Alan Hirsch > Quotes

“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, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“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.”
― Michael Frost & Alan Hirsch, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church

“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

“If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
A”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“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, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“the main stimulus for the renewal of Christianity will come from the bottom and from the edge, from sectors of the Christian world that are on the margins.”22”
― Alan Hirsch, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“if we are going to be genuinely Christlike, we will not be conformists! For one, our Lord can hardly be called a conformist. He disturbed the status quo, railed against injustice and lack of mercy, hung out with highly questionable people, and fomented a revolution that called for the overthrow of religious oppression.”
― Alan Hirsch, Untamed (Shapevine): Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship

“It is one thing to create a countercultural community or a Christian subculture, but it is a much more difficult thing to live as an "incarnational-missional communitas" in the midst of a culture and not be bound by its dictates and decrees: to be "in" it, not "of" it, but not "out of it" either. When”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Due to my own experience in local ministry, the ones described in the first two chapters of this book, I have come to the conclusion that for we who live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal to the Western mind, nor is it Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture. It is not the New Age that poses such a threat; in fact, because there is a genuine search going on in new religious movements, it can actually be an asset to we who are willing to share the faith amidst the search. All these are challenges to us, no doubt, but I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This is a far more heinous and insidious challenge to the gospel, because in so many ways it infects each and every one of us.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“many of our current practices seem to be the wrong way around ... we seem to make church complex and discipleship too easy.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world. . . . What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. Roland Allen, The Compulsion of the Spirit”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“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, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“The first apostles of Christ were in the eyes of the world “unlearned and ignorant” men: it was not until the Church had endured a persecution and had grown largely in numbers that Christ called a learned man to be His apostle.31”
― Alan Hirsch, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“Strictly speaking one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.... This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church's essential nature and its empirical condition.... That there were so many centuries of crisis-free existence for the Church was therefore an abnormality... And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church.
David Bosch, Transforming Mission”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Apostolic ministry is not just about founding new churches and movements; it is as much about the renewal of existing organizations, that is, helping the church retain its primal movemental nature and stay vibrant. And so it has ongoing relevance for established churches as well.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.
Dee Hock, The Birth of the Chaordic Age
The”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will. This”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“How did we ever get to believe that faithfulness involved simply retaining past forms and thinking? With the Creator God as our Father, how did we ever become the socially conservative stiflers of innovation that we are so notoriously perceived to be?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“It was C. S. Lewis who observed that "there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it."11”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world. In”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. “If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“If we are not careful, then, the culture rather than God actually gets to define reality.”
― Alan Hirsch, Untamed (Shapevine): Reactivating a Missional Form of Discipleship

“If apostolic refounding is about anything, it is about a return to the sources. Organizational renewal therefore involves the discovery of an organization’s true identity and mission. The authority to bring transformation to the church does not rest in the person of the leader or group but in God’s calling. Therefore, the key to the revitalization of religious organizations is to reappropriate, or recover, their founding charism. When Dallas Willard, an influential theologian and thinker, urges younger leaders to “stir the primal coals of your movement, do what they did, say what they said,” he is wisely encouraging them to be radical traditionalists.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church

“Transformation happens less by arguing cogently about something new than by generating active new practices that shift the experience of the basis for reality. In other words, the best way of making ideas have impact is to embed them into the very rhythms and habits of the community in the form of common tools and practices.”
― Alan Hirsch, 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ

“The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there. —H. Richard Niebuhr”
― Alan Hirsch, 5Q: Reactivating the Original Intelligence and Capacity of the Body of Christ

“if we fall in love with our system, whatever that is, we lose the capacity to change it.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“what did it mean for the early church to join Jesus on his mission?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling. . . . [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment. Hans Küng, The Church as the People of God”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways