Top 60 Alan Hirsch Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s not so much that the church has a mission, it’s that the mission of God has a church.”

— Alan Hirsch

2. “A missional church is a church that must live the dialectic. It must stay in the journey.”

— Alan Hirsch

3. “I found out the hard way that if we don’t disciple people, the culture sure will.”

— Alan Hirsch

4. “You can do more with 12 disciples than with 1,200 religious consumers.”

— Alan Hirsch

5. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

6. “Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones and then manage the resulting distress.”

— Alan Hirsch

7. “Every Christian is a sent one. There is no such thing as an unsent Christian.”

— Alan Hirsch

8. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

9. “In missional churches, the baby birds have been pushed out of the nest and are learning to fly for themselves.”

— Alan Hirsch

10. “Mission is the practical demonstration, whether by speech or by action, of the glorious lordship of Jesus.”

— Alan Hirsch

11. “There’s no such thing as an unsent Christian. You have already been SENT.”

— Alan Hirsch

12. “Think of mission like the paddles of a defibrillator applied to the chest of a dying church.”

— Alan Hirsch

13. “If a can opener no longer has the capacity to open cans, what is it?”

— Alan Hirsch

14. “There is no doubt that to walk with Jesus means to walk on the wilder side of life.”

— Alan Hirsch

15. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

16. “If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.”

— Alan Hirsch

17. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

18. “More data is not always the answer.”

— Alan Hirsch

19. “There’s no such religious force in the West as powerful as consumerism.”

— Alan Hirsch

20. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

21. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

22. “Truth is narrow, but grace is wide.”

— Alan Hirsch

23. “The missional church is not a new trend or the latest new technique for reaching postmodern people.”

— Alan Hirsch

24. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

25. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

26. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

27. “The ultimate solution to the problem of spiritual complacency is to create a systematically embedded culture of holy urgency.”

— Alan Hirsch

28. “But herein lies the rub: Christianity has been on a long-term trend of decline in every Western cultural context that we can identify.”

— Alan Hirsch

29. “You plant the gospel. You don’t plant churches.”

— Alan Hirsch

30. “Our preferences for stability and security blind us to the opportunities for adventure when they present themselves.”

— Alan Hirsch

31. “The appetite for adventure and risk is not exclusive to young Christians. In face, it seems to be a fundamental yearning, knitted into the fabric of the human soul.”

— Alan Hirsch

32. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

33. “In a world that demands service we position ourselves as servants.”

— Alan Hirsch

34. “The safety-obsessed church lacks the inner dynamic to foster profound missional impact in our time.”

— Alan Hirsch

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

37. “You cannot sell a Christendom approach to a post-Christian world. They are anti-Christian.”

— Alan Hirsch

38. “Currently, young Christians reach adulthood bored with church experience, and with little or no sense of their calling as missionaries.”

— Alan Hirsch

39. “Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It.”

— Alan Hirsch

40. “Worship that is in some way divorced from mission is counterfeit worship.”

— Alan Hirsch

41. “Building community for its own sake is like attending a cancer support group without having cancer.”

— Alan Hirsch

42. “Go among the people. Don’t assume you know what church looks like.”

— Alan Hirsch

43. “A retreatist spirituality is not a spirituality that can, or will, transform the world in Jesus’s name.”

— Alan Hirsch

44. “The kingdom of God is a crash-bang opera: the king is dramatic, demanding, and unavoidable.”

— Alan Hirsch

45. “Heroes are important not only because they symbolize what we believe to be important, but because they also convey universal truths about personal self-discovery and self-transcendence, one’s role in society, and the relation between the two.”

— Alan Hirsch

46. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

47. “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.”

— Alan Hirsch

48. “The fact is that if Jesus’s future kingdom is secure, those who trust in its coming will enact it now.”

— Alan Hirsch

49. “At some point preoccupation with safety can get in the way of living full lives.”

— Alan Hirsch

50. “Nowadays we raise our children in a cocoon of domesticated security, far from any sense of risk or adventure.”

— Alan Hirsch