Alan Hirsch (born 24 October 1959) is an Australian author and thought leader in the missional church movement.
But the standard churchy spirituality doesn't require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.
But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.
There’s no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.
This submission to the threshold of a cross is at the very root of our following Jesus; it changes the game completely.
Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.
It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.
Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.
The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.
Go among the people. Don't assume you know what church looks like.
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.
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.
There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.
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.
The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.
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.
The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.
Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.
If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.
A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus's name.
Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship