Today I’m heading out to Washington D.C. for this year’s Ecclesia Network National Gathering. The theme this year is Spiritual Formation in Missional Congregations, we’ll be joined by Dr. Todd Hunter, Dr. Marykate Morse, Corey Widmer and Don Coleman, and others from within the network who will be running some of the focused sessions. There is a liveblog feed, which you might enjoy following.
In addition to the blessing of simply attending and re-connecting with friends in the network, this year I’ll be partnering with my friend Doug Paul to lead a focused session on Huddles, a vehicle for discipleship and leadership development we’ve both found to be tremendously transformational for our communities.
This is the description of the workshop:
Last year at the ENG, Dallas Willard commented that every church needs to be able to answer two questions: 1) What is our plan for making disciples? 2) Does our plan work? Sadly, while most of our churches have thought out plans on how to make disciples, we are increasingly seeing that these plans aren’t really making missional disciples. However, in the past few years at the ENG we’ve had three speakers (Mike Breen and Bob and Mary Hopkins) who created a discipleship vehicle called Huddle that was developed over the last 20 years in post-Christian Europe. While a Huddle is similar in size to a traditional Small Group, they are quite different in how they exist, function and are led. After hearing about it, several Ecclesia members have started to use Huddles in their own communities and the results have been extraordinarily promising: They seem to be producing and multiplying missional disciples whose lives look increasingly like the disciples we see in scripture. This track will explore the phenomenon of Huddle, it’s scriptural, historical and sociological basis, as well as answering the question, Why do Huddles work?
Don and Cory are both awesome guys. Oh and of course, so is Doug.