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- [00:00]
A
If you can define the church without Jesus, you could probably run the church without Jesus, too.
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B
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Skypod, brought to you by Holy Post Media. I'm Sky Jutani. Joining me this week is an old friend, Alan Hirsch, who is normally in Australia, but you're coming to us from New York City. Alan, welcome back to the show.
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A
Great to be with you again, bro.
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B
I can't remember when we first met or the circumstances. Probably at some Christian conference or ministry or something I was doing when I was connected to ct. But you've been in this space of helping the church for many years. I was just looking up, like, your newest bio because it's changed over the years. When you go places, how do you introduce yourself or what it is you do now?
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A
Oh, bro, that's an interesting question. I tend to now be very much more focused around helping kind of people who lead existing movements. So, like, you know, there's a certain type of thinker. We're going to get into that, and my main aim is to try and help provide what we call proof of concept. We want to see a different expression of what it means to be Jesus people in the world, one that's kind of expresses more truly what we think is more of a authentic expression, what Jesus intended, somewhat more attuned to the dynamics of growth in the New Testament itself. And, you know, just to help people think differently about what we've become so darn familiar about, which is the word church, which I kind of identify with a very distinct, you know, metaphor, you know, with a building particularly, that has captured our imagination. But I think a church ought to be something bigger, more dynamic than that.
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B
Yeah. As long as I've known you, I don't know, 15, 20 years, and the work you've done, the books you've written, the talks you've given, it has this common theme which is trying to get the church to think out of its box and reimagine what it's called to be and do in the world, apart from just its inherited structures. I know that's taken on different forms as you've moved and talked to different groups, but that. That seems to be a central calling and passion of what. And you're still doing it.
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A
Yes.
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B
So I want to talk about this. This new statement that's come out. There's a group called Modus DEI that you are connected to, and they've released a statement titled Reactivating the Church as Movement. And I know you're not solely responsible for the composition of this statement, but you participated in it. And I think it's a good place to begin this conversation. And in the preamble it says that we're facing extraordinary challenges and that we need to transcend meaning we the church. And we need to transcend inherited frameworks as we continue to pursue God's will for this generation. What are some of those inherited frameworks that you think are problematic? Or even if they're not problematic, they're not ideal for the moment we're in?
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A
Well, I mean, we can be very specific about certain aspects of it, but I think the whole. We might say that we've most of the ways that people think about church, what I call legacy thinking and legacy understanding of the church, is that we are priming ways of interpreting the church and its relationship to context. And our mission in the world. That is has been derived from probably the kind of merger between church and state that started with Constantine way back in the year 307, I think he came to power, but it was kind of solidified 70 years later where the church was literally merged with the state, entered into a different way of engaging, which of course became the only religious institution. And so much of our thinking about who we are and our relationship to context has been determined by that, even though that what we call Christendom no longer exists in a phenomenon that was started to be taken out by the French Revolution, which separated church and state. And that of course created the secular state, which kind of where the Church was put on the margins with other religions and had to compete. I guess, nonetheless, the way we think about church has still been pretty deeply entrenched by Christendom thinking. So I say it this way, that Constantine is still the emperor of our imaginations. It's still telling us how to think about ourselves. And I think much of the institution of the Church is bound up from that, even though I think it's somewhat outdated map, it doesn't interpret our territories any longer.
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B
So for those who are less familiar with Church history and just Western history, we. What I hear you saying is for the first three centuries of the Christian Church, the Church existed on the periphery. It did not have cultural power. It was an outlawed religion. And so it existed on the periphery. When Constantine came to power around 300, he brought the Church into the center of power, both political and cultural power. And for a lot of Western history, that's how the Church operated at the center of society, at the center of political and cultural power. And you're arguing that we've. We're still thinking that way and it's not helpful. And maybe we need to go back to think about the way the church operated and fulfilled its purpose before Constantine in the early centuries.
