Alan Hirsch Quotes & Sayings

A missional theology ... appl ies to the whole of life of every believer. Every disciple is to be an agent of the kingdom of God, and every disciple is to carry the mission of God into every sphere of life. We are all missionaries sent into a non-Christian culture. — Alan Hirsch

If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

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. — Alan Hirsch

I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will. — Alan Hirsch

Go among the people. Don't assume you know what church looks like. — Alan Hirsch

You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers. — Alan Hirsch

All apostolic ministry in some sense involves this return to the founding message as well as purpose. The missional task that follows is to reinterpret it radically into various contexts. To use the words of leadership gurus Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, the key to dynamic entrepreneurialism is to "preserve the core and stimulate progress."15 Thus, there is both a continuity and a discontinuity in the revitalization process, involving both a conservative dimension and a radical one. Radical traditionalism involves a rediscovery of the founder's vision, but it must be matched with spectacular innovations that are as yet undreamed of.16 As such, it is the apostolic intrapreneur's (the Petrine apostle) basic method of renewal. — Alan Hirsch

We have to assume now that all mission is cross-cultural. — Alan Hirsch

There's no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism. — Alan Hirsch

If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it? — Alan Hirsch

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

It's not so much that the church has a mission, it's that the mission of God has a church. — Alan Hirsch

In a world that demands service we position ourselves as servants. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

More data is not always the answer. — Alan Hirsch

Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship — Alan Hirsch

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey. — Alan Hirsch

The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency. — Alan Hirsch

Judgments about who belongs in the Hall of Fame are extremely subjective. — Alan Hirsch

Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity. — Alan Hirsch

You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

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

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. — Alan Hirsch

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves. — Alan Hirsch

Every Christian is a sent one. There is no such thing as an unsent Christian. — Alan Hirsch

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

Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change. — Alan Hirsch

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

Being the church that Jesus intended means that we must participate in God's eternal purposes for his world. Renewal means more than reinventing ourselves; it means rediscovering the primal power of the Spirit and the gospel already present in the life of the church - reconnecting with this purpose and recovering the forgotten ways. This purpose and potential have always been there, but individuals and communities have largely lost touch with them. — Alan Hirsch

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

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

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here's the deal, here's the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know what happens ... as you disciple them evangelism takes place, because it's done in the context of discipleship.
Here's the issue: We have to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship — Alan Hirsch

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

But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees. — Alan Hirsch

When the church is in mission, it is the true church. The church itself is not only a product of that mission but is obligated and destined to extend it by whatever means possible. The mission of God flows directly through every believer and every community of faith that adheres to Jesus. To obstruct this is to block God's purposes in and through his people. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

Whether we like it or not, we are all on a journey, a Quest if you will, every day of our lives, and the path we must take is full of perils, and our destiny can never be predicted in advance. — Alan Hirsch

We are perfectly designed to achieve what we are currently achieving. If Christianity is in decline, at least part of the issue goes to the contemporary way we live out faith in a watching world. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus's name. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

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

In short, apostolic movement involves a radical community of disciples, centered on the lordship of Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, built squarely on a fivefold ministry, organized around mission where everyone (not just professionals) is considered an empowered agent, and tends to be decentralized in organizational structure. — Alan Hirsch

Truth is narrow, but grace is wide. — Alan Hirsch

It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures. — Alan Hirsch

You plant the gospel. You don't plant churches. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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

The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

There's no such thing as an unsent Christian. You have already been SENT. — Alan Hirsch

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit's power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension. — Alan Hirsch

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

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. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch

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. — Alan Hirsch