Theology in the Raw - 753: #753 - A New Vision for Church: Hugh Halter

Episode Date: August 19, 2019

In this episode, Preston gets to know Hugh Halter, who’s done some innovative “church” plants—if we can even call them that. Preston and Hugh talk about the different kingdom projects that Hugh’s been a part of, especially his most recent project at “post commons”—a missional, kingdom-minded venture that might be the way forward in our post-Christian context. How can we integrate community-centered, kingdom-minded, for profit businesses with church planting and the gospel? Preston and Hugh explore this question in their conversation. Hugh Halter has been a leading missiologist and thought-leader within the contemporary missional church movement. He has authored 8 books, and speaks extensively around the world helping the church be less churchy. He just moved his family to the St Louis area and has started a Neo-trappist marketplace mission as an incubator for good works and uses this story to help Christians rethink calling and kingdom contribution. Follow Hugh on Twitter. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm going to be coming to a city near some of you in the next couple months. I'll be in Indianapolis on September 5th, Fort Wayne, Indiana on September 17th and 18th. I will be in Richmond, Virginia, September 24th, New York City, September 27th, 28th, Colorado Springs, October 9th and 10th. And I will be in Minneapolis in early November, November 5th. And I believe the following week, too. If you want to go to centerforfaith.com, go to the events page, look up these events. You do need to sign up.

So if you want to attend one, two or all of these events, then you do have to register. one, two, or all of these events, then you do have to register. And especially the sooner ones, the ones in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne in particular, you're going to want to sign up like right now, if you want to attend one of those events on faith, sexuality, and gender. So we'd love to see you there. Again, it's, uh, you can go to the events, uh, events link at centralfaith.com. Uh, look at the details of those events and sign up if you want to attend. Also, we are running, we as in the Center for Faith, Sexuality, and Gender, we are running an August special on our Digital Leaders Forum. The Digital Leaders leaders forum is as far as I can tell, the most comprehensive e-course on faith, sexuality,

and gender over 20 videos of content over eight hours of content, uh, but which include both me teaching and me talking to different people from pastors to LGBT Christians. And, uh, it's, it's,

I'm super excited about this product. So if you, um, want to check it out, I'm super excited about this product. So if you, um, want to check it out, you can go to centerforfaith.com. It's the first thing that pops up on the website centerforfaith.com. And for the month of August, we are running a discount of, uh, $15 off of the digital leaders forum. It retails for $65. So right now for the month of August, you can get it for 50 bucks. So there's still a couple of weeks left to sign up for the e-course, the Digital Leaders Forum. My guest for today is a guy I've been wanting to talk to for, I would say, four years at least. Hugh Halter is a church planter, but a very different sort of church planter.

He is an entrepreneur. He's a different sort of entrepreneur. He is a pastor. He's a very different kind of pastor. He's written several books, including The Tangible Kingdom, which is kind of his, I don't want to say manifesto, but kind of his vision for what church can and should be. He's also written other books like Sacrilege, Flesh is his most recent book, and several others. You can find his website, HughHalter.com.

I, as I'll say in the podcast, whenever I talk about church or ecclesiology, people often say, oh, so you've been reading Hugh Halter. And I'm like, actually, I know who Hugh Halter is, but I've never actually read any of his books. And people usually are a little bit stunned when they hear that because apparently, apparently, when I talk about church, it's very similar to the way Hugh Halter not only talks about church, but has been doing church for the last 20 years. And I so enjoyed this conversation. I don't know if you're gonna enjoy it or not. I think you probably will. I think you'll love it actually. But for me,

this conversation showed me that I'm not completely insane or maybe both Hugh and I are insane. And that's a very likely possibility. In any case, I enjoyed talking to Hugh about his journey in the church and in the kingdom of God, especially what he's been doing recently in his... Well, I'm just going to stop there. You're going to hear all about it. Please welcome to the show for the first time, hopefully not the last time, the one and only Hugh Halter. All right, we are live on Theology in the Raw.

Actually, we are not live, we're recording this, and this conversation is happening probably a few weeks before you are listening to it. But anyway, that's the podcast world, right? I am here with my new friend, and I don't even know how to refer to you, Hugh. I mean, almost like a mentor, but not, in a sense. Like a brother from another mother who... There's a lot of other words people have used for me. I could give you some of those. So I'm here with Hugh Halter. And let me just quickly begin by saying, whenever I talk about church to other people, I often get the response,

oh, so you must be reading a lot of Hugh Halter stuff. And I actually haven't. My thoughts on church and discipleship and the kingdom of God and everything has not been just simply drawn from Hugh's stuff. But apparently, Hugh, we have similar ideas of what the church can and should be. So why don't we start with just who you, for those who don't know Hugh Halter, give us a quick introduction of who you are. And maybe that can lead us into a conversation about what you've been doing with church and church planning over the last several decades, really. Sure. Well, first of all, Preston, great to finally meet you. I've heard of you often, and I've been mentored by you from a distance on quite a few issues, so good to finally hang with you on the phone. Yep, I am Hugh Halter. I don't think that means much of anything, but I probably got known, you know, I kind of came out of the woodwork about 10 years ago with a book called The Tangible Kingdom.

That was kind of a story of what we were of the contemporary missional conversation was happening. Some mates from Australia, Alan Hirsch, Mike Frost, and others, began to write about the nature of the missionary church. And we, you know, a lot of that was philosophical, theological. And our story came out as a practical look at a different way of doing church. And it just kind of, for whatever reason, it took off. And then I found myself flying all over the world, telling our story, which honestly, I didn't think was that big of a deal. But, you know, I think our country needed some different looks of church, you know. And so that, you know, that's what we've been doing. We planted a church in Portland, Oregon, back in the 90s.

Then we moved to Denver and did the Tangible Kingdom church plant story. And now we are in the kind of north of St. Louis, a little town called Alton, Illinois, and our third sort of travels in the church world. And this one will look probably completely different than the first two. So that's who I am. I have penned some books. I hate writing. Really? But I, yeah, I really do. And I don't even like speaking, which is, I do those two things mostly, but it's just, you know, there's things that just keep you up at

night to where you have to say something. And so, you know, whatever I've written is generally related. You know, even the church planting stuff, I don't really get jazzed about church planting. I think it's the hardest, most miserable thing you can be called to. But I just love lost people coming to faith, you know? And so if that works, then you have to plant churches. So the church becomes, you know, something that you begin to grow out of the fruit of people finding faith in Jesus. So, you know, in some ways I said I've been stuck with the church planting thing or the church thing, but I love the church and I love what it could be. It's just right now it's really difficult, as you know. Why don't you give us, let's drill down a little deeper into ecclesiology. I don't need to define

that. My audience is super smart. They know what that means. But yeah, just let's go a little bit deeper into your ecclesiology or view of the church, maybe even contrasting with how you maybe grew up or the models you came out of. And now, I don't even like to use the term model, but the shape of church, the focus of church, what does it mean to be a missional church? Give us a little more of an in-depth look at your ecclesiology. Sure. But, I mean, first of all, your listeners should know

I grew up in a normal church, Nazarene Evangelical Church. I came to faith because I was sneaking out of the Sunday school because I loved hearing sermons. So I was in fifth grade and after I preached a sermon, I responded, walked the aisle. So I did the normal traditional thing very early on. So I'd say I was very much blessed by a traditional look of church. But as I got married and adopted a son named Ryan, Ryan had really severe epilepsy. And he was having, you know, in those early days, 20 grand mal seizures a day, every day without a break.