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A
Yeah. And sky, the interesting thing about that rose that, you know, like, so, like we got our thinking and Americans don't like to hear this, but most of our thinking about the church was derived from the European expression as a. The Constantinian kind of one, where the church is literally central. You can go into towns that kind of go back, you know, a couple of centuries even. You'd find that the tallest building in the center of the town or the city is the cathedral across the road. It was the town hall. And that simply signified the kind of handshake, but that no longer exists any, you know, as reality. So I say this, you know, so some. It's an American. It's going to make you gasp that you are a European derivative. The way we think about church is European. Now you want to see the future of the European derivative? I suggest you take a good vacation. Go to Europe. It's a fantastic place to visit. You really should get off the island of America and go there and you'll have a good time. But go and see if you can find Bible churches anyway. Now there are some, but you have to really look for it. In other words, that's the future of the church that we operate in. The kind of idea of church that we operate in if we don't somehow change.
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B
Well, it's interesting you say that because you're well aware of the political environment here in the US There's a significant movement on the conservative right that's trying to essentially make the church Constantinian again in and refuse together Christianity and nationalism, which is where you get Christian nationalism from. And that idea of the churches across the street from the city hall or from the center of government is exactly what some people want. And you're arguing it didn't work in Europe. People can probably tell from your accent you are not American, you're South African and Australian.
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Yes.
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B
And even in those parts of the English speaking world, the church is quite peripheral in a way that is ahead of where the US Is even. Yes, so you're speaking from experience.
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A
Yes, but true. But the reality is, I mean, South Africa, particularly the Christian nationalism, was deeply kind of cooked into the way we understood ourselves. Well, not me. I said, like I escaped from time. I was never comfortable with it. And I don't consider myself South African for that reason. As I grew up in apartheid South Africa, which actually was a Christian heresy before it was a political theory, it was again came from a theocratic understanding, Calvinistic understanding of the world, which again, the European understanding, but yes, Australia certainly struggles. The interesting thing is Americans should notice that America was started on the assumption of the separation of church and state.
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B
Right.
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A
Which is the very thing that Christian nationalism is now arguing for or implying that somehow Christian identity is bound up with being an American. So it's a different form of Christendom. But yes, it's highly problematic and it weds power with political power, ideological power, co opting the, the gospel message. And that's hugely dangerous.
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B
Right. It's, it's, it's interesting because there's a lot of critics of Christian nationalism because they believe it's ultimately un American and bad for a pluralistic democracy like the United States. But what you're saying, and what I'm saying often is it's not just bad for America, it's bad for the church.
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A
It'S bad for Christianity.
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B
Right. It's bad for the gospel and the church. And so depending on where you're starting from, you can see.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Why this is so problematic.
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A
Yeah. Okay. I just want to remind, just again, to say. Again, I. No, because I know what I'm looking at here. I was raised in apartheid South Africa, where that was rife. Now I, the other side of my. I'm very weird kind of guy. I come from a Jewish family background, so like, I come from European jewelry. My family escaped from Europe, went to South Africa frying pan, you know, from fire into the fire. And so there's all that kind of stuff in that, you know, trying to figure out, you know, Christian nationalism in Germany, which was the birthplace of the Reformation and probably the most Christian country in Europe, yet it produced Nazism. And this, of course, is what Bonhoeffer was grappling with too. And again, it was a co. Option where the church had lacked any kind of way of discerning the political, the difference between political ideology and what the church stood for. And it was in. Well, I mean, that produced for me the Holocaust, which is like a, you know, pretty, you know, so for me it's like I got both, you know, Nazism and of course the apartheid kind of regime. I know what we're looking at here. Yeah, I've seen this before, brother.
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B
I, I'm glad you mentioned that because I know there are some thoughtful advocates of Christian nationalism today, but I find that an awful lot of the people I engage both online and in person around this topic are fairly naive about history and they they, for example, they don't understand what nationalism really means. They think it's synonymous with patriotism.
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A
Yep.
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B
And it isn't. There's nationalism has a definitive historical definition that is really problematic.
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A
And the.
