Alan Hirsch
South African-born missiologist and a leading voice in the missional movement of the Christian West.
There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.
Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.
In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.
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.
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.
It is vital to see ourselves as part of an ongoing journey started by our heroes in the Scriptures.
A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus’s name.
But the standard churchy spirituality doesn’t require any real action, courage, or sacrifice from its attendees.
If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.
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.
The quest for heroic adventure then is a quest for the gospel, although it might not be seen that way by everyone.
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.
The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.
But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.
Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.
The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.
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.
Christianity is an adventure of the spirit or it is not Christianity.
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.
Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.