And it got so bad, I had to actually leave seminary. I was two years into my MDiv program, and we just couldn't manage life because I was probably an hour's sleep a night. And, you know, that disability with Ryan changed everything because we literally couldn't leave our home. You know, I had to go back to a house painting trade. And yet we just had this burning desire to see people come to faith and form community. So all we had was our house and a few extra hours with, you know, a little bit of energy. And so we did.

We started to get pretty intentional about what we did with people. And pretty soon the house filled up. And then we basically just taught people to do what we were doing. So early days, you know, I guess I was trying my hand at house church, but there wasn't even any literature on house church at that time. So I just thought, well, we're just doing small church, although a lot of people were coming to faith. You know, so, you know, that story began to change the way I viewed ecclesiology. began to change the way I view ecclesiology. Oftentimes when I talk to pastors about the state of the church,

most leaders know it's not good right now. Every denomination is on the decline, pretty rapid decline. So when people are going, well, what's the church supposed to be? We have to go back to kind of missiology. Alan Hirsch, a great kind of contemporary theologian, missiologist, said usually we start with ecclesiology that's very connected to our theology. So we're either Reformed or we're Arminian or we're whatever. And then we try to get people to do missiology. So we literally lead with ecclesiology and theology and then try to get people to do missiology. So we literally lead with ecclesiology and theology and then try to get people to do missiology. Alan says, when we start to think about church in our day, you have to go, you have to begin with Christology. You have to start with Jesus again. And not just, you know,

what he did on the cross. You start with his humanity, how he lived in the world. And if you settle the issue of Christology, in other words, if anybody would say, I will, no matter what is going on, I will let Jesus decide what I do with my day, then Jesus will immediately take you to the second role, which is missiology. He'll say, hey, let's go do something today. And let's go talk to people and bless people and love people. And then eventually, as you're on mission with Jesus, he will begin to reframe theology. And then eventually, he'll build his ecclesiology. So it's almost the reverse sort of way that we would think about church.

We try to plant churches, which is essentially sermon teaching times. But most of our Christians in America, they've never really done the missiology. They don't go with Jesus. And so when we start talking about what is the missional church, all we're talking about is a group of people that wake up in the morning and go, Lord, you can do whatever you want with me today. And then church becomes an outgrowth of what is happening in people's lives, not something you lead with.

So in all of the churches that we've started, we literally framed the ecclesiology later. You know, we didn't even have names for what we were doing. There was no church name. There was no website. There was just people that were coming to faith. And we would disciple our friends and then fill up houses with people that were doing

the same thing and and then eventually then you started going oh we've got lots of communities and people want to see each other so then we would begin to frame sort of the congregationalizing of the mission fruit if you if you will that's and you know it makes so much more sense. And it does seem to reflect the, I don't know. And, you know, there's prescriptive and descriptive in the New Testament. You know, is the early church in the New Testament the way the church should always be? Or is it just simply what happened? And I think it's probably somewhere in the middle. And sometimes those categories are a little too artificial.

But I mean, what you're saying seems to really reflect what you see in the New Testament. You have the gospel going forth, the word of God going forth, some people embracing it. And then because we are communal beings, they gather together and then they, because of Jesus, they break bread, drink wine. And because they want to grow in their faith, they study the apostles teaching and then they pray together. And it's, it just feels very organic and stripped down. And yet, it doesn't seem that complicated.

So what's your... So what complicates it? Well, yeah, there's so many different directions I want to go here. And I do this often on the podcast, but I want to really seize our time because I have Hugh Halter on the show, not just me talking about these ideas that I haven't really worked out. Tell us about the first church plant. See, there I go again, church plant. Tell us about the first city, your time in Portland, when you had a church grow out of everything you're talking about, for lack of better terms, evangelism, discipleship,

God's spirit moving forth, people coming to Jesus, people wanting to walk together, and all of a sudden now you start meeting maybe once a week, probably on a Sunday, maybe there's some teaching. Tell us about that first experience of letting the church grow more organically. Yeah, totally. I mean, the first one was literally born out of, I was working for Youth for Christ. So I was hanging out with high school kids, football coach, you know, hanging out

with all kids that are outside the church. And a lot of them were coming to faith. And back in those days, the model was you try to plug those kids into a local church. And we tried that. So, you know, early days, I wasn't even thinking about church leadership or planting a church. I just loved seeing, you know, brand new people come to faith. But the problem was whenever we would try to put these kids into local churches, they would just get their, you know, what handed to them. And they would get so judged or so ostracized. A lot of our kids were African American. So we started to go, oh, white people don't always want black people in their youth groups. And so it was more of a tension point.

I just was like, wow, the church doesn't want the people that we're reaching on mission. And so finally, my wife and I just said, screw it. Let's just start some sort of a community for these people that we've already seen come to faith. And then those relationships began to grow because some of their parents started to come around and then it was our neighborhood, you know? So it was, you know, usually Cheryl and I would intentionally give up three to seven meals a week. That was like an intentional rhythm.

We said, let's just eat with people and let's just ask them how they're doing. And then nobody was doing well. So, you know, we would just start to love on them and have more dinners. And on about the 30th dinner, you know, they'd start to share things spiritually and then they'd ask us questions and we'd say, you know, I don't know if it'd be of interest to you, but every other Thursday night we meet at the house with people that are just trying to figure out faith and life. And we usually pray for each other. And so we would,

we would make an invitation, but it was after a lot of what we call incarnation or life with people. But we, we did always have that kind of that thing in our house every other Thursday night. So it wasn't every week, you know. So twice a month, we'd have kind of that Jesus time. And that seemed to be enough, you know, that on those off weeks, it was more like we were on. It just gave us more time to throw a lot of parties and hang with people. So, you know, our original story was that we just knew that if we don't relate with people, we have no way that we're going to be able to proclaim to these people. I wrote a book later called Flesh,

which was trying to help Christians understand the power of the incarnational life, that Jesus didn't just come to die for sin, but he literally came to teach us how to be human again in the neighborhood. If he did it, then we got to do it. Or because he loved to do it with people, we get to do it, right? So John 1, it says this word becomes flesh and he dwells in the neighborhood. And because he did that, we were able to perceive the glory of God. So I always say in the text we're in now in America, our street cred is so bad as a Christian movement, be it tying it to Trump or tying it to anti-refugees

or, oh, you guys don't let women teach in your churches. I mean, you can go down the list of all the things. Oh, and by the way, this is how you guys have generally treated the gay community. And we've got eight to 12 major blows against the street cred of the evangelical church right now. And that's showing people what God is like to them. So Jesus, I think would go, he would come in. And in the midst of all that, we go, no, let me give you a different picture of God. And he's,

you're going to figure out who God is because you're going to watch me be different than all that stuff you see tied to me. So sometimes when I'm teaching evangelism, which is really the front end of a church plan, I go evangelism is not teaching or telling people something they've never heard before. It's literally changing their assumptions about what they think it is. And the only way we're going to change the assumptions is we have to be different type of people that represent literally not stick up for God, but represent him just like he would act on the neighborhood. So that's, that's a long answer to that question, but no, that's good.

