Alan Hirsch Quotes

In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Let’s stop kidding ourselves — there are too many instances of Christians worshiping sublimely every Sunday, but never making an impact beyond the congregation, never experiencing the powerful beauty of communitas, and never going deeper in discipleship.