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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This is why we are on record claiming that the missional conversation — refactoring mission back into the equation of church — contains the seeds of authenticity and renewal for Christianity in our time and place.

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

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

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

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

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.