Top 15 Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.

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

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

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 appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face, it seems to be a fundamental yearning, knitted into the fabric of the human soul.

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.

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion, who knows what innovation, what freshness, what new insights from the Spirit will emerge.