As part of our desire to become effective in mission through missional communities, we started experiment with a new gathering at Burlington called huddle.

Jesus gave us the model for discipleship.  Gathering people around him to learn and be challenged, he then sent them out.

Mark 3:14 He appointed twelve that they might be with him and that he might send them out to preach

Typically our churches are good at caring and support, but if we are honest we struggle with the challenge. The result is that week by week there can be little change in our spiritual vitality and our missional impact. A huddle is an attempt to replicate an environment where people are gathered in in order that they might be sent out. It is therefore a group that seeks to be more vulnerable, more accountable and more challenging than we might be familiar with. More on Jesus’s approach here.

Since we started with a few pilot huddles, God has been good to us and we have seen a number of people released as missional community leaders and others propelled into a missionary context that might not have otherwise happened.

Meeting for 90 minutes each week, a huddle is centred around two primary questions:

• What is God saying to me?
• What am I going to do about it?

With a few established huddles already, we are looking to launch a new huddle in the Autumn that I will personally lead. As a huddle only makes sense if you are willing to be sent out then the only requirement is that you have a sense of what your missional vision might be. It might be a little vague, too overwhelming or hard to imagine in detail, but if there is a nagging sense that God is calling you to something then this new huddle might be for you. Being in a huddle without a missional vision would be like sitting through the team talk in a football dressing room about a match the team was never actually going to play!

To help you explore this we are holding a huddle taster evening on Tuesday 26th June.  If you would like to come, just to explore, then please contact Julie Kite or myself directly or through our contact form. We will talk that evening more about what a huddle is and how it works, explore with you your missional vision and share in an actual huddle experience. If you are interested but can;t make that evening please do contact us anyway. Unfortunately, being part of a huddle involves such a core belonging to Burlington that we can only offer it to our current community.

Over the next few weeks at Burlington there will be opportunity to hear people share their own experiences of being in a huddle.