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.

At Adullam we’re building on the theme for the year – discipleship, but not in the typical manner.  Rather than focus on some of the common pathways to discipleship, we’re focusing on the aspects of discipleship that involve transformation and an active bias towards spiritual development. I’d describe the distinction as adding an exercise regiment to an already good diet. Afterall, most of us diet by restricting the things we eat, cutting calories by reducing all those good tasting – carb loaded foods. While this may have a short term affect, it will likely not create a sustainable change. By adding exercise to our routine we are able to actually change our metabolic rate, burning more calories and transforming our bodies (hopefully reducing fat & adding muscle).  

You’ve probably already guessed that I’ve joined a gym recently…but I think this analogy is extremely relevant to our discipleship discussion. As with diets, we often take a short-term viewpoint when it comes to discipleship. For example, we add a daily devotional, scripture reading, and prayer expecting these changes done in solitude will produce a disciple. When I look in scripture for discipleship, it most frequently occurs in the context of a community. How can a person work out issues of forgiveness, repentance, anger, fear, holiness, stewardship, integrity, gossip, generosity, mercy, and faith without other people involved in the process? Especially when our most problematic discipleship issues tend to involve the real challenges of loving others. So, why does our discipleship process tend to focus all of our energy on learning to love God more without any tangible application? I doubt this view of discipleship can produce true life transformation – it may cut back on some of our bad spiritual habits, but lacks a long term commitment to change.   

I’ve been intrigued lately by the scripture that we typically quote, “go and make disciples…” But as a leader, the question that immediately comes to mind is how? We often assume that there is a linear process that can be created, but when we look at Jesus and his disciples as a model, there appears to be a random set of learning experiences that are highlighted after they occur, and thus discipleship happened. The challenge with this model of discipleship is that it takes a great deal of time and a huge commitment to maintaining relationships with those we’re discipling. For example,  In Mark 9:33-35 Jesus confronts the disciples with some practical application,

When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” ^?But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.

So, what if the discipleship process included the development of spiritually oriented life skills that were consistent with some of the most relevant challenges we face everyday?

What if…

• our discipleship helped us become good stewards of our money? 
• we actively practiced repentence and forgiveness in our communities?
• we confronted the issues of gossip, fear, and anger in our lives?
• we worked out our faith by giving more, blessing more, and serving others more than we did last year?
• discipleship happened, thus transforming our churches, families, and neighborhoods?

As I look ahead to 2008 there are several key developments under way…

The first is the release of The Tangible Kingdom due out April 18 that Hugh and I wrote in 2007. This book highlights much of our ministry story and philosophy as it was developed through our ZerOrientation training and lived out in the start of Adullam.

The second is the continued expansion of the MCAP (Missional Church Apprenticeship Practicum) – an 8 month, online apprenticeship practicum that was launched one year ago with the first pilot group of 24 leaders. This training environment has proven to be significantly more beneficial to participants that desire to learn and apply missional community principles than traditional seminar trainings. With the kickoff of the second cohort this past October with 23 participants, we anticipate training/apprenticing 60-75 leaders in 2008 through the MCAP.

In conjunction with each MCAP kickoff, we are planning to host Missio Intensives to provide an opportunity to continue the missional community dialogue. We hosted the first Missio Intensive in October 2006 at Fuller with 90 in attendance, and in October 2007 at Denver Seminary there were 225. As we look to 2008, we anticipate the continued expansion of the missional conversation and look forward to additional opportunities to ‘be in the room’ with other like minded practitioners.

With these opportunities and as Missio continues to expand as an entity within CRM, we’ve had to spend significant time clarifying and articulating our core purpose. Through a series of meetings with Andrew Taylor, our CRM Communications guru, we’ve narrowed our focus to a phrase that is informing our future goals and plans -

Missio both apprentices and shares experiential learning with incarnational people and communities in a Western context

This statement has several clarifying points:

• Apprenticeship is our primary purpose
• We share learning from the posture of a practitioner
• We prioritize working with incarnational people and their communities
• We do this in Western contexts that share much of our philosophy and ministry challenges

As we continue to develop the Missio team, the MCAP online apprenticeship, and host Missio Intensives – we hope to improve our communication strategy so that we can better connect with people that share our ministry values. Where we find common ministry philosophy, we hope to establish partnerships, serve leaders, and apprentice those that could benefit from shared learning.

So, last night I was in one of those discount shopping stores with the family, watching Maegan while Maren shopped. We were having a great time – Maegan was cruising the isles trying to touch everything that caught her eye, while I was trying to keep her from getting hold of anything breakable, a sort of game we had going. It was actually quite fun…until…I started multi-tasking. A routine that has slipped into the background of just about everything I do. I didn’t even notice that I had begun reading an email on my Blackberry until Maren walks up carrying Maegan with one of those, ”Did you lose something looks?” That something was Maegan who had managed to get 2 rows down the store before running into mom – quite by accident.

I spent some time last night on the way home from the Rob Bell  ”The God’s Aren’t Angry Tour” wondering why I felt this unconscious need to stay up to speed on my emails. It occurred to me that it’s mostly due to the pressure I feel to not let the email pile build up too high. Instead of waiting to get back to the basement office, I try to stay ahead. Sort of understandable, but it’s interesting that I never really made a conscious decision to be on call 24-7. 

But there I was at 7:00pm, out with the family, checking emails while cruising through a store. Now that I’ve captured this dysfunctional habit in my mind – I’m faced with a real decision. As some might say, To Crackberry or not to Crackberry? And this is not just an email problem! I was on the way home from the event with a good friend, and I noticed that he’d been captured by a similar issue with Text Messaging…

The technology age has brought us many significant improvements to our lives, but occasionally it might be worth measuring at what cost they’ve come. I’d like to say there’s a simple solution to this problem, but the reality is – my Blackberry has become my mobile office. Perhaps the solution involves setting some internal Matt Smay office hours??? 

Paul Rhoads who I mentioned in the mentoring article described a discipline some of his co-workers have taken up that they call “Technology Tuesdays.” On Tuesdays they refrain from using most technology, like pda’s, internet, email, etc… So with this in mind, I’m setting a new goal that I’m calling my ‘Crackberry free zone’, which will be turning my Blackberry to Phone only during non-working hours. Wish me luck!