Alan Hirsch Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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.

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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
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.

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

Alan Hirsch
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.

Alan Hirsch