Alan Hirsch: Church

“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 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.”

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

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

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”