Customer Reviews

The Tangible Kingdom: Creating Incarnational Community (Jossey-Bass Leadership Network Series)

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As the previous review pointed out, the strength of `The Tangible Kingdom' is the stories. Halter and Smay include some great anecdotes from their own lives as church planters that illustrate their faith and ministry in the context of modern culture. Their care and love for people is evident. Their real-life examples of being missions-minded, invitational, and outward-reaching are personally challenging to me.

With that said, the book also has a few weak points. They get much of their church history backwards. For instance, they claim "People in the Dark Ages tended to be focused on God. They built their churches in the middle of their towns and lived to survive the day and keep God at the center of their worldview." That might be a good description of the Puritans. However, prior to the Enlightenment, Reformation, and Great Awakening, while `religion' and `superstition' were prevalent, God being the center of community just wasn't the case.

Additionally, they go on to champion the Eastern-mindset as having a radically holistic approach to life - and claim `Christianity is completely, entirely, an Eastern faith.' That's a bold statement. If anything, Christianity, born at the crossroads between East and West has had a significant impact on the West, while having a marginal impact on the East. As a result, the ideals, worldview, and mindset that are reflected in the West, more closely align with the core tenants of Christianity. Those would include the world being separate from God, the world being knowable, the sanctity of human life, life having meaning, and life going somewhere as opposed to life being endlessly circular.

However, the part of the book that most concerned me was their understanding of the gospel. The authors claim the gospel isn't the answer of Jesus to the sin-problem of men and women. Rather, it's "[God's] love and acceptance and vision for every human being... God's love for his created humanity." That description of the gospel too easily marginalizes the passion, crucifixion, and substitutionary death of Jesus. In fact, if the gospel is merely about God's love and acceptance of every human being, then why would Jesus have to die? They go on to claim that the gospel isn't just about God's love, it's about love in general - people adopting children, having block parties, and planting trees... "it's all Kingdom, and it's all good news." While Christians are called to love others, that's not the gospel - that's an outworking of the gospel. The good news in the New Testament isn't a message about us, it's a message about Jesus. The authors go on to claim, we should look for ways to "Witness to this gospel by bringing tangible slices of heaven down to life on Earth, and continue to do this until those we're reaching out to acknowledge that our ways are `good news'." Again, the gospel is not a message about me. It's a message about Jesus, who is more than sufficient for a person has the same problem a non-Christian does. It's called sin, and Jesus provides an incredible answer to it - His life. His good news is about Him, not about me trying to be Him.

In short, I wanted the book to be more about its sub-title, "The Posture and Practices of the Ancient Church Now." I was hoping for an understanding of how the Jesus of then is the same today and how His cross can be known now. Instead, the book focused more on general relationships, inter-personal situations, and caring for people in community. Those are good, but how are they uniquely Christian? How do they differ from the community experienced by people from other faith-traditions? In short, the community in the Tangible Kingdom seemed to be both the beginning and the end.

As a Christian who has been involved in ministry as a participant or leader over the last 15 years, I have to say that this book has some of the most fresh ideas about reaching the world that I have ever heard. The odd thing is they are not "new" ideas, they are firmly rooted in scripture and an understanding of the way believers and nonbelievers lived in community 2000 years ago. Halter and Smay communicate clearly the message that if the church is going to grow and continue to be a vessel for change in people's lives, it is going to have to change the way that it relates to people in our modern culture.

In reponse to the review above, never once did the authors suggest that adopting a child or having a block party was a substitute for Christ's redemptive work on the cross. This book was not written as a gospel presentation. It was written to Christians and Church leaders who already know the gospel, but don't know how to make that gospel matter to people who have never been to a church and never care to.

I would reccomend this book to any Christian, especially one in a leadership role, who is interested in having a deeper impact on the people in their communities.

Hmmm...what to say, what to say...

LOVED IT.

A book like this requires some degree of back-story, and it was provided, so it was a little long for me to get to the nitty gritty of what I was searching for in the story. It was around chapters nine and ten that I found myself getting "sucked in" to the heart of what Hugh Halter was driving at. I am incredibly excited about the community described in the tangible kingdom. It brings great joy to me to hear that people are living the life that Jesus taught...and not some cheaply interpreted facsimile of it.

Chapters ten through around fourteen were mostly about deconstruction from the "way we have always done things." I appreciated that Halter was not overly critical toward the methods he was deconstructing; in fact, he seemed very sensitive to the people entrenched in those systems.

Chapters fifteen through eighteen were rebuilding chapters; teaching the foundational elements of this "incarnational community." Everything that was shared in these chapters just seemed to make such beautiful sense... I found myself saying over and over; "yes, yes, yes, yes...!!!"

The final chapters, nineteen through twenty-one, were about the focus and outcome of the three primary components of the community once people decide to "join" the community. This focus hinges on togetherness, oneness, and otherness...and I'll stop there. The teaching and the illustrations used by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay are very clear and easy to understand. It would be my great desire to see this community with my own eyes. I would love to get some one-on-one leadership development from an existing-healthy-functioning community.

In my opinion, this is another must read for those people and leaders desiring to live missionally and incarnationally (buzzwordsy I know, but I don't know how else to describe it). Personally, I don't know that I'd follow everything from this book... I have some personal convictions that differ from the authors, but I understand the heart of his passion and with that I agree 100%. I recommend this book very highly. I'm glad I'm kicking off my 2010 reading year with this one; a great way to start it out.

Originally posted on my blog at [...]

A friend of mine suggested this book. His missions agency President has been influenced by the book and he wanted my feedback about the book.

In many ways these ideas have been bouncing around for at least the past decade. Neil Cole`s Organic Church treads some similar ground. Essentially, the authors are suggesting that the church is broken, or at least ill equipped as it is currently designed for reaching people that do not already have a relationship with the church. The authors are not against current churches, in fact they think that current churches, especially the mega-churches really are doing a good job of reaching out to people that already have a relationship with the church. (My church, a mega church, has people do a video before their baptism. The videos and the baptisms keep the mission of reaching people front and center. But most of the video begin with a variation of "I grew up in a loving Christian home, but...").

The strength of Tangible Kingdom is the second half of the book. In the second half, the authors relate their own story of reaching out to people by living life with them. The key is that the authors fee they should not push people into short term decisions, but give them time to "sojourn" with them as they explore Christianity (and really more importantly, the people that claim Christianity.) One story had a non-Christian woman leading a children's ministry. But the author sat with her weekly, went over the lesson, made sure she understood it and allowed her to teach it to the kids. She got the message she was teaching the kids and became a Christian.

The way that we have time to live our lives with non-Christians is to be intentional about our third place. Many Christians make their third place (the places they are most likely to spend time when not at home or work) the church. When we make church our third place, our relationships primarily become with other church people. The authors suggest that we should focus on spending time with people and allow our life to speak to other people's needs. They suggest this was Jesus's method, "You'll notice the majority of the stories happen in unplanned, interrupted moments. Most of Jesus' teaching was done "along the way" or "as they were going." What this means for us is that we must develop rhythms of sharing life so that these powerful moments can happen. If we only see ministry happening in our programmed world, according to our DayTimer, or in our church buildings, we'll continue to miss out."

Overall I thought this was a good contribution to the growing literature about reaching those that have no prior relationship with the church. I thought some of the sociological descriptions at the beginning of the book were fairly weak. Many others have done a better job trying to illustrate the differences between modern and post modern thinking. But because this has been done so well by so many others, I don't think it is a huge weakness because most people reading the book will have read others descriptions previously.

Back to the missions strategy, I do think that some variation of this strategy will have to be the future of the church both in the US and abroad. (Although primarily done by nationals, not by missionaries. I think missionaries will become more about training and mobilizing.) Our traditional strategy of getting people into a church building to hear a presentation of the gospel in a large group setting is not going to work. That being said, I think it will be a long transition and there is still lots of room for innovative traditional churches and innovative organic/missional/whatever term you want to use churches.

This is not the book to read if you want to nit-pick on fine theological points. But if you want to be really challenged to think of things in a new way that may be much closer to that of Christ, and if you want to see church in a fresh light, then read this!

I especially love the chapter on Posture. Very convicting to me. We have focused so much on our message that we are oblivious to how it sounds to people. They must see us as their advocate and as humble before they will be open to hear any message. Halter advocates authentic relationship, not salesmanship.

This book could revolutionize churches if taken to heart, and in the mean time can turn individual hearts to be compassionate like Jesus'.

I will say right off that if you believe in the absolute truth of scripture, this book is not for you. The main thesis of this book is that there is not only a discrepancy between the Word and Christ, but the Word and Christ are actually in an antithetical relationship. Halter divides the world of Christians into two camps- those who see the person of Jesus through "the literal interpretation of doctrine," and "those who see the Christian message through the person of Jesus." He is among the latter. He states that we need to "realize that truth is important, but according to scripture, truth is not the only thing or the most important thing. The most important thing is whether or not people are attracted to the truth...". The main thrust of this book is to divorce Jesus from his message. Halter states, "Our main contention is that what drew people to Jesus, surprisingly was not his message. It was him. ...His message repelled people. Many people who were drawn to him as a man would leave after he let them in on the message." Halter's solution? "I make it a point to ask people not to be evangelistic. I tell them that I don't want them to try to figure out how to share the gospel with strangers."

