Post Commons
Hugh and Cheryl Halter’s son Ryan had severe epilepsy all his life.
“We were never able to leave the house and do ‘normal’ church,” Hugh Halter explains. So, they had to learn a more incarnational ministry model where community revolved around inviting people into their home. Eventually, Ryan got accepted into a special medical facility in Alton, Illinois, and the Halters moved there to be near him.
“We came to Alton to live as missionaries, which is what Ryan’s disability had forced us to learn,” Halter explains.
The small river town that had in the 19th century outpaced the growth of nearby St. Louis, Missouri, had since fallen on hard times, and the Halters were given a building—an old post office that had been boarded up for about 60 years.
“There was no coffee shop or community gathering space in town, so we asked our children and friends to move here and create a ‘living room for the city,’” he says. They called it Post Commons, an umbrella company under a nonprofit Halter created named the Lantern Network.
The facility did far more than serve great coffee. It became a hub for a network of businesses (Idle Coffee Roasting, PC Events, Good News Brewing and Wood-Fired Pizza, to name just a few); justice initiatives (youth basketball, low-income housing, neighborhood-improvement coalitions); and more.
“We would never say this ourselves, but people always thank us for making our town a little better, which lines up with our core Scripture: ‘Where the righteous prosper, the city rejoices’ (Prov. 11:10),” Halter says, adding that they “now focus on incubating good works, and ‘church’ seems to happen naturally as we build out many and varied tables for people to sit at and find the kingdom.
“We don’t ‘plant churches;’ instead we work on building kingdom ecosystems. Everything we’re doing is church for us,” he says. “Our call is to move beyond formulaic church models and create dynamic, holistic communities embodying Jesus’ transformative vision.”
Halter describes their model in his recent book co-authored with Taylor McCall, Brave Cities: The Archeology, Artistry and Architecture of Kingdom Ecosystems. He believes the church always emerges from the margins and from an incarnational missionary life in homes, businesses and works of justice.
“Alton—like thousands of impoverished areas that Jesus seemed to angle his people toward—may not provide simple, easy and financially sustainable opportunities in a classic Sunday-centric model, but missionaries who plant businesses will be the ones standing and sustaining into the future,” Halter says. “My prayer is to model, create, stabilize and plant kingdom people, ventures and good works in this town so that God can continue to build his church here. It’s more natural, it’s financially sustainable, it’s contextually appropriate, and it’s a lot more fun than trying to get grown adults to keep coming to hear me preach.”
Discovering Innovative Ministries
These innovative ministries of the future could be described in churchy terms as microchurches, house churches, underground churches, avant-garde churches, free market churches, or fresh expression church movements. At this point, terms like this might limit these pioneering ministries, given how many are apostolic in sending people to demonstrate and proclaim the gospel in new settings, working more with nonprofits, and forging new partnerships with government and other entities.