Alan Hirsch Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will.
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A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus's name.
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In a world that demands service we position ourselves as servants.
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Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian.
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Go among the people. Don't assume you know what church looks like.
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Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.
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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.
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It's not so much that the church has a mission, it's that the mission of God has a church.
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It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.
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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.
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We have to assume now that all mission is cross-cultural.
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Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.
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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.
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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.
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But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.
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The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.
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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.
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But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.
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If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?
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Every Christian is a sent one. There is no such thing as an unsent Christian.
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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.
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Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship
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Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.
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Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.
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