Quotes from Alan Hirsch

In a very real and sobering way, we must actually become the gospel to the people around us—an expression of the real Jesus through the quality of our lives.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. — ABRAHAM LINCOLN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

You simply cannot be a disciple without being a missionary—a sent one. For way too long discipleship has been limited to issues relating to our own personal morality and worked out in the context of the four walls of the church with its privatized religion.

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.

The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. T. S. Eliot

It is only when the people of God as a whole are activated in a movement that real world transformation takes place.

At the heart of all great movements is a recovery of a simple Christology (essential conceptions of who Jesus is and what he does), yet one that accurately reflects the Jesus of New Testament faith—they are in a very literal sense Jesus movements.

In essence, the apostle is the one who is most likely to facilitate the emergence of communitas, a particular kind of community that is shaped and formed around a challenge or compelling task.

I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This

So a working definition of missional church is a community of God's people that defines itself, and organizes its life around, its real purpose of being an agent of God's mission to the world. In other words, the church's true and authentic organizing principle is mission.

A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension. —Oliver Wendell Holmes

Christianity is concerned with the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in this world, not the longevity of organizations.

The great Christian revolutions came not by the discovery of something that was not known before. They happen when someone takes radically something that was always there. —H. Richard Niebuhr

Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs. Dee Hock, The Birth of the Chaordic Age The

if the church fails to make the shift to apostolic movements again, Christian influence in Western culture will continue to fade, and church attendance will remain in its current trajectory of decline. All we can say in writing this book is, not on our shift! Not if we can help it.

There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!"19 If the world and everything in it belong to God and come under his direct claim over them in and through Jesus, then there can be no sphere of life that is not radically open to the rule of God. There can be no non-God area in our lives and in our culture.

Transformation happens less by arguing cogently about something new than by generating active new practices that shift the experience of the basis for reality. In other words, the best way of making ideas have impact is to embed them into the very rhythms and habits of the community in the form of common tools and practices.

Neil Cole wryly notes, "If you can't reproduce disciples, you can't reproduce leaders. If you can't reproduce leaders, you can't reproduce churches. If you can't reproduce churches, you can't reproduce movements."32

A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling. . . . [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment. Hans Küng, The Church as the People of God

the church (the ecclesia), when true to its real calling, when it is on about what God is on about, is by far and away the most potent force for transformational change the world has ever seen.

C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. "If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.

Discipleship is all about adherence to Christ.

To be a truly radical disciple does require a relentless evaluation of life's priorities and concerns, together with an ongoing, rigorous critique of our culture, to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out.

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