Alan Hirsch Quotes

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Becoming an adventurous, liminal church means getting over risk aversion. Often the difference between a successful person (or organization) and a failure lies not in having better abilities or ideas, but in having the courage to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus’s name.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.”

“The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.”

“At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Because of this global uncertainty, the visionary and the adventurous amongst us will get to shape the future of the twenty-first century—the church included.”

“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.”

“Indeed, we believe that twenty-first century Christians are yearning to see the adventure put back into Christianity, into the relationship with the living God — where it rightly belongs.”