Posted: 09/03/2007 at 5:43pm | IP Logged

Alan Hirsch Rediscovers the Forgotten Ways

by Steve Eastman, OpenHeaven.com TOP News

Alan Hirsch is captivated with an idea -- the church is empowered with the ability to function as God intends.  Somehow much of the “how-to” was forgotten after the first century, but Alan believes it is still in the church’s DNA.  His seminary training did little to prepare him for this discovery, which he details in The Forgotten Ways. 

Alan’s book is partly auto-biographical.  This is unavoidable because God taught him these truths through the school of experience, beginning with his pastorate in Melbourne, Australia.  OpenHeaven.com spoke with Alan Hirsch recently from his new home in California.

You’ve been through many paradigm shifts since arriving as pastor of South Melbourne Church of Christ in 1989.  How did your understanding of how to do church begin to change?

I began to see my world as a missionary would.  In the same way as when a missionary goes to an unreached people group in Papua, New Guinea or Africa, you begin to look at your context in terms of cross-cultural dynamics.  Once you start thinking as a missionary, everything else seems to change around you.  It’s kind of a conversion experience I think, in the sense of the way we do church. 

We know that in missionary settings when the church operates attractionally, it extracts people from their environment.   That’s one of the big challenges – how to communicate cross-culturally in a missionary context?  Then you have to take into account the post-modern shift, tribalization in society and the post-Christian experience of people in the West.  All that begins to take place once you begin to think like a missionary.

South Melbourne Church of Christ morphed into South Melbourne Restoration Community.  What did the name change represent in terms of the church’s DNA?

When we first arrived there, it was a church that was in classic decline from the post-war period.  This is very classic, at least for churches in our part of the world where inner city churches experience massive-decline.  That would be true in most Western contexts.  I’m not so sure about America.  The Church of Christ, the Christian Church and the Disciples of Christ – we don’t have those three labels, just the one unit over there.  It was kind of like a Baptist church.  It was a traditional kind of church in that regard.  Most of the people were over 60.  There weren’t very many of them anyway.

That church soon disappeared under the weight of change.  We had an influx of new people.  We became a more progressive, church-growth kind of church.  We took radical community very seriously.  We had people living in various houses up and down the street.  Many of us came from the edges of society – at one time about 80 percent from drug abuse situations and about 45 percent from the gay/lesbian subculture.  There were punks and a lot of street people and prostitutes.

Could you describe your experiment with market place ministry in Melbourne, which has the reputation for more restaurants per square mile than anywhere else?  How did the failure of the Elevation Café spur you on to greater insights?

It was a very depressing thing for us, not only because of the failure of the restaurant.  For us the bigger failure was the failure of discipleship.  We were in a bit of strife at the time.  We weren’t asking for money.  We were just inviting people to drop by with a friend, buy some food and a drink or two, listen to the band and enjoy the setting.  We discovered that probably only a third responded very well and another third were mildly supportive.  I don’t think the other third even turned up. 

For me, this exposed a major flaw.  We weren’t making disciples, people who could make a decision for a call other than the consumer’s call.  At that point, it led to a major rethinking of how we do church and how we could work it around to become a disciple-making community as well as doing mission together.

God spoke to you about the percentage of a church that is active and the percentage that is passive.  How do you, as a traveling speaker and consultant, expect churches to respond?

The larger they become, not everyone can be part of the ministry.  It actually invites people to be very passive in the equation of church.  Most people see the Sunday experience as the majority experience of church.  When you go into any church on a Sunday, most people are very passive.  They’re an audience really, not a participating community.  The church becomes a provider of religious consumer services.  It’s a major challenge for people to rethink how they see church. 

For some, it’s quite an eye-opener.  A lot of people think -- that’s exactly what we experience.  No wonder we can’t seem to get people to activate missionally or make disciples because the very model of church asks us to be passive.

But it’s very hard for a person who has thrown their whole life into developing the attractional church to swallow this analysis, which I think is sound. 

Many people who, for one reason or another, are disillusioned with common models of church in the Americas, Europe and Australia long for the days of the first century.  Others believe the longings are naïve and useless in today’s world.  The Forgotten Ways provides a counter-example to the “realists.”  Why is the example of the underground church in China so easily dismissed?

They say that’s a pre-modern society, it took place largely among the peasant population, and the West is a very different thing.  I totally agree that the West is extremely different with post-modern and post-Christian characteristics.  The West is largely educated with democracies and market-based economies.  I use China as an example to understand the phenomenon of apostolic settings and movements with growth curves that are highly significant.

What China taught me is they had what we’ve got.  They got institutionalism from us during the colonization of China.  They were quite comfortable with it.  In fact Confucianism lends itself to high tradition and authority.  When Mao Tse-tung comes in, and takes all that out, the Chinese church discovers a potency that lies dormant within them that I call “apostolic genius.”  A combination of factors comes together that seems to create spontaneous expansion.

My assumption is that apostolic genius is already in every Christian and every church, but is dormant.  That’s why the book is called The Forgotten Ways.  Those factors are there.  We have just forgotten how to use them.  That’s what China teaches us.  Can that happen for us?  I would say, “Yes,” but it might be different.  The West is different in a cultural context, but we can approximate it.  Any church leader can, by focusing on the six elements and bringing them together, catalyze apostolic genius. 

