Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel.

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.

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

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

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.

Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.

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

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

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.

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.