Alan Hirsch Quotes

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.

What we find in our heroes and martyrs is a living witness to the fact that the true life of faith can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if one takes it on bravely and gallantly, as something of a grand adventure in which we set out into an unknown country to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More important, Christian community is not something about which we can arbitrarily make decisions — it is not an optional extra.

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

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 are the people of the ultimate Quest — we are on a wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventure to save the world.

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.

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.