The Forgotten Ways Quotes

“We can only live changes: we cannot think our way to humanity. Every one of us, every group, must become the model of that which we desire to create. —Ivan Illich”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“if we wanted to be missional, we had to take significant risks.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“Too much concern with safety and security, combined with comfort and convenience, has lulled us out of our true calling and purpose. We all love an adventure. Or do we?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“if we fall in love with our system, whatever that is, we lose the capacity to change it.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“We need refounding even more than we need reformation”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“what did it mean for the early church to join Jesus on his mission?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“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.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“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.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“Neil Cole wryly notes, “If you can’t reproduce disciples, you can’t reproduce leaders. If you can’t reproduce leaders, you can’t reproduce churches. If you can’t reproduce churches, you can’t reproduce movements.”32”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”19 If the world and everything in it belong to God and come under his direct claim over them in and through Jesus, then there can be no sphere of life that is not radically open to the rule of God. There can be no non-God area in our lives and in our culture.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“At the heart of all great movements is a recovery of a simple Christology (essential conceptions of who Jesus is and what he does), yet one that accurately reflects the Jesus of New Testament faith—they are in a very literal sense Jesus movements.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“One of the “gifts” that persecution seems to confer on the persecuted is that it enables them to distill the essence of the message and thus access it in a new way. Take the Chinese Jesus movement, for example. When all the external structures and reference points were removed, when most of their leaders and theologians were killed or imprisoned and all access to outside sources was cut off, they were somehow forced through sheer circumstance to unlock something truly potent and compelling in the message they had always carried as the people of God. The result was a Jesus movement unparalleled in history—against all possible odds they grew from around 2 million to around 120 million in seventy years! What was going on here, and what can we in the West learn from this?”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements

“Christianity is concerned with the unfolding of the Kingdom of God in this world, not the longevity of organizations.”
― Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating Apostolic Movements