The Forgotten Ways

Reactivating Apostolic Movements

Hirsch, Alan

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781493404728
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Alan Hirsch's paradigm-shifting classic remains the definitive statement of the church as dynamic missional movement. The bestselling first edition ignited a conversation about how to harness the power of movements for the future growth of the church. In this major update, Hirsch shares significant insights gained along the way, provides fresh new examples of growing churches, and reflects on the last ten years of the missional movement. The new edition has been thoroughly updated and revised throughout and includes charts, diagrams, an expanded glossary of terms, new appendices, an index, a new foreword by Ed Stetzer, and a new afterword by Jeff Vanderstelt. Known for his innovative approach to mission, Hirsch is widely acknowledged as a thought leader and mission strategist for churches across the Western world. He considers The Forgotten Ways the guiding work to all of his other writings. The book explores the factors that come together to generate high-impact, exponentially explosive, spiritually vibrant Jesus movements in any time and context. This extensive update to Hirsch's influential work offers a system of six vital keys to movements that will continue shape the future of the missional movement for years to come.

SECTION 1

THE MAKING OF A MISSIONARY

1

A View from the Edge

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Confessions of a Frustrated Missionary

If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A great deal more failure is the result of an excess of caution than of bold experimentation with new ideas. The frontiers of the kingdom of God were never advanced by men and women of caution.

—J. Oswald Sanders

What we have is . . . a pagan society whose public life is ruled by beliefs which are false. And because it is not a pre-Christian paganism, but a paganism born out of the rejection of Christianity, it is far tougher and more resistant to the Gospel than the pre-Christian paganisms with which foreign missionaries have been in contact during the past two hundred years. Here, without possibility of question, is the most challenging missionary frontier of our time.

—Lesslie Newbigin

In true biblical fashion, a reliable understanding of the nature of things comes out of a narrative—a story involving God’s dealings with human beings in the rough and tumble of actual human history, including that of our own stories. In setting out to explore the seminal ideas of this book, I need to place this search into the context of my own life because it is out of my own personal struggle in leadership and mission, and in ongoing efforts to lead the church into a genuine missional engagement, that I have come to the conclusions that I present in this book.

So if the reader will indulge me, I will tell you something of my story. It is a story brimful with redemption. It is about how God has shaped me in the chaos of the amazing people, communities, and organizations among which I have had the privilege to minister. I will weave various aspects of missional analysis into the narrative in the hope of painting a picture of the common dilemmas all churches are facing across the Western world.

“South”

Without doubt my most formative experience of local ministry was my involvement in a remarkable inner-city church called South Melbourne Restoration Community (SMRC), of which I was privileged to serve as team leader for about fifteen years. It’s a little difficult to speak for much of the prior 140-year history of this church because I was only an addition who came much later—in 1989, to be exact. But for the purposes of this book, the important thing to note is that this church, originally called South Melbourne Church of Christ, had gone through the now all-too-familiar pattern of birth (in the late nineteenth century), growth (in the early part of the twentieth), and the rapid decline that has marked so many churches in the postwar period throughout the Western world. When my wife, Deb, and I were called there as rookie ministers in 1989, we were the last-ditch effort to turn it around. If we weren’t successful, the church board had decided to call it quits and close up shop. Because of its relatively desperate situation, this church was willing to become a place out of which a whole new community was to develop. And it is this story with which I most identify.

This particular story of redemption starts with a somewhat zany, wild-eyed Greek guy named George. George was a drug dealer and a “roadie” (a sound technician for bands), among other things. He had accumulated a number of parking fines that he was not disposed to pay. According to state law at the time, a person could “do time” in lieu of paying fines, so George decided that this would be preferable to parting with his hard-earned drug dollars. He chose to go to jail for ten days rather than pay the fine. Now George was a bit of a seeker (some called him a “tripper”), and he loved to philosophize about the nature of things. At this point in his life, he was exploring a wide variety of religious ideologies. At the time of his imprisonment, he had worked his way through a long list of religions, and it was time to come to grips with the Bible. So he took his mom’s big, fat Greek family Bible with him to the jail. To his great surprise, while paging through it he encountered God (or rather God encountered him), and he found new life in Jesus right there in the prison cell.

On release, he hooked up with his brother John, an equally mad radical, and he too gave his life to Christ and became a follower. With characteristic zeal the two of them soon developed a list of all their friends, contacts, and people they sold drugs to and, armed with a big black KJV Bible and a Late Great Planet Earth video (which they used more effectively than the Bible),1 they met with all the people on their list. Within six months about fifty people had given their lives to the Lord! One of them was later to become my remarkable wife, Debra, and another was her sister Sharon. They were coming down from an LSD trip when they were exposed to the video and decided for Jesus. How could you not, watching that movie on acid!

It was an amazing thing, and I mention it here because it says so much about how God works at the fringes of society, in this case through the radical obedience of two slightly wacky Greek brothers, George and John. It was as if, through George and John, God had scooped a people to himself from Melbourne’s netherworld. In the group were gays, lesbians, goths, drug addicts, prostitutes, and, yes, some relatively ordinary people, although all were rabid party animals. This untamed group of people, following their latent spiritual instincts, immediately began to cluster in houses and build a common life together. It was at this time, about six months after George’s radical conversion, that I came into the picture. Although I had come from a similar background, I was then a first-year seminary student looking for something radical to do. Through a series of events, and much to my surprise, I was called to lead this crazy group. On reflection, this connection with the group was to become a defining motif in my life and in my journey to becoming a missional leader.

