Quotes from Alan Hirsch

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

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

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.

If we are not careful, then, the culture rather than God actually gets to define reality.

A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.

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

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

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