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The Forgotten Ways: reactivating the missional church, by Alan Hirsch
'There are some books good enough to read to the end. There
are only a few books good enough to read to the end of time. The Forgotten
Ways is one of them.'
- Leonard Sweet, in the introduction.
In AD 100, there were only twenty five thousand Christians in the world. BY AD 310, (the time of Constantine) there were twenty million. How did they do it? How did they grow in two hundred years from a small marginal movement to the most significant religious force in the Roman Empire?
In 'The Forgotten Ways,' Alan Hirsch looks back to the early Church, and what was different. What have we forgotten - and how can we recover it?
He also looks at the example of the Chinese Church: all the missionaries were thrown out of China; buildings were confiscated and senior national leaders killed - and the Church has grown to sixty million people or more.
It's as if persecution somehow forces Christians to see the difference between what is essential and what is peripheral. In the fires, the peripheral things are stripped away, and the focus on central realities is restored.
As well as the early Church and the Chinese Church, Hirsch also illustrates this book from his own experience as a church planter.
At the heart of Hirsch's model of the ways we have forgotten, there is Jesus as Lord - not just an object of belief, but a person to follow. Clustered around this central reality, there are five key themes or principles:
- disciple making
- missional-incarnational impulse
- apostolic environment (what kind of leadership?)
- organic systems (what kind of structures? Network or movement rather than institution)
- communitas rather than community.
This last point needs a bit of explaining: community can be inward looking and self-absorbed. But communitas - which goes beyond community - is forged in conflict Hirsch says:
'The most vigorous forms of community are those that come together in the context of a shared ordeal of those that define themselves as a group with a mission that lies beyond themselves.'
I can't recommend this book too highly. Leonard Sweet is right: it's a book worth reading to the end of time.
This doesn't mean I agree with all of it. In particular, I think the words 'apostle' and 'apostolic' have been so hijacked by a particular way of thinking that it becomes very problematic to use them today. The bottom line is that I don't believe there are apostles walking the earth today in the same sense as the first twelve plus Paul were apostles. To talk about 'apostles' paves the way for all kinds of authoritarian nonsense.
But if you talk instead about visionary leaders, or missional leaders, there really isn't a problem. And I think this is what Hirsch is talking about: missional leaders. Don't let the use of the word 'apostle' scare you off - or stop you listening to what he has to say. It's too important for that.
Author Alan Hirsch is the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network, and the co-author, with Michael Frost, of 'The Shaping of Things to Come: innovation and mission for the 21st century Church.'
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