Podcast - Episode 9 - The Forgotten Ways - Chapter 1

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We have moved into a discussion of The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch, which explores "reactivating the missional church" and explores the missional DNA which exists in all churches, planted there by the Holy Spirit.

I would love to have you in on the discussion. If you have any posts, comments, or questions about chapter 2 or 3 of The Forgotten Ways, leave them in the comments here or make a new post if you want.

Here are my notes for the Chapter 1:

The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch

Hirsch divides chapter one into threes of his journey with the church.

Intro quotes

Phase 1: From Death to Chaos

“Everything in my education was geared toward maintaining the established, more institutional forms of the church. The vast majority of the subjects on offer were theoretical and were taught by theoreticians, not practitioners. So we had to learn on the run, so to speak. On reflection, perhaps this is the only way we really learn, but certainly at the time this was the way that God chose to somehow make a missionary out of me.” – p 31

“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 decided that all we would do was build an authentic Jesus community where all who came our way would experience love, acceptance, and forgiveness, no matter what – we did know a little about grace as we had all experienced it so convincingly ourselves.” – p 31

“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.” – p 31

Phase 2: Becoming a Church-Planting Church

“Toward the end of this phase, we had begun to articulate something of the ideas that energized us, and we had developed something of a self-conscious “model.” We felt that we had to become a church-planting church with a regional organization.” – p 32

“SMRC was fairly unique, possibly even in world context, in that up to 40 percent of the community came from the gay and lesbian subcultures. What made this more unique was that we did not take a politically correct, pro-gay stance, theologically speaking, but graciously called all people into a lifelong following of Jesus, which for some would involve lifelong celibacy; others whose desire and will were strong pursued heterosexual relationships. We still remained committed to ministry on the fringes, only now it was to alienated young adults and gay people.” – p 33

“We then experimented with house churches in the working-class western suburbs of Melbourne, but sadly, for various reasons, they did not sustain.” – p 33

“The last missional experiment of this phase was for me (and I believe for the church as well) a decisive one. Over the years up to this point two critical things had taken place. First, SMRC, the “mother ship” so to speak, had settled down somewhat from the more heady days of wild and chaotic community. And second, we had become known as a “cool church,” and as a result lots of middle-class Christians, who for understandable reasons were alienated from the institutional church in various ways, had made their way into the community and settled down in it. So while maintaining its “groovy” and somewhat alternative vibe, South had inadvertently become safe and more self-consciously yuppie and, as a result, had lost something of its edge. Without anyone noticing, we had lost our original call and missional heart. – p 33


“The Christendom mode of engagement, what I will later describe as evangelistic-attractional, was simply not up to the type of missionary challenge presented to us by our surrounding context: a context that required more of a cross-cultural missionary methodology than the “outreach and in-drag” model we had been using to that point.” – p 34

“A combination of recent research in Australia indicates that about 10-15 percent of that population is attracted to what we can call the contemporary church growth model. In other words, this model has significant “market appeal” to about 12 percent of our population.” – p 34

“Demographically speaking, they tend to cater largely to what might be called the “family-values segment” – good, solid, well-educated citizens who don’t abuse their kids, who pay their taxes, and who live largely, what can be called a suburban lifestyle.” – p 35

“With these statistics in mind we can intuit that in America the current “market appeal” of the contemporary church growth model might be up to 35 percent (as opposed to 12 percent in Australia). But even if it is at this level of appeal, it is decreasing. It’s time for a radical rethink taking into account both the strategic and the missional implications.” – p 36

“The vast majority of evangelical churches, perhaps up to 95 percent, subscribe to the contemporary church growth approach in their attempts to grow the congregation, in spite of the fact that successful applications of this model remain relatively rare.” – p 36

“And that’s tragic, because it doesn’t seem to work for most of our churches and for the majority of our populations. In fact, it has become a source of frustration and guilt, because most churches do not have the combination of factors that make for a successful application of the model.” – p 36

“Thus in Australia we have the somewhat farcical situation of 95 percent of evangelical churches tussling with each other to reach 12 percent of the population. And this becomes a significant missional problem because it raises the question, “What about the vast majority of the population (in Australia’s case, 85 percent; in the US, about 65 percent) that report alienation from precisely that form of church?” How do they access the gospel if they reject this form of church? And what would church be life for them in their various settings? Because what is clear from the research in Australia, at least, is that when surveyed about what they think about the contemporary church growth expression of Christianity, the 85 percent range from being blasé (“good for them, but not for me”) to total repulsion (“I would never go there”). At best, we can make inroads on the blasé; we can’t hope to reach the rest of the population with this model – they are simply alienated from it and don’t like it for a whole host of reasons.” – p 37

“For Melbourne, where every third business has to do with food, and which has more cafes per capita than any other city in the world, we concluded that the missional church must seek to redeem the social pattern/rhythm of such spaces – reinvesting it with religious significance – and express what it means to be a people of God in a café-bar context.” – p 37

“How do we know we are being fruitful? With what measures will we as God’s people be weighed? How does God assess our effectiveness? (Is that not the inner meaning of judgment?) Because evidently he does (John 15:1-8; Revelation 1-3) and will (1 Peter 4:17) judge his people. – p 40

“A true encounter with God in Jesus must result in
• Worship, defined as offering our lives back to God through Jesus.
• Discipleship, defined as following Jesus and become increasingly like him (Christlikeness)
• Mission, defined as extending the mission (the redemptive purposes) of God through the activities of his people.” – 41

“But for us, the central failure lay primarily in our inability to “make disciples.” Our worship and mission were therefore enfeebled; they had no real foundations. I came to the horrifying conclusion that we had built much of SMRC on sand because we did not build it on discipleship (Matt 7:26).


Phase 3: From a Church to an Organic Movement

“We can’t seem to make disciples based on a consumerists approach to faith. We plainly cannot consume our way into discipleship.” – p 45

“We did transition the church over a two-year period by using a healthy model of change where all were invited to give feedback and participate. – p 48

Notes

My Note: The question here is “Where do you want to invest your relationships and your life?” The restaurant not to mention the classes would consume you, which would be ok if you and your family wanted to be consumed by it. The question is where and how do you invest your relationships to build outreach and discipleship?

My Note: Is he saying that for the foundation to be built on discipleship that the church must be built as an organic movement?