 6 months
    
  • Participation – front end of the entire process has higher bar, here the bar gets lowered
    
  • Partnership – now they are doing the mission