It's critical. So that was your first, um, your, your first stab at this was not even really trying to do it. You were just being a Christian reaching reaching people, and it sort of organically grew out of that. Now, fast forward to, let's just skip over Denver. Let's go to north of St. Louis where you're at now. I would imagine your, well, I don't know. I'll ask you.

I mean, has anything really changed? What have you added or taken away or refined to your sort of view of, and I'm just going to use the phrase church planning with using that as broadly as I possibly can. Because when people hear that, they think, okay, you raise a quarter million dollars, you find the staff, you go in, you start meeting with people. And in one year you launched church. And what that means is your first Sunday service and now churches began, which you're saying that that, yeah. I mean, you've already kind of said how, how, you know, you, you would kind of maybe re reframe the whole thing, but, um, so tell us about your church now and how has it maybe changed, shifted, or,

or, or maybe stay the same since, you know, from the last 10 years. Well, there's, there's definitely some similarities, but this is way different. This, this was a total curve ball after the, the tangible kingdom story in Denver. You know, I resigned from that after about 14 years and Ryan, we finally found this assisted living center for Ryan out here in this little town called Alton, Illinois. So we're just 20 minutes North of St. Louis. And so we brought Ryan out here six years ago.

And so that was the first time Cheryl and I had ever been able to do our life without his kind of constant disability. So it was a huge breath of fresh air for the whole family and Ryan loved it out here. But, you know, we would fly in and visit this little town. Um, people have heard of Ferguson. We're about nine miles just North of Ferguson. Wow. Um, about 40% of the population here in Alton is African American. It's very, very poor.

It used to be three times the size. It's roughly about 30,000 people right now. It's right on the Mississippi River. Kind of a beautiful little river town, but it has lost most of its industry. So the average family income in Alton is right around $22,000. It's extremely poor. I just, you know, it's the hood, but it's not like what you would see right down the middle of downtown St. Louis. It has the same demographics, crime issues, all that,

but it feels more like a town. So we would fly in and visit this little place and we were, we were taken by the beauty of it, but we're like, holy cow, why is everything seemingly boarded up? Uh, we found out later half the homes are slumlord owned and, you know, we, so we just were kind of intrigued by, you know, the first church plant was really for us more inner city, multi-ethnic, uh, this felt like that to us. And, And yeah, we're living on a four acre horse ranch in Colorado, kind of enjoying the spoils of, you know, I'd resigned from leading the

church. So it was kind of our first break. I bought my wife some horses and, you know, we're kind of loving life. But on probably the 10th trip in my wife and I were talking to a gal who had, she was our waitress. And I asked her, what do young people do in this town? And she goes, oh, most of them just do drugs now. And we chatted with her a little bit longer and walking out of this little Italian bar, my wife goes, why don't we just move here and see if we can do something to help the town out. And it was kind of a, you know, it was one of those weird moments where like I knew that she was sniffing something the Lord was laying down and I was too,

I just didn't want to leave Denver. I was, I didn't want to do it again. You know, I didn't want to start over. And if you've ever been to Denver, it's just like a big Boise, right? It's just a playground. So I was like, I don't want to enter in. I'd rather just be a consultant and speak and go home and hang out in the barn. You know, but so Cheryl and I got in a bit of a fight on the sidewalk. She's like, no, seriously. Like, and I was like, well, number one, I just bought you a ranch.

I just got you horses. Like, there's a lot of reasons why we shouldn't do this. And long story short, we went back home, had a talk with our two daughters who were, one of them was just newly married. One was engaged. And the entire family except me said, yeah, let's go do another, you know, the way we framed it. Let's go on mission again as a family. And, you know, I was the last one to hold out, but eventually I just, you know, couldn't handle it. So we all came out here literally as a family on mission going, okay, let's try to do something to help the town.

I was not thinking about a church plant. I would just walk the streets. We all bought houses within about six blocks right in the downtown area. And I would kind of walk and pray and tried to buy, you know, you couldn't find literally think about this present town of 30,000. There was no coffee shop. There was no breakfast joint. There was no place that people just hang out. And so I finally said,

I'm just going to start a coffee shop. So I tried to buy a little gas station and renovate it all of Portland, Oregon style. That deal fell through. And I remember having coffee with Cheryl at home. I said, okay, fine. Let's just not do anything for a year. Let's just pray. And she was like, that's a good idea. Then it was literally two hours later, I get a call from a guy named John, who I only had one lunch with before. And he said, hey, come to my house. I want to take you on a drive to show you some places around Alton that I own. And he pulled up in front of an old federal post office right in the middle of downtown, right next to City Hall. It's this beautiful, ornate, you know, federal building.

And he goes, what do you think about it? I was like, oh, it's, you know, it's beautiful. He goes, well, I'm glad you like it. I feel like I'm supposed to give it to you. And he goes, I think you'll know what to do to help our town. And I literally said, no, I was like, John, I don't want it, you know. And he gave me the key and he goes, just keep like, John, I don't want it. You know, and he gave me the key and he goes, just keep the key. If you really don't want it, give it back to me in a month or two.

And so we got the family in the building and within 10 minutes, my kids were like, no brainer, dad. Let's let's make the living. Let's make the living room for our city. Let's make a place of connection and let's provide what they don't have. So we did. We started I think we're the largest non-chain coffee shop in the Midwest. We can seat 500 people

and it's an all-day brunch cafe and then we're the premier event space in our town. It's just unbelievable building. Strangely, I did get a bunch of funding from people I didn't know. So we took about a year, renovated it, and we are the place that everybody meets in our town. So government meetings, reconciliation meetings. And then out of that, we've gotten so much street cred. I mean, I oftentimes tell

church planters, if I had come into this town to plant a church, I would have got the middle finger by everybody, including the church leaders, but if the Lord knows what he wants to do missiologically in our cities, and I'm walking the streets, and the Trinity is going, hey, let's tell Halter And I'm walking the streets and the Trinity is going, hey, let's tell Halter to do a coffee shop and an events joint and a brunch cafe. I mean, what a cool thought. The Lord knows a better way to enter relationships than we oftentimes do. And we do. We try to enter as a pastor or a church. And Jesus didn't do that.