That community rocked. And because the community would take in just about anyone who wanted a bed, the main house—thought to have been previously used as a brothel—was crammed full of some really strange people. At times there were drug deals going on in the back rooms and Bible studies in the lounge that was filled to overflowing. John and George were arrested a few times for disturbing the peace while noisily trying to cast demons out of some unwitting victim in the backyard. And if this all sounds a bit shocking, let me say that for all the chaos and ambiguity in it all, there was something wonderfully apostolic about that group of people. The group had a huge impact on everyone who came into contact with it. The Holy Spirit was almost tangibly present at times. It seems at least he was very willing to be present in the chaos. That experience also introduced us all to a model of radical ministry in the form of a remarkable pastor, Pat Kavanagh. Pat, an older man who came from a very different world, was a model of redemptive love in the midst of the mess, and it is largely because of him that the community survived and was transformed.

To cut a long story short, most of this group ended up joining us at South Melbourne Church of Christ when Deb and I were called there to serve as pastors after completing seminary training. It is here where these two narratives, and in many ways the two alternate images of church—the one traditional and declining, the other grassroots and vigorous—came into contact. And thus begins the remarkable story of which I was so privileged to partake. What is quite remarkable is that here, latent in this spontaneous, chaotic, and unchurched group of people, lay the seeds of an agile, evolving, missional movement, long before we even knew that such concepts existed. And while it did take us a bit of time, with lots of reflective experimentation, to get there, I believe I can say that “South” (now called Red Church) is still in the process of becoming a genuine missional movement in the city of Melbourne, Australia.

And because this is a book about missional dynamics, it is appropriate to comment on a significant characteristic of Jesus movements at this point. In the study of the history of missions, one can even be formulaic about asserting that great missionary movements seem to always begin at the fringes of the church, among the poor and the marginalized, and seldom at the center. But there’s more to it than just mission; most great movements of mission have inspired significant and related movements of renewal in the life of the church. And for this reason it becomes vital that the church move out of its safety zones and engage in real mission on the margins. It seems that when the church engages at its edges, it almost always brings life to the center. This says a whole lot about God and the gospel, and the church will do well to heed it (more about this in chap. 7, “Liminality and Communitas”).

So what I propose to do with the rest of this chapter is to try to articulate the series of adaptations that had to take place for this fledging phenomenon to become a genuine missional movement. I will embed some of the rationale for these various stages in the narrative to help the reader discern the evolution of a movement in the story of South. I hope that my narrative will illuminate the reader’s own personal narrative and his or her experience of church. Three distinct stages in the life of this community can be discerned.

Phase 1: From Death to Chaos

This phase involved the reseeding of the established church with the new and more missional one. I must say that nothing in my seminary training had prepared me for the experience of those years. Everything in my education was geared toward maintaining the established, more institutional forms of the church. The vast majority of the subjects I was required to take tended to the theoretical and were taught by theoreticians, not practitioners. So we had to learn on the job and on the run, so to speak. On reflection, perhaps this is the only way anyone really learns, but certainly at the time this was the way that God chose to somehow make a missionary out of me.

Something about context: South Melbourne is located in the shadow of the central business district of Melbourne, and like many such locations across the Western world, it has become a mixture of yuppies, older working-class folk, subcultural groupings, a large gay population, and upper-class snobs. It was a challenge, to say the least. And I am not ashamed to admit that I had no real idea of what I was doing. There was very little in the way of functional denominational strategy or successful models to refer to for mission in these contexts. So, in terms of approach, we simply decided that all we would do was build an authentic Jesus community where everyone who came our way would experience Jesus’s (and therefore our) love, acceptance, and forgiveness, no matter what. After all, we did know a little about grace, as we had all experienced it so convincingly ourselves. On this alone, on a real promise and experience of a grace-filled community, the church grew. We attracted just about every kind of freak in the neighborhood, and soon people began to cluster in communal houses. We had no real outreach programs per se. We simply “did community” and developed a certain ethos based on grace for the broken.

As the church grew and developed, the older folk who were part of the original history of the place began to struggle with all the mess and new life in their community. But to their credit, they did recognize that the future of the church lay in the newer forms of ecclesia (church) that God was birthing in their midst. They did not actively resist to the point of ejecting the new, something that happens all too often in similar situations. In the end, this new evolution of the church became the predominant one, and thus begins the next phase.

Phase 2: Becoming a Church-Planting Church

From very early on, God had birthed into us a sense of responsibility to those outside the church. In part this arose out of the fact that we all knew where we had come from and what God had done in us; in part it was an instinctive sense of missional obligation. At the time we had no real language for this obligation, but we somehow intuited that we were “pregnant” with other churches that would reach unreached people groups in our city. We had a particular sense of calling to those people groups that made up the subcultural context in which we lived, the poor and the marginalized—people groups from which most of us had come, and people who would seldom, if ever, darken the door of the established church as we know it. Again, in doing this we were simply following the apostolic instincts that I have come to believe lie latent in the very gospel itself. In this case, these latent instincts expressed themselves in a desire to pass on the faith by creating new communities that were relevant to the subcultural context but faithful to the ancient gospel.

Because of this drive to plant churches, at this time we began to discern that fundamental change was going on in Western culture. It was the early 1990s, and postmodern philosophy was a cultural phenomenon increasingly felt at the level of popular culture. One of the major effects of the modern-postmodern split on the cultural level was a breakdown of a cohesive macroculture into many different subcultures or tribes, or simply subculturization.2 So much for the grand cultural phenomena; on the ground in inner-city Melbourne, we had intuitively grasped that some form of neo-tribalization was taking place. There was a shift from people identifying with a large traditional grouping defined by overarching metanarratives (e.g., trade unionism, political ideology, national identities, religious groupings) to that of myriad smaller, emerging subcultural groups defined around anything from cultural interest to sexua...