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B
They are also naive about not just recent history, 20th century history like Nazism and apartheid and some of the things you're speaking of that were often supported by theologies and Constantinian kind of movements, but they forget what existed prior to the Enlightenment and the wars of religion that led to the Enlightenment, that led to the founding of the United States and the freedom of religion that we appreciate today. So when they're naive of all that history, they think, oh, it'd be a great idea to have a theocratic Christian nationalist government in America because then, you know, know all the laws would be truly Christian and biblical. And what could be wrong with that? And it's rooted in naivete.
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A
Naivety, okay. Or ignorant or ignorance, if you really am.
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B
The statement goes on and uses this phrasing from periodically throughout that. I think I would love a good definition of. And I think anyone who reads it would want it. The statement says we must rediscover the movemental ecclesiology of the early church. All right, two weird words there for some people. First, ecclesiology, which if you're unfamiliar with the word, comes from ecclesia, which is the Greek word for church. So ecclesiology is the study of the church or the model of the church. But movemental is a made up word. It's something that you guys are using. What do you mean by movemental and what is movemental ecclesiology?
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A
So what we mean by movement is a much more dynamic understanding of the church. That is, I mean, there's social movements, all different kinds of movements. For me, I think we're talking about in the church is what I call a Jesus movement, where there was a certain kind of passing on of the, of the, of the story of Jesus through discipleship that was meant to be passed on to others who would be attached to Jesus and would then create this kind of phenomenon which has this capacity to spread without having necessarily all the institutional kind of structures that we normally associate with the church. Movemental, we mean something much more fluid and adaptive and contextual based. And so kind of its capacity, you kind of create different expressions in different settings of ecclesia of a church. Right. So the mental ecclesiology, perhaps the best way I can say it, if I've already mentioned, I think the Constantinian format, I simply see it as that kind of related to A certain building, but everything associated with that, which the clergy, assumptions that are cooked into that about the church's relationship to context. We call that missional relationship about, you know, the relationship of ordinary people outside the church. Coming to the church we'll call attraction, or come to us, we will look after you. The movement is more likely to go to, you know, it's missional, so it goes to people. Rather than expecting people to come to us. It would see a much more adaptive ecclesiology among this people group, as in that people group. There's common assumptions that it's a church, that what a church can express itself would be very different. So it's a very much more fluid and adaptive understanding of the church, what we mean by that. And it can scale, and the average disciple can reproduce it. So an image, I like to use a metaphor, would be in a seed is a potential for a tree. In a tree is a potential for a forest. But it's all contained in the smallest part, right? So something organic and so that the ability to scale in every one of us carries the potential of a movement. That is a great potential in the individual believer. But also Christian communities are seed pods of something much bigger and greater.
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B
Okay, and we'll come back to this in a little while because it comes up later in the statement as well. What I hear you saying is traditional understanding of ecclesiology is very focused on structures, authority structures, governing structures, leadership structures, sometimes literal structures, buildings and movement. Ecclesiology is arguing, don't be so fixated on replicating structures. The movement is, to use your word, fluid and adaptive to the environment in which the church exists and needs to accommodate to those realities. We'll come back to this, but I'm curious, because liquids are great, fluids are great, but when they have no container, they just make a mess. So what are the limits on that? We'll come back to it. Part 5 of the statement is titled Healthy Multiplication, and it says that we need. This is your point earlier? Every. Every seed has the potential for a tree, and with every tree, there's potential for an entire forest. In the same way, God has created every disciple and church with the spiritual potential to reproduce fruitful, maturing disciples and churches. No doubt some people who are listening to this episode and hear about multiplication, even healthy multiplication, they're going to recoil at hearing that, because many people have found themselves, especially in the evangelical American subculture, have found themselves in churches that were very focused on growth, often using the word multiplication, and that focus on growth became unhealthy. It became toxic, which is a common word these days. It leads to a toxic culture, toxic leadership, people feeling used and abused in the advancement of the mission of the church and its growth. Is there a danger in being too focused on growth and multiplication? And what's the difference between what you call healthy multiplication and the unhealthy forms that so many of us have experienced in the evangelical subculture especially?
