Alan Hirsch
South African-born missiologist and a leading voice in the missional movement of the Christian West.
The fact is that if Jesus’s future kingdom is secure, those who trust in its coming will enact it now.
The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.
The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are the people of the ultimate Quest — we are on a wild, and sometimes dangerous, adventure to save the world.
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.
Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.
Those of us with too much invested in the way things are will never embrace the revolutionary cause required for wholesale change.
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.
At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.