You know, Jesus entered as a person who worked amongst people. And so long story short, we've been in business about a year and a half and we've had to, we've had to tell the newspapers to stop writing articles about us because it's getting so weird. And you know, we've got nine employees, but out of that, we, you know, we say our, we're an incubator for good works. So post commons is the name of the business, but our nonprofit is called lantern network. And it's just, we incubate good work. So we, anybody that wants to help people, including people that don't know Jesus,

we say, let us help you start new businesses, start social entrepreneurship. And thirdly, if you just want to start a missional community. So there are some Christians that go, I just want to reach my neighborhood. So we've incubated now five little individual businesses. So it's not a big story. We're just kind of getting off the runway. We've got three missional communities that are beginning to gather,

just kind of more neighborhood-ish. And we're just going to keep going. On the side of that, we have a little, I guess you would call it a church missions community called Side Door. And we call it that because everybody that's a part of that comes in the side door of the building. I don't think we'll ever have a public worship service because I think public worship services, in most cases, draw Christian people. the standard Christian in this kind of Midwestern part of the culture is going to do very well with the non-Christian people that we're relating with and are

gaining so much street cred. So our side door is essentially like a core group community, but all we do in that is mission formation and helping them to start and a little micro communities. And so in some ways we're, we're really discipling kind of Navy SEALs, people that are going, look, I'm going to let Jesus tell me what he wants me to do, and I'm going to go try to do it.

So we're more a network of missionaries or missional communities. But we're sustained financially from a business perspective. And that's really kind of our missionary positioning in the neighborhood is we're business people. And all the Jesus stuff is subversive and quiet. And right now it's been a blast. I've never felt like we have so much favor as I do in this story. It's almost more trying to manage what we're going to do because we have so many opportunities with people. Now, so do you own and run like the coffee house, the brunch kitchen, the event center, the Whiskey Society?

I mean, all these things are happening or do you lease it out to other businesses? Well, initially we housed it all ourselves, but now we're actually trying to turn them into for-profit businesses. That's another thing. When you think about that scripture where the rights is prosper, the city will rejoice. We're really trying to take that seriously. Almost like the early Trappists, through enterprise, they would bless the local cities they were in. Right now, honestly, nonprofits are not that good of news to cities because they don't pay taxes. So initially we started, you know, a really, a really good coffee

house, but our main coffee manager, who's one of our missionaries wants to start a roastery. So as we're processing that, we go, well, let's, let's move you from nonprofit in our bucket to a for-profit. And so we're going to try and do that even with our kitchen, turn that into its own restaurant. So essentially they would be leasing from the nonprofit, even though right now the nonprofit will probably give them free lease. Basically, we're trying to do anything we can to incubate things that are going to employ more people or give them relational connection with people outside the church. Yeah, that's so, so here, here's where we, I think our minds and hearts kind of intersect a little bit. You're doing, it sounds like kind of like a dream. I've talked about this on a podcast a couple of times, I think. But I've always envisioned

and taken my cue from the kind of business as mission movement. And I don't want to go too much on a tangent, but it sounds like you're doing what missionaries kind of figured out 10, 20 years ago, that in a lot of cultures or growing number of cultures, if you come in as a self or a supported missionary planting a church, people look at you like, what is that? That's weird. So when I'm at work all day, people are paying you to kind of walk around the market.

Like, what does that even mean? That's not attractive to me. Exactly. So that, you know, I've got a cousin who's been in Mauritania or used to be for a number of years. And he says it wouldn't even get off the ground if he came in here as a missionary. So he started a restaurant and all this stuff. And, and that seems to be like missionary that used to be radical.

Now it's kind of like, yeah, that's kind of the way you need to do missions in most countries. Basically is that, I mean, I don't want to simplify, but are you basically drawing on that kind of business as mission model and saying, Hey, we're in post Christianchristian america and what's happening here is not too different than what's going on around the world yeah exactly that's why when i when i explain our story people go it's super weird and i go well yeah but it's just weird right now in america it's pretty normal all over the place um and it's it's been norm literally normative for church leadership for centuries that the idea that

you would grow a congregation the congregation would pay you a full salary and benefits we have to realize that's that's less than a hundred year old story in the history of the world prior to that it was people more like saint benedict of the sixth century who started the trappists or if they were the only cloistered order that did not beg for money because they made so much It was people more like St. Benedict of the 6th century who started the Trappists. They were the only cloistered order that did not beg for money because they made so much of it. And their sort of monastic motto was ora et labora, which meant pray and work. They were the ones that were the first ones to kind of say, hey, there's no divide between the sacred and the secular. So everything you do, especially enterprise, is as unto the Lord.

Rodney Stark later on, this is kind of a missiology, said it was the monastic leaders, really speaking of St. Benedict and the Trappists, of the 9th, 10th, 11th centuries that literally funded the preliminary expansion of what would be the Reformation. They owned a third of England during the time of the Reformation. So it was the financial power of these cloistered sort of monks that literally got the story to us, or at least preserved it. So, you know, we talk about marketplace planting. That's all we're saying is that your profile, not just your gimmick, but literally your way of life is that you live amongst the people doing what they do. You know, which obviously changes what church becomes.

Church is not this hierarchical institution, but church now is going to operate as a family. And so it's not going to be a single leader model of church. So not everybody's going to say, well, Hugh Halter is my pastor, like they used to, which meant Hugh has to do everything for us. Now church, you know, if we literally do church like this, I'm going to give hours a week to the ministry functions that we might normally call ministry functions, but I'm going to have 30 other people that are all going to give 10 to 15 hours a week. So we literally do church as community. It takes the pressure off big time. And it doesn't require as many church services for sure.

And, you know, are just beginning now after a year and a half to go, okay, what does it look like to begin to provide kind of a, I guess, under one roof worship gathering? And we're not sure we will. We might actually have worship gatherings that are another part of what this network provides people. So here's my dream or dream idea. I would call it a dream. Like, I don't know if I'll ever do it, but I always thought like, given the financial state of the church, the decline of Christianity and everything we're talking about now, what if you, what if your church plant was a coffee house by day? You just bought a building, maybe get some investors, bought a building, turned it into a coffee house by day, a tap room at night. And then also in the times when those businesses aren't functioning, you can open it up to a gathering place for believers,

a gathering place for nonprofit, whatever, yada, yada, so that your gathering place is completely integrated with the community. You are providing a service both to the businesses. Maybe if you have a couple different businesses come in, maybe you can charge them 75% of what a normal cost. I know in downtown Boise it's incredibly expensive, like any downtown area. But, man, if you've got two different businesses operating here,

you can probably squeeze every ounce of time out of this building. But then offer, bless these businesses, bless the community, also make it, you know, this is a public gathering place for believers. Would something like this work? I mean, it sounds kind of like what you're doing. You just described what we're doing to the T. And we have total control to give our building. Like, for instance, instance you know we've

got a really beautiful basement part of this building so it's 12 000 square feet total 9 000 is the upstairs main area where you have events rooms and the coffee house rooms and a big kind of grand you know 25 foot ceiling foyer type of thing, but down below is this really cool kind of 3000 square foot. So I was thinking, well, I should try to monetize that, maybe do a shared office space concept. But the more we were talking with a lot of, you know, some of them were our barista staff that are not Jesus people. Um, but also talking to other people that were like, there's not a place where young artists in our town can really just hang out. And so we decided to literally just donate the basement to the arts community here. And you know, we will not make money,

but we try to make our money through events. Primarily, we just barely cover the nine staff through the coffee and the food, but the events are where we can actually make profit. And so that profit we make there allows us to then go, okay, let's donate this space to, you know, and I would say none of the young artists that I've met know the Lord. So to me, again, it's not a gimmick. It's just a way to bless them.

