Alan Hirsch Quotes

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#3. Judgments about who belongs in the Hall of Fame are extremely subjective.

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#6. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#12. 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

#13. Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#16. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#19. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#21. There's no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.

Alan Hirsch

#22. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#24. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#34. 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

#35. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#37. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#45. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#48. Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#51. More data is not always the answer.

Alan Hirsch

#52. 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

#53. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

#55. 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

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

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

Alan Hirsch

#59. 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