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| Forgotten Ways, The: Reactivating the Missional Church | 
 enlarge | Author: Alan Hirsch
Creator: Leonard Sweet
Publisher: Brazos Press
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $11.50
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New (38) Used (9) from $11.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  26 reviews
Sales Rank: 8775
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 304
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.8
ISBN: 1587431645
Dewey Decimal Number: 266
EAN: 9781587431647
ASIN: 1587431645
Publication Date: January 1, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New
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| Customer Reviews:
 Very Good, Very Deep November 16, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
This title is the best I have read yet on the missional church concept. While it is not an easy read, it does provides a multitude of insights on what it means for the church to go beyond the four walls of the church. Hirsch begins by defining the true missionary spirit of being a follower of Jesus Christ. He describes how the dawn of the age of Christendom stifled that spirit, and how the church has suffered enormously as a result. He then speaks of "Apostolic Genius" and "Communitas," two phenomenons both rooted in the early, New Testament church prior to Christendom.
This book is a great read. Just be forewarned: it will shake to the core the traditional, "attractional" way of doing church!
 Personal, Missional, Narrow, Verbose, but Helpful October 20, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't know what it is with some of the missional books being published these days, but their titles can be so out of touch and ambiguous (cf. Off-Road Disciplines, Creps). The Forgotten Ways: reactivating the missional church (subtitle is much better) is no exception to lousy titles, but the content is certainly thought provoking and generally summative of some missiological thought (McGavran, Walls, Bosch, etc).
In Section one, Hirsch brings the reader into his own missional and not-so-missional story as missionary and church planter. At one point he claims to have planted 6 churches in 7 years, not all of them successful. Hirsch draws on his rich and varied experience as a church planter to critique recent models of church in the West. He concludes that in order to have a truly missional church one must possess Apostolic Genius (AG. another naming failure), which he describes as "something that belongs to the gospel itself and therefore to the whole people who live by it."
AG is comprised of six components of missional DNA: 1) missional incarnational impulse 2) disciple making 3) communitas 4) organic systems 5) apostolic environment and, at the center 6) Jesus is Lord. The longest and Second section of the book is devoted to defining and describing just what and how this mDNA is and does.
Praise: Hirsch creatively combines elements which appear to be essential to missional movements, while incorporating the frequently neglected theological center of mission: monotheistic christology (cf. Wright, Bauckham) or as Hirsch puts it christocentric monotheism.
Critique: Despite the incarnational component of his mDNA, Hirsch ends up baptizing the decentralized, "organic" modes of church and incorrectly oversimplifies the connections between the early church and the missional church. On page 64 he includes a chart that reflects his stated simplification, drawing tight parallels to the Apostolic church and the missional church of the past ten years. Two issues arise here: 1) the NT does not concretize any form of church, allowing for diverse expressions of church 2) the missional movement is only ten years old and it remains to be seen how much in common it will have with the early church.
SIMPLY PROFOUND October 18, 2007
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
Hirsch dose a masterful job in showing how the church of the western world has forgotten the way to be a Christ follower. As Hirsch puts it, "... all God's people carry within themselves the same potencies that energized the early Christian movement and that are currently manifest in the underground Chinese church." (Hirsch, 2006, p. 22) Hirsh then introduces the term: Apostolic Genius which the primary missional strength of the gospel and God's people. He expresses that this strength lies dormant in each Christian and local church that seeks to follow Jesus faithfully in any time. The problem, he rightly recognizes is that today's Christian culture has forgotten how to access and trigger it. Hirsh writes this book to help reactivate it so Christians can transform the world by living transformed lives.
Hirsch identifies in the book six simple but interrelating elements of missional DNA, forming a complex and living structure. They are: 1) Jesus Is Lord: At the center and circumference of every significant Jesus movement there exists this very simple confession. 2) Disciple Making: This is the life-long task of becoming like Jesus by embodying his message. Hirsch believes that this is perhaps where many of our efforts fail. Disciple making is an irreplaceable core task of the church and needs to be structured into every church's basic formula. 3) Missional-Incarnational Impulse: Hirsch examines missional movements that seed and embed the gospel into different cultures and people groups. 4) Apostolic Environment: This relates to the type of leadership and ministry required to sustain metabolic growth and impact. 5) Organic Systems: Determining appropriate structures for metabolic growth. 6) Communitas, not Community: Too much concern with safety and security, combined with comfort and convenience, has lulled us out of our true calling and purpose.
