Quotes from 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.

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

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

Evangelism cant be our focus! We must not stop sharing the good news, but here's the deal, here's the wonderful thing, it gets done along the way as you do discipleship. Great commission is just about going to disciple the nations and you know what happens... as you disciple them evangelism takes place, because it's done in the context of discipleship. Here's the issue: We have to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship

If you want to build a ship, don't summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. Antoine de Saint-Exupery A

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.

the main stimulus for the renewal of Christianity will come from the bottom and from the edge, from sectors of the Christian world that are on the margins."22

It is one thing to create a countercultural community or a Christian subculture, but it is a much more difficult thing to live as an incarnational-missional communitas in the midst of a culture and not be bound by its dictates and decrees: to be in it, not of it, but not out of it either. When

if we are going to be genuinely Christlike, we will not be conformists! For one, our Lord can hardly be called a conformist. He disturbed the status quo, railed against injustice and lack of mercy, hung out with highly questionable people, and fomented a revolution that called for the overthrow of religious oppression.

I think it is fair to say that in the Western church, we have by and large lost the art of disciple making. We have done so partly because we have reduced it to the intellectual assimilation of ideas, partly because of the abiding impact of cultural Christianity embedded in the Christendom understanding of church, and partly because the phenomenon of consumerism in our own day pushes against a true following of Jesus.

many of our current practices seem to be the wrong way around ... we seem to make church complex and discipleship too easy.

Apostolic ministry is not just about founding new churches and movements; it is as much about the renewal of existing organizations, that is, helping the church retain its primal movemental nature and stay vibrant. And so it has ongoing relevance for established churches as well.

How did we ever get to believe that faithfulness involved simply retaining past forms and thinking? With the Creator God as our Father, how did we ever become the socially conservative stiflers of innovation that we are so notoriously perceived to be?

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

The first apostles of Christ were in the eyes of the world "unlearned and ignorant" men: it was not until the Church had endured a persecution and had grown largely in numbers that Christ called a learned man to be His apostle.31

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.

It was C. S. Lewis who observed that there exists in every church something that sooner or later works against the very purpose for which it came into existence. So we must strive very hard, by the grace of God to keep the church focused on the mission that Christ originally gave to it.11

Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It

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

we will never be faithful in the biblical sense if we never move from home base.

The gospel cannot be limited to being about my personal healing and wholeness, but rather extends in and through my salvation to the salvation of the world.

Left to their own devices, most organizations tend toward a sort of sociological conservatism that will increasingly forgo engagement with their context in favor of preserving what they see as their repository of inherited ideas. In other words, they turn away from missional engagement and toward an increasingly traditionalist, sentimental interpretation of reality. Instead of looking forward to a possible future of which they are called to be a part, they look back to an idealized past.

Whether we choose it or not, almost all expressions of church in the West are implicitly vulnerable to nondiscipleship, professionalized ministry, spiritual passivity, and consumerism. The problem is rooted in the profoundly nonmissional assumptions of the system itself.

These are classic insiders—the fussy traditionalists who operate close to the center and seldom break with convention. In such traditionalistic organizations, intelligence and decision making tend to be drawn out from the reservoir of inherited wisdom. These inherited ideas are seen to be inviolable, even sacrosanct.