Top 62 Quotes & Sayings by Alan Hirsch

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

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.

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.

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

Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship

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

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

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

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

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

Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

You plant the gospel. You don't plant churches.

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.

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

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.

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

There’s no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.