In March, Robert
started a coaching huddle. This huddle
was led by a man who knew how huddles and missional communities were “supposed”
to look. He knew the life shapes that
3dm taught well enough that people paid him to be coached. Since Robert was now getting more official
training on how a huddle flowed, he had our huddle restart. We took about a month to learn a new shape so
we were not too far in for a restart.
At the same time, Jarred and I
decided we should give Katy and Jon a taste of huddle so that we could decide
if that is what we wanted to move Common Ground towards. We felt pretty confident about starting a
huddle because we had essentially been through the start of one twice with
Robert.
Also at this time, the other
twenty-something couple in the huddle was wanting to start a missional
community for the young adults in the church since there was not much going on
for that group at the time. Since there
were a few of us in the very early stages of multiplying with little to no
experience in doing huddles and missional communities, Robert started coaching
us after huddle. This was a time where
we could talk through our strategies and struggles and Robert would give us
input and help us hear direction from God.
At the end of the month we did a
couple “huddles” with Katy and Jon and they were able to see what we saw when
we first started getting into the material: Common Ground was a cozy
culture. We were very inviting to people
but we had very little challenge for growth.
We desperately wanted people to grow but we had no tools with which to
help create a more empowered culture, one with a balance of invitation and
challenge. The 3dm books were giving us
tools that we could see as pertinent and useful for our group. Katy and Jon were on board with trying to
transition Common Ground into a missional community.
We
felt very passionately that we wanted to be making disciples. We knew that in order to make disciples, we
needed to first be disciples that had something worth replicating. We saw huddles and missional communities as
the most efficient way of having that desire realized.
Since
we still had very little understanding of what a missional community looked
like, we knew we would have to take it slowly (which for us meant a couple of
months instead of a couple of weeks). We
also realized that we would have to bring up new leaders so it would not be the
Irby and Goldstein show but that we would really be discipling new leaders of
the group. We decided that our next step
should be praying for at least two more people (one from each house of Common
Ground) that we could bring alongside us and be in our huddle.
After
some prayer, we all came up with two names, Courtney from our house and
Christopher from their house. We decided
that in the next month, we would ask them to be a part of our team.
As
always, we would love to hear about what you are doing with missional
communities in your context. Please feel
free to share in a comment below. Also,
if you have questions about anything we are doing, feel free to ask and we will
get back to you as quickly as possible!
Thanks for following along!
Love,
The Irby’s
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