Best 52 quotes of Alan Hirsch on MyQuotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The fact is that if Jesus's future kingdom is secure, those who trust in its coming will enact it now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change.

Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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