This is the third post in a series about Simple Church. In this write-up, I will explain “huddle” and how it sits within the Acts 2 Culture and Simple Church Triangle that I introduced last week.
This past weekend, I helped baptize one of the guys in our Simple Church. He initially connected to our church through an evangelism initiative, a board game night, that eventually transitioned into attending huddle and, after a few years, giving his life to Christ. He is now discipling one of the younger guys in our group, contributing to Huddle, and deeply engaged in our church’s culture of making disciples and planting churches.
Huddle was a huge part of his journey towards a life surrendered to Jesus. But what is huddle?
A Different Entry Point
To understand huddle, it helps to see how Simple Church fits into a broader strategy of evangelism and discipleship. In a typical church context, small groups serve primarily as a relational integration or assimilation strategy that helps people build meaningful relationships with others in the community. In this thinking, the Sunday gathering is the primary entry point, and the small group is often a first step people are encouraged to take.
This model makes sense if the prevailing culture is nominally Christian, so that people will naturally find their way to a gathering. However, if the culture is post-post-Christian, this assumption doesn’t hold. I define post-post-Christian as no longer having a Christian memory, despite a Christian heritage in the wider culture. This Christian heritage without Christian memory describes the Canadian landscape in many ways.
This lack of Christian memory means that the best entry point for people to explore faith needs to be a lower-barrier, more relational, and intelligible environment in which someone unfamiliar with Christianity can participate.
The Simple Church therefore sits in a different place in the process of building a church. Rather than an integration strategy for new members, the Simple Church is the initial entry point, facilitated through one of the points on the triangle, including gatherings, but most commonly an evangelism initiative followed by a huddle.
Emphasizing openness to non-believers as a first entry point is a core characteristic of Simple Church, especially compared to traditional small groups. In fact, we teach that a huddle should be open to non-believers at any point in the calendar.
So, What Does a Huddle Do?
A huddle has two primary components every week: sharing a meal or genuine fellowship and time formed by the Word through study and prayer. That’s it. It really isn’t rocket science. But each of these has a bit more to it than it might seem.
A Meal or Fellowship
I am convinced that the best strategy to reach non-believers is to invite them into genuinely loving Christian community. As Jesus said, people will know we are His disciples by our love for one another.
Any non-believer coming to a Christian Bible study is likely to be confused and overwhelmed, regardless of what we are talking about or studying. So much background knowledge is required to make sense of much of our faith.
But a genuinely welcoming group that has a genuine love for one another is undeniably attractive. The friend we baptized this past weekend attested to this: he did not trust or like Christians. He also had many complex questions that we couldn’t answer in a few weeks together. But over several years, he could not deny our love for others or for him.
By sharing meals, laughing, playing, and enjoying one another, we can help people catch a small glimpse of what God’s eternal family is like, and invite them in.
Hospitality is our first witness, before we open our Bibles or say a single word. The huddle is where we master hospitality.
Time Being Formed by the Word and Prayer
We do not prescribe a Scripture study strategy. Instead, we defer to each Simple Church to determine its own course of Scripture study. While most of our Simple Churches opt to track with our church-wide Daily Devos, some don’t. Either way, it is all good.
One of the most foundational discipleship skills is learning to read and wrestle with God’s Word. The huddle seeks to allow God’s Word to speak to people directly and train them to wrestle with it.
I am always amazed at how a non-believer can open virtually any part of Scripture and, under effective leadership, mine it for beauty and power. It should come as no surprise, though, since all of Scripture is God-breathed!
When training new leaders, to help steer them out of the ditch of just debating the text, we encourage them to use a discovery Bible study format to steer conversation toward obedience and application. (See an example here.)
Having observed hundreds, if not thousands, of groups over the years, the ones that bear the most fruit keep it simple and teach people to read Scripture without the aid of video teaching, books, or devotionals. Not that videos or resources are always bad per se. But we find that the long-term fruit of training people to love God’s Word and wrestle with it is not as deep when an external resource does the heavy lifting for them.
Perseverance
Is every huddle transformational? Of course not! In fact, sometimes they can feel dull or mundane. But by meeting each week consistently, the relationships become deep and genuine.
As Paul wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1:5, “Now the goal of our instruction is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.” Love is hard work. It requires patience, sacrifice, openness, and genuine care for the people we serve. When a Simple Church embraces this reality, it becomes a powerful enabler of discipleship and evangelism.