And hopefully they see in us kind of a unique generosity that might, I hope it spurs some conversation, which it really has already. Um, but that's, you know, it's essentially how, how we think about business permission. We remember it when Paul would, would say, Hey, and he's talking about a very unique context. He said for you guys, I decided to work amongst you. So as not to be a burden. Yeah's a missionary going, hey, you know, where other times Paul's appears that he's raising money or saying,

hey, don't muzzle an ox or a workman's worthy of his hire type of thing. So Paul did seem to say, you know, you should try to help people that are essentially helping guide the community. But for him personally, he went into a unique context and went, and the least amount of burden I can be on this thing, the better. And so he worked. I think that's what we're coming to in America right now. And I'm saying in all the church plant networks that I'm kind of helping coach or influence, everybody right now is looking to the marketplace,

not just planting, but even existing pastors are going, you know, I can still preach on the weekend. I don't need to get paid for that. And they're literally entering the workforce just because they want to be a missionary and relate to people again. It's very fascinating. I've seen that more,

or even like a bivocational model or some, you know, you have a few movements at least, or people like what Francis Chan is doing in San Francisco and others where, you know, at least for Chan, there's, you know, zero money goes into the actual running of the ministry of the church. So that there's not a single ministry decision that's based on money or even affected by money. And I was super attracted to that for a while. I think now I do, because I started something kind of like that, where not a penny went in. And maybe it was just my situation or whatever, but it couldn't, I don't know, I saw the need for, I think it can be good in most, not every, but most contexts to

have some kind of financial release for some leaders to lead. I agree. Yeah. Not in every case. That's the thing. I don't think there's one strict model that for every context needs to be the norm. There needs to be some flexibility. For me, I was about to slip my wrist because it just put me on the top because I'm already doing a full-time and a half ministry where even the thought of trying to prepare, put 20 minutes into preparation of a message or a talk or a teaching

or to meet with one more person that's part of the church was just like, it just put me over the edge. But that's why I would say, like, I do think we should fund leaders, but we've traditionally funded the pastor-shepherd teacher role. I think biblically what Paul was really pushing for is that the apostolic, you know, just now within the missionary conversation, what we call the APES model leadership based on Ephesians 4, apostle, prophet, shepherd, teacher, you know, all that stuff. Paul would, I think, argue and others that study that would say we should be funding our apostolic evangelists, the ones that are out as the tip of the spear, which tend to be the entrepreneurial, because they do, they create a wake behind them. And the shepherd teacher roles oftentimes are the most natural to most of the body of Christ. So I would say, I don't think in most cases you need to pay somebody

to preach a sermon or even provide a worship set. What you do need is you need to free up people that are discipling leaders who will be missionaries in their own context. So you almost need to fund coaches. Trainers and coaches would be the funding element, I think. Or you fund the apostolic work. So we did have people that gave money. We had to raise $600,000 to renovate the building. We're three years in i have yet to take a penny from this personally so i actually am starting another paint job you know this week so sometimes i travel and speak sometimes i'm

painting the house um sometimes you know so i've five or six buckets, but I personally am trying not to be a burden, even though I'm sort of the apostolic leader of this movement. My board has voted that I should be making income off of this. At some point, we're trying to, you know, maybe next year start to hive off a little bit. And I think it's important that leaders have to have some sustainability, right? Right. I think it's important that leaders have to have some sustainability, right? Right. But that apostolic role oftentimes is a combination between fundraising,

actual work, labor, you know, fee for service, if you will, and potential congregational support. But I think it can be a combination of those. It doesn't have to. I think when you settle on one, I'm going to make my full salary through a congregation. I think then, yeah, you get into some weird space where it begins to shut down the mission. I want to keep focusing on the money thing. I've been thinking through this for 20 years, really, but especially the last few years.

So I don't know if I'm contradicting myself or I have two competing interests. On the one hand, I love the idea of, and let's just call it ministry or a church, whatever, to be, I don't like it when any ministry decision is based on money on some level, which I don't care how, a traditional model of church, cast that as broadly as you want. And at the end of the day,

if your church is shrinking, that affects the budget, that affects the ministry, that affects everything. The whole thing could crumble if you preach one message and half the people leave. And at the end of the day, like you are making ministry decisions based on money if you're really honest with yourself. So I want to free, you know, I often say, you know, how much does it cost to break bread, drink wine, study the Bible and pray together? You know, hopefully that shouldn't cost a lot. But we've created a system where it does.

It costs sometimes millions of dollars to be able to do that. So I'm very allergic to ministry being intertwined so much with money. On the flip side, I'm also, I don't like the kind of old school, oh, you're doing the Lord's work, so you have to not make a lot of money while you go get your teeth pulled by your Christian dentist and you have no problem with him making half a million. It's like, well, wait a minute. That just doesn't make sense. We will say all vocations are unto the Lord. Why is it totally fine for some vocations filled by Christians to the goal? The success is I made a

ton of money. If you have a Christian real estate agent, you would say, oh my gosh, he is killing it. He's making 2 million a year. He's giving 10%, whatever. But you have no problem with that. But let's just say you in your situation, as you're an entrepreneur now, what if you really started killing it? What if you're making half a million a year and you're being very generous or whatever? I think people would be like, wait a minute, is that okay? Like he's a pastor, he's a minister.

So I don't know. I want to at least be consistent with how we think about and value Christians, money, entrepreneurship, ministry, all that stuff. So I don't know. I'm trying to sort out, am I contradicting myself?

Am I being money grubby over. So I don't know. I'm trying to sort out, am I contradicting myself? Am I, you know, being money grubby over here? I don't know. No, I think it's a normal question. I think it's a context thing, to be honest with you. You know, we're part of a ministry network where, you know, a group that coached us is out of Birmingham. It's called Common Threads. There's about 100 missionaries in that movement that, again, do very similar.

