The Forgotten Ways Quotes

“If we're going to impact our world in the name of Jesus, it will be because people like you and me took action in the power of the Spirit. Ever since the mission and ministry of Jesus, God has never stopped calling for a movement of "Little Jesuses" to follow him into the world and unleash the remarkable redemptive genius that lies in the very message we carry. Given the situation of the Church in the West, much will now depend on whether we are willing to break out of a stifling herd instinct and find God again in the context of the advancing kingdom of God.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“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”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Due to my own experience in local ministry, the ones described in the first two chapters of this book, I have come to the conclusion that for we who live in the Western world, the major challenge to the viability of Christianity is not Buddhism, with all its philosophical appeal to the Western mind, nor is it Islam, with all the challenge that it poses to Western culture. It is not the New Age that poses such a threat; in fact, because there is a genuine search going on in new religious movements, it can actually be an asset to we who are willing to share the faith amidst the search. All these are challenges to us, no doubt, but I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This is a far more heinous and insidious challenge to the gospel, because in so many ways it infects each and every one of us.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“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.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“many of our current practices seem to be the wrong way around ... we seem to make church complex and discipleship too easy.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organization, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man, and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, nor rich in the wealth of this world. . . . What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. Roland Allen, The Compulsion of the Spirit”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“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”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they'll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.
Dee Hock, The Birth of the Chaordic Age
The”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“I found out the hard way that if we don't disciple people, the culture sure will. This”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“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”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“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”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“Strictly speaking one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it.... This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church's essential nature and its empirical condition.... That there were so many centuries of crisis-free existence for the Church was therefore an abnormality... And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church.
David Bosch, Transforming Mission”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church

“In a very real and sobering way, we must actually become the gospel to the people around us—an expression of the real Jesus through the quality of our lives.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“Discipleship is all about adherence to Christ.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ. He said that the church exists for no other purpose. “If the Church is not doing this, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“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 other words, the church’s true and authentic organizing principle is mission.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“the church (the ecclesia), when true to its real calling, when it is on about what God is on about, is by far and away the most potent force for transformational change the world has ever seen.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief. T. S. Eliot”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“Strictly speaking one ought to say that the Church is always in a state of crisis and that its greatest shortcoming is that it is only occasionally aware of it. . . . This ought to be the case because of the abiding tension between the church’s essential nature and its empirical condition. . . . That there were so many centuries of crisis-free existence for the Church was therefore an abnormality. . . . And if the atmosphere of crisislessness still lingers on in many parts of the West, this is simply the result of a dangerous delusion. Let us also know that to encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the Church.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling. . . . [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment. Hans Küng, The Church as the People of God”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways

“I have come to believe that the major threat to the viability of our faith is that of consumerism. This”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church