Alan Hirsch

I have voiced some reservations in a couple of recent posts about the appropriateness of modelling the life and mission of the church on the form of discipleship found in the Gospels (see ‘Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, and the future of the church in Europe’ and ‘We have to go back, but not to square one’).

There is a fully understandable desire abroad - as a reaction against big church, as a reaction to the distintegation of the Christendom mentality - to recover the immediacy and humanity manifested in the community of followers that Jesus gathered around himself. Sometimes this is expressed as a strong preference for this model of radical, itinerant, liminal community against the seemingly more institutional form of the Pauline churches.

I suggested in my review of Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways that, in our search for a new paradigm to replace the now more or less defunct Christendom worldview, the historical moment which we should revisit for inspiration is not the beginning of the narrow path of suffering that the radical Jesus movement took in pursuit of its Lord but the end, when the faithful community, having finally overcome the opposition of Greek-Roman paganism, was in a position to ask far-reaching questions about how it should organize and define itself as God’s ‘new creation’.

Andrew - I hope this won’t seem obsessive, but I do find your perspectives interesting, even when I don’t totally share them, and I am always interested in teasing out the practical implications of your radical revision or re-imagining of the Christian faith. I sometimes feel I hear more clearly what you are not saying when it comes to your ideas on the practical expression of church and mission, than what you are saying.

The ebullient Alan Hirsch was in Portugal recently with the Christian Associates leadership community, talking about what makes a missional church-planting movement, in his words, go ‘Kaboom!’ In his book The Forgotten Ways he faces squarely the fact that the church in the West is experiencing ‘massive, long-trended decline’ (16). For the most part, the techniques and strategies that are currently being proposed as remedies for this dilemma are no more than revisions of techniques and strategies that have already proved themselves ineffective. ‘As we anxiously gaze into the future and delve back into our history and traditions to retrieve missiological tools from the Christendom toolbox, many of us are left with the sinking feeling that this is simply not going to work’ (17). What is needed is a new paradigm: ‘a fundamental change in our thoughts, perceptions, and values, especially as they relate to our view of church and mission’.

Al and Debra Hirsch were speaking at the Christian Associates staff conference in the Netherlands last week. Al is co-author with Michael Frost of The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st Century Church and National Director of Forge Mission Training Agency in Australia. It was all good stimulating, bawdy, overstated stuff - an excellent antidote to the slow grind of church-planting. Most of us left wanting to be hip wild geese dudes like Al and Debra, flying in spiritual freedom, not the fat domesticated creatures that waddle around farmyards. That’s the power of a metaphor!