Hirsch wisely spends much attention as to how in the modern and the postmodern situation, the church is forced into the role of being little more than a vendor of religious goods and services. Which is why many of it's members have become passive. The church is supposed to radically change society and to do so we must tell an alternative story
Hirsch ends quoting church consultant Bill Easum. Easum is right when he notes that "following Jesus into the mission field is either impossible or extremely difficult for the vast majority of congregations in the Western world because of one thing: They have a systems story that will not allow them to take the first step out of the institution into the mission field, even though the mission field is just outside the door of the congregation." (p. 252)
The Forgotten Ways--rated top new release in missiology! October 4, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
The Forgotten Ways by Australian church planter and founder of Forge Mission Training Network, Alan Hirsch, is his second book calling for a complete reorientation of the mission of the church. This books probes to the core of the underlying DNA issues.
Throughout The Forgotten Ways, the author gives us a vocabulary and vision that can help defrag Christianitys clogged hard drive and restore the churchs Apostolic Genius. The heart of what Hirsch calls Apostolic Genius is the net result of the convergence of the six organic elements of mDNA (m = missional).
Hirsch makes his case in two phases: Section One, The Making of a Missionary, sets the scene by honestly sharing his own frustrations in church planting, and tracks the seminal ideas and experiences that have guided his thinking and fired his imagination. His concern is to take the reader through a missional reading of the situation of the church in the West (23). His distillation of their exploration and experience into five key biblical functions of the church (46-48) is masterful. Chapter 2 is the macro view, exploring the missional situation in which we find ourselves at a strategic and translocal level.
In Section Two, A Journey to the Heart of Apostolic Genius, traces Hirschs research which led him to discover what he calls Apostolic GeniusXthe built-in life force and guiding mechanism of Gods people, and the living components that make it up, which he tags missional DNA (m = missional) (18). He provides expansive chapters unpacking each of the six interrelating absolutely irreducible components (24):
XThe Heart of it all: Jesus is Lord, posits that the very simple biblical, first century confession is central to every significant Jesus movement in history. (chapter 3)
XDisciple Making, recenters the irreplaceable core task of the church which needs to be restructured into every churchs basic formula (24) on a global-local scale. (chapter 4)
XMissional-Incarnational Impulse, explores the twin impulses of remarkable missional movements, namely, the dynamic outward thrust and the related deepening impulse (25).(chapter 5)
XApostolic Environment, describes why and how apostolic influence is responsible for shaping and nurturing the fertile environment that initiates and maintains the phenomenal movements of God. He explains clearly how ethos or environment relates to the type of leadership and ministry required to sustain metabolic growth and impact. (chapter 6)
XOrganic Systems, examines the next element in mDNA, the idea of appropriate structures for metabolic growth. Here Hirsch finds that remarkable Jesus movements have the feel of a movement, have the structure of a network, and spread like viruses (25). Hirsch is equally adept at linking the scriptural pattern with church renewal writers such as Howard Snyder and William Easum, as he is synthesizing the movement dynamics described by David Bosch and David Garrison, or distilling the essence of current leadership authors such as Dee Hock, Malcolm Gladwell and Margaret Wheatley. (chapter 7)
XCommunitas, not Community, unveils how the most vigorous forms of community are those that come together in the context of a shared ordeal or those that define themselves as a group with a mission that lies beyond themselvesXthus initiating a risky journey (25). Missionaries will relate their experience in church planting to Hirschs explanation of the biblical basis of communitas. (chapter 8)
The global missions community is indebted to Hirsch for this seminal book. It is packed with solid exegesis and theological reflection, provides a fresh reading of contemporary Christian authors, and careful synthesis and evaluation of paradigm-shifting authors from the leadership field. There is rich insight in each chapter for field practitioners and a fresh synthesis of the essentials of biblical missiology that we have not seen David Bosch 15 years ago.
Great Seminary Text June 15, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
If I were still teaching my seminary courses "Revitalization of the Local Church" and "The Gospel in Western Culture," which I'm not ("My Calvin Seminary Story"), I would assign this book as a primary text for the former and at least as a secondary text for the latter. Every seminary (and Bible college) student should read this before going into ministry. I certainly don't agree with everything Hirsch writes, but he raises issues in a cogent way that no other book matches. He's telling preachers that the local church must become smaller before it grows, and "church growth" as it's been dished up is just plain unbiblical. For those looking for corporate management models, this is not the book for them. In many ways I see it as a companion to my own book Left Behind in a Megachurch World: How God Works through Ordinary Churches. I look for this book to become a pivotal text for training ministers------and for guiding those in the congregation who are seeking a pastor. Here in America we're soon celebrating the grand holiday of patriotic American Christendom----the 4th of July. Give FORGOTTEN WAYS as a holiday gift to your pastor or elder or head deacon, or buy it for yourself and pass it around.
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