Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Becoming an adventurous, liminal church means getting over risk aversion. Often the difference between a successful person (or organization) and a failure lies not in having better abilities or ideas, but in having the courage to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.

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