Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Indeed, we believe that twenty-first century Christians are yearning to see the adventure put back into Christianity, into the relationship with the living God — where it rightly belongs.