You frequently use the word “missional” in The Forgotten Ways.  A lot of people are clueless about what that means.  Could you explain the term as an alternative to religious consumerism?

David Bosch, a South African missiologist, reframed our understanding of God as a missionary God.   “Mission” comes from the Latin word for “sent.”  We find in the Scriptures that even before the foundation of the world, God sends His Son.  So the Son is pre-ordained to be a missionary.  The Son says (John 20:21b NKJV), “As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.”  The church is a sent people.  Every Christian is sent.  Mission comes out of the very being of God. 

Let’s talk about the six elements of apostolic genius.  You list them as:

·         Jesus is Lord

·         Disciple Making

·         Missional-Incarnational Impulse

·         Apostolic Environment

·         Organic Systems

·         Communitas, Not Community

What did “Jesus is Lord” mean to the early church and what implications does it have for today?

It was their primary confession.  It was an all encompassing claim and clashed with the claims of Caesar.  We find the early Christians became political subversives because they refused to submit to the overlordship of Caesar.

I’m writing a book now with Michael Frost called Sweet Jesus.  It looks at how our idea of Jesus determines the shape and dynamic of the church.  How we conceive of Jesus’ lordship determines the image and the shape of the church. 

We’ve already touched on disciple-making.  What are some ways the modern church can implement it?

First of all a church has to define what they mean by a “disciple?”  For me, it is the process of becoming more and more Christ-like in our lives.  It is a fundamental task of the church.  We might veer away from doing the entertainment type stuff on a Sunday.  We need to put our energies into mentoring and developing other people.  That can be done in various ways.  Church Multiplication Associates (Neil Cole’s organization) uses Life Transformation Groups.  They all read a significant section of Scripture, pray together, support each other and, whenever possible, see each other.

The “missional/incarnational impulse” is another term most Christians do not instantly recognize.  Why is it important that they do?

This is probably some of the weightiest theology to follow.  The missional/incarnational impulse is weighted in the mission of God.  It’s not so much the church has a mission, but the mission has a church.  It requires some sort of outward-bound movement in the people of God.  We are not meant to stay put.

“Incarnational” is how God engaged the world.  The prototypal model is Jesus.  He took up residence among us.  He was thirty years in the neighborhood.  He fully took on what it meant to be a first century Jew.  That sets the model for a Christian.  We are a sent people.  That is the outward bound impulse.  The deepening impulse is getting down into the culture.  It’s incarnational.

We have to take the culture of the host community very seriously.  There are literally thousands of subcultures in Western culture.  It’s one of the aspects of post-modernity.  It’s the breaking down of homogenous culture, the tribalization of society.  In the youth subculture alone there are at least 50 to 100 identifiable subcultures.   

Once talk turns to modern day apostles, a lot of red flags go up.  That’s mostly because of past abuses.  What is the proper role of an apostle and what do you mean by “apostolic environment?”

If you want missional church you have to have a missional leadership which must include the five-fold (Ephesians 4:11).  The apostolic both generate movement and hold it together.  You take them out of the equation and you can’t, in my opinion, have a healthy movement.

The apostolic approach models on Jesus. When you look at the power dynamics that are found in Him, it disturbs all normal notions of power.  Jesus doesn’t come as a domineering king.  He says that the greatest among us should be the least.  I don’t think we as Christians are allowed the top-down approach. 

Can you explain what you mean by “organic systems?”

We need to see how God has built nature to operate.  Organic images free us from the machine-like imagery which we got from the 19^th and 20^th century science.  We need to find metaphors that are much richer by far by which to model the church.  The multiplication aspect is interesting.  Your own body will tell you this.  You started as a zygote, a single cell organism.  It multiplies itself.  There is no boss cell telling the other cells what to do.  You do have internal records called DNA.  The coding of the DNA is in the cells.  Living systems are a wonderful way to recalibrate our concepts.

How is “community” a cheap substitute for a concept you prefer, called “communitas?”

“Communitas” is a kind of community that develops in the context of a challenge, a situation that demands people restructure their lives together and become comrades to overcome or to get the job done.  In many ways I think we’ve settled down to become a much more civil community, a very safe zone.  The dynamic movements of history don’t have the same concept of community as we do today.  They see each other much more as comrades in arms than they do as people sitting in a circle and holding hands.

Put a challenge before people  If they buy into the challenge, a challenge they cannot do alone, they have to find each other and begin to work together to get the job done.  Sometimes people find themselves in a new way when they confront an ordeal as a challenge to overcome.  They become comrades, a band of brothers.

Your time in Australia seems to have come to a close.  How do you see your ministry developing in the United States?

We’ve come over here not as immigrants, but on a working visa.  We look at this as a five-year mission and then possibly back to Australia.  What I see I’ll be doing here is like what I was doing in Australia.  America is much more complex and much larger.  In my own little way I feel like I need to serve the American church.

My hope is that the American church can really activate people.  I think there’s something about America that lets it take an idea and really make it work.  I think it’s something entrepreneurial, something apostolic about the American people.

My personal mission statement is to help birth and nurture the church in Australia and beyond.