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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

More data is not always the answer.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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