Matt Smay

Since my last post - there’s been a ton of developments. Hugh, Ryan, and I had a great trip to Scotland and Ireland. We met some great people (Furgis, Phil Kingsley, and many others from Greater European Mission).  We enjoyed a great time with church leaders and even spent a day golfing at St. Andrews.

It’s still quite amazing to be in contexts where less than 3% of the population attends an evangelical church.  It’s a reminder of how important the call has become to the missional/incarnational life in the west.

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.

Hugh and I have been working to create such a resource.  I’m happy to announce that The TK Primer is now available - released in April. We’re super excited about this resource and are getting great feedback from those pioneering the Primer in their churches. The goal of the Primer is to help every Christian to understand and experience a bit of what’s possible in an incarnational community.

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 the fifth day of each week is designed to be done with a group - a few friends, a small group, or a community group that’s just getting started.

Each week has 7 days of content and follows this format -

Day one: Exploration of the concept

Day two: Meditation on Scripture related to the concept

Day three: Change element: What will need to change to live out the concept

Day Four: Action day: Small steps into missional life

Day Five: Community Day: Where everyone processes 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 “bible study” to a more holistic incarnational commmunty.  In adullam, we use this 8 weeks to prepare people to live the Adullam way and so it serves as a great companion to any assimilation process, disipleship 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 that will help you use the primer.

If you’re an existing pastor and desire to use this tool to reorient your church, we’d recommend you check out the Missional Chuch Apprenticeship Practicum. The MCAP 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.

I’m often asked, “What does a Village (an Adullam Community) really look like? While this is a big question that we attempt to answer in the Tangible Kingdom by describing how we integrate communion, community, and mission – Below are a few things that we’ve experienced lately:

• Our Village is the people we can call in the middle of the night, and relied on to watch our daughter for two days while my wife was in the hospital delivering our second baby.
• Our Village makes decisions about where to buy their homes based on proximity to each other.
• Our Village is the people we ask to give advice when we’re making our biggest life decisions.
• Our Village spends time with each other beyond our normal meeting times.
• Our Village is the people we party with during holidays, vacations, and special occasions (Super Bowl, BCS, and World Series).
• Our kids can’t wait for our Village so they can see their friends, and our 2 year old knows all the adults by name.
• When people in our Village call – we always pick up.
• Our Village blends conversations about everyday life and God naturally.
• Our Village is basically our extended family in Colorado.

Last week, Hugh and I had a chance to spend a few days with a couple of friends, colleagues, and strategic missional leaders. Alan Hirsch - on the front right is one of the founders of Forge Australia and an author of three of my most highly recommended books (the newest of which is ReJesus). Lance Ford in the left corner is a church planter and coach that has started an entire online networking and training website called Shapevine.

During our time together, we solidified our commitment to serve in the development of a broad based missional movement, which will result in a number of partnering arrangements with Missio - the details of which will be announced in the next few weeks.

Madison Smay was born last Friday. She came into the world a healthy 19.5 inches and just shy of 7 lbs.