Alan Hirsch Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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