They start coffee shops and other businesses, but they also buy up tons of homes in the very, very poorest parts of Birmingham. Well, their community, they just asked everybody in that community to take a vow of simplicity where nobody lives on more than double the poverty line. So an average family of five to seven, three to seven, if you will,

most of them are living off of less than $3,000 a month. And they make that commitment as essentially a neo-monastic movement. So what we've said here in Alton is we're going to ask our people to make a downward, what we call a cruciform sort of model of their life. So we didn't feel comfortable asking everybody to make that level of commitment, but we said, would you be downwardly mobile? So my wife and I, during that, we sold a larger house that we bought. So my wife and I, during that, we sold a larger house that we bought. Interestingly, we bought a beautiful 4,000 square foot Victorian home for $260,000. You know, coming from Denver where we're selling a really kind of a kind of cool but relatively crappy four acre ranch for about a million dollars.

We come into this town like, oh, my gosh, we have we can buy anything we want for the first time in our lives. We actually had money. And so we did, we bought, you know, kind of a higher end home, but you know, and it wasn't that much, but we still felt like, no, we could downsize. So we just bought a house last year to downsize still a beautiful house. But we're again, we're, if I don't do that, then I've got to go figure out how to maybe take a little bit more money out of the movement or spend more time on the road speaking. But I want to be here. So we're constantly re-architecting our financial scenario to where we can simplify. In Denver,

Colorado, we had to have 10 grand a month just to survive. It's probably more than that now because it's just booming. All of a sudden in Alton, we're trying to learn how to live off $4,000 a month. So it's more of an internal ethos that you create in your movement. That's contextual. If, if I made a ton of money at the post and all of a sudden we had hundreds of

thousands of profit, I do feel like it would be inappropriate because again, we're trying to represent, uh, where the righteous prosper, the city rejoices. So if we make profit, we feel like it's for the city. And I do feel like there, there is a cap. There should be a cap in every context where you are a normal person in an environment. And that's just a commitment we've made. Even if we kill it, we're going to give that away, and we're going to use it for kingdom stuff. But let me push into that just a little bit,

not even push back, but just push into it. So let's just say you started getting more successful and everything, and it's one thing for your success to hinder somebody else's success. I mean, that's where, you know, I don't know. I'm not an economist, but that's where, you know, unchecked capitalism can be destructive and, you know, driven by greed and everything. But what if your success actually spilled over and helped, was a blessing to others in the community? Say you were successful and then you started two or three other businesses and more employment and now the economy of the city. say you were successful and then you started two or three other businesses and more employment and now the economy of the city and you're being, let's just say you're saying, you know

what, I'm committed to give away 50% of my income if I'm making more than, you know, $150,000 a year or whatever. Well, let's just say you're making $500,000 a year and you're like, I'm still going to give away half. Well, you're still making a lot of money after that. Yeah, exactly. So I don't know. I guess, would it be accurate for you?

I pray for millions. I really do. Because I see the power of finance in poor, blighted areas. I mean, the two things you need to revive a town are great people and money. So you still need money, but your average church in America is spending 90% of all of their income in-house on pastors and buildings. So we've inverted the tithe. We literally teach the tithes and try to get people to bring all their money in. But we invert it. It used to be the clergy would take a 10% rake off the top and give 90% to the poor.

So I hope that the future of funding is that we do. We make so much through good, benevolent enterprise that not only are our leaders sustainable, but we're able to actually immediately give it to the needs of our cities. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I've often thought, like, I don't, I've never, I was raised in a really poor family. My parents were divorced at 10. My wife, or my mom worked three jobs just to put food on the table.

I was, on my 16th birthday, I was literally working at, in California. I don't know if it still is. You had to be 16 to work for like, you know, legally. And on my 16th birthday, I worked eight hours at Burger King, you know? So it's just, it's been in my blood and my wife was raised missionary family and everything. So we have a natural, like we don't have, I don't know. I just, I haven't struggled with like a desire to for, for more stuff and more income. But what I do desire, I would love to be financially freed up to do quote unquote ministry without,

you know, the thought of, oh, but I still need to put food on the table. And yes, I'll go speak here, but I need to get paid because I need to eat, you know, I would love to, you know, I've had people around the world say, hey, can you come in and help us sort through questions of sexuality? And I'm like, yeah, but that's going to cost like thousands of dollars for me to fly over there. Either I leave my family for two weeks or I bring them. If I bring them, then that's a huge price. I would love to be financially freed up to just say, sure. Yeah, no problem.

Because I have that kind of financial freedom to be able to do the Lord's work without – I don't know. I'm constantly wrestling with the ministry money kind of question. I think everybody is, honestly. I think even pastors that take a full salary wrestle, oftentimes tell people there's not really a better way for funding. And there's nothing unbiblical about taking a full salary from a church. But wherever you take money, there's strings attached. That's the bottom line.

And if you take money from a congregation, you will feel constrained. And at times you won't pastor them or tell them what, you know, you should. And, you know, and if you make your money from business or you, then there's strings attached. If I make money at Starbucks, I got to do a good job working for Starbucks. So, um, you know, it's almost like there's not a perfect way to fund yourself, but there are more options than there used to be. That's what I oftentimes tell the bivocational or co-vocational or pure marketplace leader is pick the life that you like. You and I are probably very similar, Preston. We probably enjoy five or six different buckets because it's kind of fun to do something different every day. But I also don't like the pressure of having to get on a plane and leave my context.

Right. And as I'm getting older and, you know, grandkids are popping out, I have to constantly re-architect the life that I feel like I want and what I feel like the Lord wants for us. For me right now, it's trying to get, you know, I used to be 15 days a month speaking somewhere. I'm trying to get that to two, two to three days a week. Well, that means I have to adjust where I'm making money. So when somebody walked into the post office the other day and said, do you know any house painters? I, you know, I initially was like, no crap like no crap but i said well let me go take a look at it for you you know so i start you know something i don't really enjoy i'll be honest with you painting is not my favorite thing anymore but i go well looks like maybe that's the way

god's going to provide for this week's income and then i'll worry about next week's next you know next week sometimes because we have a nonprofit, people do like what we're doing. So occasionally I get just a pure financial donation and I'm able to receive that because we have a nonprofit and you know, there's some for-profit buckets, there's nonprofit buckets and there's my personal work buckets. And I kind of enjoy that, you know, most entrepreneurs kind of like that.

Yeah, I do too. But I'll be honest with you, Preston, I never know where we're going to make income more than two weeks in advance. And it's been like that for 25 years. And, you know, even though I essentially oversee a building that's worth about a million bucks right now, I can't benefit from that personally because it's a non-profit's building. So I live by faith as a 52-year-old, just like I did when I was 25. I literally have no idea where it will come from a year from now, but God's been faithful. We're here by God's grace. And most of the time we've been relatively broke because our son's disability costs us almost everything, but somehow we're here and what God wants to do in the city, he provides for us. So he gave me a building and he gave me 600 grand in about a year's time because that's what God wanted to do. And I always tell people, stop trying to figure out

how you're going to sustain life or, you know, figure out the perfect balance. The first question, Christology, is Jesus, what do you want to do in this town or this neighborhood? And if you can align yourself with what Jesus would do, God will provide. Like, he's no dummy. He's not going to waste a willing servant and a really cool entrepreneurial idea. He's not going to waste a willing servant and a really cool entrepreneurial idea. And I will tell you this. There's a lot of church people that are so done giving their money to just the weekend services.

