Missional Path

Excerpts from interview with Alan Hirsch in NewWineskins

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Fred: If you were asked to steer a conventional, western church on a missional path and were given the freedom to utilize or reallocate all funds and resources in the best way you felt this could be accomplished, how and what would you do? Let’s say you have three staff members and a lien-free building. And the building is located in a neighborhood where few members actually live.

Alan Hirsch: Fred, you want to get me into trouble here! The issue of change and transition into missional forms of church is fraught with many complex problems. But again, at the heart of the problem is our ‘idea of church’—the conception we have of what it means to be God’s people as a community. Part of the problem is that we have so associated our idea of church with the institutional forms of it (including programs, services, professionalization of ministry, theologies, denominational templates, etc.) that we need to at least be given the chance to experience each other as Jesus’ church divorced from the predominance of the institution of the church.

Having said this, I do believe the building can present a real problem—for one, it staticizes our idea of church. I would certainly have the building in my sights. But that would be just one thing—the heart of my strategy would be to try to communicate a more primal and organic idea of church and mission because I think that is more who we truly are meant to be. You no doubt know that wonderful quote from Antoine de Saint Extupery: "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."

The unfolding of Christianity as the means by which people are re-connected to God has nothing to do with the institutionalized idea of church in the first instance. We need to recover our most basic, and dangerous, forms of church—that of an apostolic movement. It’s the story of the church and her mission that I outline in The Forgotten Ways. I would tell and retell of that story and then let’s see what happens!

Fred: Can you talk a little about "third place communities?" How important are they to the missional mode?

Alan Hirsch:I think in the West these are absolutely vital to our mission. For those who don’t know the jargon, the first place is our homes, the second place is our work environments, and the third place is our preferred social environment. It is where you hang out when you have time to hang out. The problem for us in the West is that the first place (home) is primarily defined by our concepts of the nuclear family. The home is our fortress from the onslaughts of the world around about us. It can be a place of mission but in most cases it is severely limited because most of us do not see the family as an extended, or open, family as in ancient Mediterranean cultures of the Bible. The second place (work) is very formalized and guarded by roles you have to play if you are to get on with others and is also therefore very limited. The third place however, is a wonderful place where you can engage with people on their own turf. But as Neil Cole says, you have to be willing to sit in the smoking section if you want to do mission in our contexts. It’s a great way to get us out of our cloistered holy zones and take Jesus to where the people are. I actually think it should be our primary missional ground.

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