Alan Hirsch Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

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

Alan Hirsch
Indeed, we believe that twenty-first century Christians are yearning to see the adventure put back into Christianity, into the relationship with the living God — where it rightly belongs.

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

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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
What we find in our heroes and martyrs is a living witness to the fact that the true life of faith can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if one takes it on bravely and gallantly, as something of a grand adventure in which we set out into an unknown country to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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
We are the people of the ultimate Quest — we are on a wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventure to save the world.

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

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

Alan Hirsch
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
This is why we are on record claiming that the missional conversation — refactoring mission back into the equation of church — contains the seeds of authenticity and renewal for Christianity in our time and place.

Alan Hirsch