They're looking for kingdom entrepreneurial work. I think people will be surprised that funding will come in for some alternative things that we're doing on behalf of the kingdom. some alternative things that we're doing on behalf of the kingdom. Yeah. I'm almost kicking myself for skipping over your Denver experience, the Tangible Kingdom thing. Let's go back there and go back in Hugh Halter's life. You leave Portland to go to Denver. Tell us about that whole part of your journey.

I was just working for a missions agency at the time. And we were basically traveling the world, trying to teach people how to do missionary church, just like you would overseas locally. So we were the only, I think we were the only non-attractional church plant training. So we really went there as a travel hub, but we always lived it out, you know? So I was back house painting.

And then again, we start filling up the house but then we codified what we were doing that was creating all the evangelistic sort of fruit and that became the tangible kingdom there were the title of the book were was basically reflective of three rhythms of life that we asked people to live in order to make the kingdom more tangible to people. And so that's all that book was. It was kind of a rethink, but giving people simple handholds. Essentially, all we did, Preston, was we said, we taught people a 2-1-1 rhythm of life. So in a given month, have two times a month where you gather together and you read scripture and you pray, you take communion and do the Jesus Christian thing. On your other weeks, throw a party. We just, Acts 10, the power of just relating with people

as a normal human being. So just throw lots of parties. And then a third circle was just blessing. So it was create places of belonging for people, do things that help you just be with Jesus and then go bless people. So very simple, but we said, if you're going to be a part of our kind of neo-monastic movement, you have to commit to those three rhythms of kingdom life. And so that ended

up being kind of a 10-year experience. We wrote an eight-week journal experience called the TK Primer that I think we've sold, I think we're right around 300,000 of those. And that became the tool that we use within existing congregations to begin to help renovate them back to missionary lifestyle. And so in a lot of ways, what we're doing in Alton, we go back to those rhythms, of course, at the kind of the missional community level. Back in the Denver day, there was no business element though. You know, I was still house painting, but we were not thinking about, we weren't running a coffee shop. We were, I guess, taking a more traditional approach to just working and then creating a network of these missionary communities. So you weren't paid by the church at that point? You were bivocational?

I've actually never been paid by the church in 25 years. You know, we've taken, we got up to about a $2,000 a month stipend in the Denver story, but that was after five years. Okay. So it was always a combination of raising funds and house painting, if you will. Okay. As you know, the books come out, so, you know, you begin to make some money as a consultant, but you don't make much off books. No. Yeah, I know.

People don't make much off books. No. Yeah, I know. That's a, people don't understand that. I mean, maybe 10, 15 years ago, from what I hear, you can make a decent amount. But now, unless you're in the top kind of 1%, which neither you or I are of authoring, you know, you can't really make living. You can, I mean, it's awesome. I never thought I'd get a penny for writing.

I just love, unlike you, I actually love writing. And the idea of getting some money is... Yeah, like the $67 checks. I was like, sweet, we can go penny for writing. I just love, unlike you, I actually love writing and the idea of getting some money is... the $67 checks, I was like, sweet, we can go out for dinner. Go out for a burger. Yeah, right.

So that was more... That was, you know, that was the story, you know, and right now that book, that tangible kingdom book

is still kind of, I guess, the underpinning of everything I would do. That was when I kind of unveiled kingdom theology as I was reading it through Dallas Willard. That's when I got a theological rework. Um, and, uh, and I still would say when people go, okay, where should I start with your books?

I always go start with the tangible kingdom and then kind of work your way through from there. Cause I think unless you have a kingdom theology rework, I don't think you'll end up being a very good missionary. And I would read The Divine Conspiracy and other people that have written well on the kingdom. Yeah. What would you say to a pastor, a leader, who is in a more traditional model who's listening,

which might be 10% of my audience. So maybe a few hundred people right now are probably employed by a church. Maybe they're on formal non-paid staff or whatever. And maybe they're like, man, everything you're doing sounds great, but here I am. I've got to preach a sermon on Sunday. This is how I make my income. And maybe they would sit me and push back on some of the things saying,

no, we're still doing a lot of great stuff in a traditional model, all that stuff. What would you say to somebody who is maybe in the traditional church system? First thing I would say is just good job. I feel like any pastoral role,

you're taking one for the team. Nobody ever calls you because they're having a great day and they just want to tell you. I mean, if you're in the box, in the church box, and you're serving people, I think you should be applauded. Whether or not you think the church is doing much or whether or not you like your role, I would say thank you for caring for God's sheep. But I'd also say, you know, everybody knows now our world is changing, and the pastor, shepherd, teacher role is going to become the most frustrated role, especially when the church is not generally reaching new people.

So I would just say, look up, you know, see, maybe, maybe think about your life in view of the APEST. You know, maybe it's a lot of great testing now on whether or not somebody is apostolic or prophetic, evangelistic, more shepherd or teaching. If you take some of these assessments and you actually identify yourself more in the pastor, shepherd, teacher role, then I say you might be in a perfect spot. So don't lament it. Embrace it. We're going to need all different forms and looks of church to get this thing done. But right now we need more looks of new new wine skin um so if you're in the old wine skin if you will um remember god had a heart for both these you know he's trying to preserve both the old and

the new so um if you feel like you're in your spot then i'd say be content with it and just serve with joy but if you are inside the box and you are constantly staring at the ceiling at night going, oh, I just feel like I'm missing something. Be open to the fact that God is opening up a lot of new ways of life for you in ministry and potentially business, and maybe have the guts to look up and begin to find some people who are doing different looks at church. Hugh, do you find, I wanted to ask you this earlier, who are some other people, orgs, organizations,

doing something similar to what you're doing? And I ask because I've got a few people, but a friend up in the Seattle area who's doing pretty much what you're doing. And I was talking to him the other day and he's like, man, I just feel like, is anybody else doing this? And I'm like, actually, I think quite a few people are. So can you give us maybe, yeah, some similar organizations or people that are doing something similar? I will say, just because the amount of denominations are calling me to process this,

I would say this is like a growing tidal wave, like the water is going out right now. But I think probably in five to seven years, you will see almost every denomination having some stream for bi-vocational or business for mission, but it's very early on. But the groups that are already doing it, I usually point people to the Underground Network out of Tampa. Brian Sanders just released a book called the underground church and uh in fact the day i got the key to our building i was actually flying out to speak

and to be with the people in the underground and i always tell people they they were ahead of us in a lot of ways to this alton story They actually coached us and they actually received our building for us and actually covered all my admin for a year. And so I started to see what they were doing. They're a network of over 200 micro churches now, and they do really weird stuff with their money. They essentially have a huge shared office space warehouse. And all they do is they would call it a radical empowerment model.

