Alan Hirsch Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It's not so much that the church has a mission, it's that the mission of God has a church.

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

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.

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.

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

We will have to take risks, to chance failure, to be willing to walk away from the familiar paths that have brought us to this point.

Every Christian is a sent one. There is no such thing as an unsent Christian.

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.

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

You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian.

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.

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.

Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.

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

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God’s eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church—reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them.

Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people's perception of the gospel.

You plant the gospel. You don't plant churches.

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

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

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

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

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

In a world that demands service we position ourselves as servants.

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

The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face, it seems to be a fundamental yearning, knitted into the fabric of the human soul.

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.

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.

Interestingly, it's as though the gospel story of Jesus is the archetypal heroic journey, the embodiment of the very adventure that all people in every epoch have desired.

The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.

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

Go among the people. Don't assume you know what church looks like.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

More data is not always the answer.

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

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