Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

We are the people of the ultimate Quest — we are on a wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventure to save the world.

— Alan Hirsch

But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

Indeed, we believe that twenty-first century Christians are yearning to see the adventure put back into Christianity, into the relationship with the living God — where it rightly belongs.

— Alan Hirsch

What we find in our heroes and martyrs is a living witness to the fact that the true life of faith can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if one takes it on bravely and gallantly, as something of a grand adventure in which we set out into an unknown country to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.

— Alan Hirsch

Because of this global uncertainty, the visionary and the adventurous amongst us will get to shape the future of the twenty-first century—the church included.

— Alan Hirsch

Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

Becoming an adventurous, liminal church means getting over risk aversion. Often the difference between a successful person (or organization) and a failure lies not in having better abilities or ideas, but in having the courage to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk — and to act.

— Alan Hirsch

Many church folk, in their self-conscious attempt to be overtly morally upright, emit all the wrong signals, thus messing with people’s perception of the gospel.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.

— Alan Hirsch

Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change.

— Alan Hirsch

This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

In order to develop a pioneering missional spirit, a capacity for genuine ecclesial innovation, let along engender daring discipleship, we are going to need the capacity to take a courageous stand when and where necessary.

— Alan Hirsch

When there is no possibility of retreat, we will find the innovation that only the liminal situation can bring. In short, we find the faith of leap.

— Alan Hirsch

Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one’s role in society, and the relation between the two.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.

— Alan Hirsch

Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.

— Alan Hirsch

Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

— Alan Hirsch

Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

Because we believe that somewhere in the nest of paradigms contained in the phrase “missional church” lies nothing less that the future viability of Western Christianity.

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— Alan Hirsch

This is why we are on record claiming that the missional conversation — refactoring mission back into the equation of church — contains the seeds of authenticity and renewal for Christianity in our time and place.

— Alan Hirsch

The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.

— Alan Hirsch

Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

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.

— 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.

— Alan Hirsch

Let’s stop kidding ourselves — there are too many instances of Christians worshiping sublimely every Sunday, but never making an impact beyond the congregation, never experiencing the powerful beauty of communitas, and never going deeper in discipleship.

— Alan Hirsch

Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.

— Alan Hirsch

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

— Alan Hirsch

Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity.

— Alan Hirsch