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A
So I think, Lake, I think that part of what the struggle said with church growth was is that church growth. And it's interesting, I heard Eddie Gibbs, who was one of the founders of church growth theory, he was a lecturer at Fuller, where the church growth theory was kind of formulated. And church growth, of course, it basically assumed that the same assumptions of the Christendom understanding, it didn't fundamentally undergo any difference. And Eddie Gibson is wonderful. He was an English dude. He said. I remember him saying, he says, it's a pig with lipstick, but it's still a pig. And he didn't mean it in offensive way because it's very British, you know, very proper. But basically, it's the same assumptions about, you got to come to us. And assumption is we'll build, build, build, build big. And then hierarchical forms of leadership or net result. So megachurch would be a classic example, but it basically forms. It assumes a certain assumption about the church and the size and then the type of leadership. We would argue that multiplication in the reproduction is built into every living organism in itself. And a tree is designed to produce fruit. I mean, Jesus says a fair bit about that, but interestingly, and the tree that doesn't produce fruit is not. He says some harsh things about that. In other words, and I've studied this about trees, a botanist would say that the sole purpose of a tree, it's pretty and it provides fruit for us, is reproduction. Because the tree, it's interpreting the sun, it's producing kind of fruits, but inside the fruit seed. We might enjoy the fruit of it, but actually the seed is what it's about out. So the idea of. But you and I, I mean, we don't grow and grow and grow and grow until we fill the sky. Sorry, double play on the word sky, but we don't feel the sky. But we are meant to reproduce. So we, you know, we have children. And so the idea of reproduction is actually very helpful. And multiplication, you can use word reproduction is kind of good one too, because it actually is organic. And we would say that, that, you know, I think when Jesus started the movement off in the first place, the assumption is this thing can scale because he was empowering the average everyday believer. And then not just believe a disciple, someone who knows how to follow Jesus. That's a big difference, by the way, in my opinion. But, you know, that is able to reproduce this. So we call the agency and voice of all of God's people who play. So it's not like creating a kind of elite hierarchy with green rooms and gold rooms or whatever, you know, Hillsong went doing. But actually, you know, something that could multiply out. It might not be that big house. Church could be example. It could be. It doesn't have to be huge. It can be huge, but I don't think it has to be. And I would argue that the bigger you become as a kind of a single entity, that probably the more inclined we are to kind of institutional forms of power.
- [20:55]
B
I mean, that's a good word. There is, I think, in most of our experience, church growth or church multiplication has often been linked to what you would call the Constantinian model or the megachurch model, which just makes the institution larger and larger and larger. Or even if you're multiplying institutions or building new ones, they have that same model of a dynamic leader at the top and everyone follows their marching orders. But let me go back to this fruit thing. I have often heard the tree fruit seed metaphor played out in church multiplication conversations, and I don't think it's illegitimate. I think there's a place for that. And yet oftentimes where I think Jesus is talking about fruitfulness, and certainly when Paul talks about fruit of the Spirit, it's not necessarily linked to the numerical growth of the movement of Jesus. It's often linked to the fruit of one's character. It's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, all those kinds of things. And in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus talks about, you will know a tree by its fruit, I don't think he's talking about having lots of followers and disciples. He's talking about the character of the kingdom of God being seen in people's lives. So is there a danger in. And it's a very American thing. It's a very entrepreneurial thing, that we're just going to grow numerically. And that's a sign of God's kingdom rather than growing in the fruit of the kingdom, which is character formation.