Every person they're trying to help them figure out what their passion is and then empower them. space warehouse and all they do is they would call it a radical empowerment model every person they're trying to help them figure out what their passion is and then empower them um so that network which also includes a group out of birmingham i mentioned called common threads um and within if you go browse around the tampa underground network you'll see seven i think seven or eight sites now internationally and nationally were considered one of their movemental sites so that's kind of the network that we're a part of because that's the closest thing we've been able to find it kind of this weird thing v3 is also a church planting network that I'm doing a marketplace cohort for. And V3 is very progressive on this as well.

I would take a look at V3. Yeah, I just had Dan White Jr. on the podcast a few weeks ago. Yep, great. Yeah, so Dan, JR, I think they're going to be towards the tip of the spear on this. But, you know, honestly, one of the benefits, as you know, Preston, speaking is you get to see a lot of cool stuff yeah and i will tell you i run into people that are doing what i just started to do but they've been at it for 10 years in their cities um they're all over the place but you know

they're not known they don't write books yeah but i could literally tell you a hundred people nationally that have literally went into blighted downtowns and started buying up buildings and doing cool stuff and also reflect an essence of what church is in their environment. So you're talking about kind of integrating ministry, entrepreneurship, more of a missional tangent to the kingdom mindset. more of a missional kingdom mindset but even beyond that then you have a lot of churches and networks and movements doing more just kind of what you're doing in Denver maybe more of a hyper

simple relationally driven missionally driven church rather than kind of more of an attractional expensive model so I mean from my vantage point it does seem like I yeah anecdotally I've got way less experience of this than you do, but it's not shocking when you say, man, there's a lot more going on here. They're kind of a tidal wave building that will be more prominent in five, ten years.

Yep, agreed. If that begins to emerge, we will all intuitively go back to that more pure missionary community type of a framework for church. And I think that'll be a really great move for the church. I think that might be the only way that we're actually going to be able to relate with people around us that don't know Jesus. Here's another byproduct, and we're going to wrap things up in just a second. But I've often seen solid Christians who are in the marketplace, who are running successful companies, who are CEOs of successful businesses, whatever, who can be kind of frustrated at the traditional model of church you got some 25 year old seminary graduate running this thing and then you know you're looking at you know the other ceos of businesses saying like man i could really help you with a lot here and they're like they kind of get the stiff arm like oh no you know i'm the pastor you know just go ahead and sit and listen to my sermon you know

and i think this model can include empower and learn learn from people with all kinds of crazy, amazing gifts that have felt like there's no real place for me in the traditional church. I don't want to attend this community group or whatever. I don't fit in the programs that are being offered. The leadership kind of looks down upon me because I'm not a pastor. I don't have seminary training. But, man, I'm managing 500 people throughout the week in a $10 million budget. I think I do it. Is there something I could give to the church, to the kingdom? I think your model can really empower a good number of people that have been sidelined by the church.

Yeah. In fact, you know, a lot of times I'll tell church planting specialists or denominational advisors to go, you know, to get somebody funded to plant a church is very expensive and it takes a hard or long time to find that person. But you could save a lot of time and money if you just go find really great leaders and then teach them how to just lead missional community in their context. Because as soon as you take a CEO that's got 30 employees that has really done a great job loving those people, all he has to do is go, hey, anybody want to meet Tuesdays for lunch and just talk about life and faith? And they will fill up a boardroom. And they're already right there doing what you call

the planting activity. So it's a lot easier to think about planting businesses or planting micro communities or planting missional communities as opposed to the idea of planting a church yeah yeah church is literally something jesus said i build so i go okay jesus said i'll take that pressure he does ask us to then build and plant you know we plant seeds we plant plant gospel. We plant communities. That's way more doable for the average person, especially the really gifted leader. Planting a church? Are you kidding me? Anybody's done it. Yeah, that's like selling rocks in a gravel pit. I plant a really cool whiskey and theology night at my local saloon.

Yeah, we can do that starting next week and it won't cost anything. So. All right. Last question on that note. Um, I'm a whiskey fan. You're a whiskey fan. What are your top five, uh, favorite whiskeys and why? Well, I've always been an Irish whiskey connoisseur because it was cheaper on occasion. My wife would let me take a hundred dollars and go buy

as much whiskey as i could so i learned i could get more bottles with irish and i also like the flavor profile better and i have irish in me and so i initially started there, I am becoming a connoisseur of all, all fine, you know, fermented where it's a long time. I just appreciate the process. Yeah. But, uh, right now I'm having some fun. You know, I did some church planting stuff throughout the Caribbean. So I, for about three years, I was a rum guy learning everything about rum. I'm kind of enjoying some nice tequilas right now. For me, it's a health food option. I got too fat drinking beer and chocolate milk, so whiskey became my healthy alternative.

So wait, is whiskey healthier than beer, like calorie-wise? It's all the same calories, isn't it? Absolutely. Oh, no, absolutely oh no no no no no your your average beer is going to be 300 calories your average little spit of whiskey is going to be about 60 oh wow and so you're you're ultimately getting uh way longer enjoyment for way less calories and actually quite a bit less alcohol so you're able to avoid trouble that sometimes can happen around the alcohol issue sure so for me it's it's more conversational it's uh it's more of a connoisseur

uh type of a drink than a beer beer oftentimes you just you know but i find when i have a whiskey with with a fellow the conversations are much more um i guess um i don't know they're just they're safer they they take longer um and people don't abuse the alcohol when when you have a finer finer whiskey in most cases you have noticed that yeah you have a finer whiskey in most cases. You have noticed that. Yeah, you get a cheaper whiskey and usually you have a stronger pour, but a finer whiskey, like anything, you don't need it. You don't want to go through a great $20 shot in five minutes.

You want to make that sucker last. So to me, it sets up the conversation way better. Yeah. Well, thank you for that, Little Whiskey Tour. And thank you so much for being on the podcast. I've been totally blessed and encouraged and challenged by it. If people want to find you, I know you have a website, HughHalter.com.

Is that the best place for people to go? Yeah, but I hardly do anything. They can find stuff. Occasionally, I will post something on Facebook if I'm in a new city or speaking somewhere. If they want to find any of the books, they can just Amazon my name and those will pop up. There's a few books on my personal website you just mentioned that are not on Amazon. personal website you just mentioned that are not on amazon okay but uh yeah if they want to check out post commons they can find postcommons.com okay and um i do have on occasion pastoral teams that come through and just want to spend a day processing so if any people feel like that would be helpful we're happy to accommodate that and uh cool you where to find us. We'll be in a little crappy town on the Mississippi here out of St. Louis. Becoming slightly less crappy through Post Commons, apparently. Well, strangely, the guy that gave me the building is now going to commit $100 million to renovate our downtown.

Oh, my gosh. It's our little cutting town, which is full of amazing people who's going to get a bit of a facelift so it should be fun the next 10 years to see what happens awesome Hugh thanks so much for being on the show alright man great chat

take care Thank you.