Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Our point isn’t to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures.

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one’s role in society, and the relation between the two.

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.

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.

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.

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

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