Alan Hirsch Quotes

A missional theology ... appl ies to the whole of life of every believer. Every disciple is to be an agent of the kingdom of God, and every disciple is to carry the mission of God into every sphere of life. We are all missionaries sent into a non-Christian culture.

In short, apostolic movement involves a radical community of disciples, centered on the lordship of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, built squarely on a fivefold ministry, organized around mission where everyone (not just professionals) is considered an empowered agent, and tends to be decentralized in organizational structure.

Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one's role in society, and the relation between the two.

It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.

The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.

Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.

There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.

When there is no possibility of retreat, we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short, we find the faith of leap.

Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity.

You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers.

Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance.

When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God's purposes in and through his people.

Most churches don't have the resources for these tricks and inducements but are still bound to the imagination that church happens on a Sunday in a building.

Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.

There's no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.

Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase "missional church" lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit's power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.

More data is not always the answer.

A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus's name.

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.

The church of Jesus needs to wake up from the exile of passivity and embrace liminality and adventure or continue to remain a religious ghetto for culturally co-opted, fearful, middle-class folk.

If we are going to make the change from community to communitas, and not just end up with an unsustainable adrenaline-junkie culture, we must have a sophisticated process to form people into adventurer-disciples.

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

Unless the church is equipping believers to embrace the values and vision of the kingdom of God and turn away from the materialism, consumerism, greed, and power of the present age, it not only abandons its biblical mandate, it is rendered missionally ineffective.

There's no such thing as an unsent Christian. You have already been SENT.

Judgments about who belongs in the Hall of Fame are extremely subjective.

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.

In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.

The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.

If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?

We have to assume now that all mission is cross-cultural.

Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.

At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.

Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.

Put simply, the church finds itself in a post-Christendom era, and it had better do some serious reflection or face increasing decline and eventual irrelevance.

Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will.

All apostolic ministry in some sense involves this return to the founding message as well as purpose. The missional task that follows is to reinterpret it radically into various contexts. To use the words of leadership gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, the key to dynamic entrepreneurialism is to "preserve the core and stimulate progress."15 Thus, there is both a continuity and a discontinuity in the revitalization process, involving both a conservative dimension and a radical one. Radical traditionalism involves a rediscovery of the founder's vision, but it must be matched with spectacular innovations that are as yet undreamed of.16 As such, it is the apostolic intrapreneur's (the Petrine apostle) basic method of renewal.

We are perfectly designed to achieve what we are currently achieving. If Christianity is in decline, at least part of the issue goes to the contemporary way we live out faith in a watching world.