Halter is extremely critical of "WestMods," because of their belief in "absolute truth." He claims that Christianity is an Eastern religion and we need to return to believing without proof, believing people we trust. He warns leaders about working with Christians who are biblically literate and who know enough to discern good from evil: "We recommend that, if possible, you read through this book with a group of people--perhaps a mix of Christian folk (jaded, spiritually disoriented, but open). The process probably won't work too well (or maybe at all) with Christians who tend to know too much, talk too much, and judge too much."

How does Halter's theology play out in practice? He filters out mature Christians right from the get-go: "Even in my coffee talk with...visitors, I wait to drop the bomb until I've heard their story. If they're struggling in faith, have no faith or have been hurt in church, then I'm as cordial as Mr. Rogers. But if I discern they have been walking with God a long time, have put in a few thousand hours in church, seem overly religious or more interested in lofty theological debate than in rolling up their sleeves to serve, I get a little more assertive. Before God, I have to protect the missional calling of our church." Quotes from "the talk": "I just want you to know we are not a church...I don't feel any compulsion to feed you spiritually...This mission probably has nothing to offer you." He fills his "church" with "spiritually disoriented" people, but feels no compulsion to feed them spiritually.

To Halter, incarnational living means "participating in the natural activities of the culture around you, with whimsical holiness...Last week I attended an engagement celebration for one of our village leaders...it was pretty fun to watch our young men navigate the tension of beautiful women, wine and more beautiful women...We all commented on how we "outpartied" the partiers." It also means less focus on family because "over-commitment to extended family" and the "constraints of children" are barriers to incarnational living. If I didn't know better, I'd say Screwtape was the architect behind this "church."

The book gets one star not because I disagree with Halter's theology, but because in his references to scripture, he changes all the details of scripture passages to make them fit his theology. See his version of the woman caught in adultery on page 44.

The Tangible Kingdom presents some excellent ideas for thought on the church. The authors take on the typical tough question of making the church relevant to an increasingly secular and uninterested society. Yet, they point out how these same people, who include many of us, are interested in the spiritual aspects of life and will relate to the teachings of Jesus. They are very critical of the modern church but recognize the need it serves for the many current Christians who have grown up with it security. This is not a book of theology, but an idea of how to look at the world and how the church relates to it.

The core of the authors' idea is a clever diagram that spells out the relationship of the missional people in a church to the "sojourners" in the world around them. As I read I began to see that I am both a missional person and a sojourner. After years of being fully immersed in the formal, administrative monolith of the American Protestant church I am turned off by alter calls, memorized prayers, and membership requirements. The thought that someone is showing a PowerPoint slide at a denominational meeting somewhere with my attendance shown as a successful metric makes me ill. The Tangible Kingdom was not the answer, but pointed me in a direction to think about it.

I came away from the book inspired to build a missional organization around my work. Fully immersed in the world, I want to work with faithful people who no longer are happy in "the temple" and want to walk through the desert with the farmers, tax collectors, and fellow sinners. Perhaps, there is an opportunity to model a care and love that might inspire a few sojourners to regain their faith in Faith. This book made me think, pray, care more, and read Matthew 5 and 6. I hope it does you too.

Dios te Bendiga.

This book was sitting on my pile of unread books for quite a while until I picked it up recently. It came highly recommended, but I was afraid that it was going to be overly theoretical, "postmodern", introspective, and rather too dull for my tastes. I am happy to say that proved not to be the case, and I found the book both interesting and challenging.

Most churches in the West have become increasingly irrelevant to their surrounding culture, and the book tells the story of Adullam, a network of missional communities located in Denver, Colorado. They have redefined church not as a building, or a congregation of people who meet once a week, but as groups of people who live their Christian faith in their daily lives. A weekly gathering usually still happens, but it is not the focal point of the church.

The authors describe a church of sojourners - temporary, spiritually curious but disoriented God seekers - and missional people - those who are committed to the cause of the gospel. Sojourners can come and go as they like within the inclusive Christian community without judgment or pressure, while the missional people live according to clear rules of life. The book provides a clear and timely challenge to church leaders, but it left me wondering whether the effectiveness of the gospel is limited by how effectively I try to act like Jesus.

The T.K. is a wake up bull horn, intentionally waking us from our cozy, comfy, down-covered Christian existence. We can not continue to complain about Christianity's irrelevance in today's society. We can not continue doing our rote, habitual, safe church practices - scheming 'within' our church walls how to attract and save those 'outside', yet never changing nor having the courage to follow Jesus' clear examples in scripture. Hugh and Matt have lived this experiment and shared their story so the rest of us can wake up and shake the shoulder of our Christian friends and leaders - and together make tangible the kingdom God had envisioned in the beginning. Thank You Hugh and Matt!

This book really made me think about my definition of the kingdom. There are many people who will never willingly darken the doors of a conventional church.