- [22:27]
A
Yes, I. And again, I don't think they should exclude the one should not exclude the other. I think, you know, a healthy organism does reproduce, extends its impact through reproduction. But yes, I agree it's. It's fruitfulness and I think what we. What in the movement's thinking, we're much more focused on discipleship and disciple making. Now, what we mean by that is not just simply a believer, someone who believes cognitively, certain ideas, and you can get this in the Sunday service, put your hands up and be saved. But there's no obligation to actually align your life with the founder with Jesus. And so you often get people who believe, but behave very badly. They believe correct doctrine. And I would argue this. This is what we call the problem of non discipleship churches. And I would say much of the legacy thinking of church is predicated by. On. It is built on non discipleship. It doesn't intend to make you disciple. It is perfectly designed to produce non discipleship.
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B
And Dallas Willard used to make this point all the time.
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A
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's the problem. The root cause of the problem is often we're multiplying is non discipleship, which is a non Jesus expression. And again, I would say this is exactly what we experience in our time.
- [23:48]
B
I've talked to folks who are allergic, frankly, to this notion of church growth, to multiplication, to evangelism, all these things, because again, they were part of churches that drove that message and they found it to be really toxic. And some of them have swung over to the side that says the church's sole responsibility should be nurturing disciples, teaching people how to follow the way of Jesus and live that out and the transformation of character and all that. And let church growth leave that up to God. Just leave that up to the aroma, fragrance and attraction of followers of Jesus who will naturally draw others to them. And God will grow his church. He'll expand his kingdom. But that shouldn't be our intentional focus. What do you say to folks who are on that side of things?
- [24:35]
A
Well, I think it goes. And again, there's. There's much I can. I can understand. I mean, I recognize deep disappointment in the way we do church in myself. Absolutely. And I think, you know, we've talked about this before, but I do think that, you know, it seemed to me that Jesus did kind of commit us to somehow making disciples, not just me being. Aligning my life with Jesus and living accordingly, little Jesus, if you will, which I think is exactly what discipleship aims at. And I should be a little expression and I think wonderfully. CS Lewis come quoting perfectly. He said that the purpose of the church and everything the church is meant to be doing is to create little Christs. And if you're not doing that, then everything else you're doing is a waste of time. And I think he's right. But a little Christ does have an impact in the world. And then of course, you've got things like the Great Commission, which again is terribly abused. But the idea of passing it on, I think there's the movement stuff coming into play that we meant to bring an impact in the world. Our lives are to have an impact, not just inspiring others to be better character, but also to bring ourselves. Aligning the world with Jesus, of course, who's the kind of archetypal human.
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B
I'm curious, how do you see the Great Commission being abused?
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A
Well, I think it's been misinterpreted as evangelism, for one. So in other words, I mean, I say to people, I could point me out where evangelism is actually mentioned in the Great Commission. So people would, you know, classic church growth model would say, we're a Great Commission church. I say, okay, Red, so. So let's look at the Great Commission because you're implying that's evangelism. So go out into the world and make disciples. Make disciples. Teaching them to obey everything.
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B
Obey, yeah.
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A
So there's obedience. Right. And I've got your back. I'm with you. You know, let's go. There's the movement taking place. Where do we see evangelism and evangelism the way we see it, sky, generally, is that I'll give you a presentation of the atonement. A certain thing that Jesus did in the cross, not alignment with his life. It's what he did for us. It's what we say, soteriology, not Christology. It's focused on a certain subcategory of what Jesus did. You only have to agree with it and you're saved. And I think that's the problem. I think we're not. They bind into. And then when you're trying to introduce the notion of discipleship to someone who's a believer. Oh, that feels like a bait and switch. I didn't sign in on that crap, you know.
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B
Okay, but to steel man the argument, some people would say evangelism. No, it's not explicitly there in the Great Commission, but it's implied. It's implied because you can't make a disciple if they're not evangelized. If they have not heard and received and responded to the gospel. That's the beginning of discipleship.
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A
Yes. Well, I actually would argue, and this is a good missional take on discipleship, is that it's interesting to think about this. When Jesus and the 12 in the 4070 whatever people in his life. Let's go with the 12 because I, you know, when were they born again? Exactly.
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B
I know that's a great question. I think it's fascinating.
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A
It's almost certainly not.
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B
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