Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways picks up where The Shaping of Things to Come left off. I ought to review Shaping one of these days, because it was much more groundbreaking for me, but I’ll start with where I’m at and go from there (as is the way of Jesus). Shaping argues for the need for missional church, and does a great job of defining it theologically and of offering some examples of what it might look like. Forgotten Ways is instruction on how to create the conditions for us to arrive at a missional expression of church.
I’ve already covered some important ground on this book here. Make sure to check it out for a great diagram (and a really bad one).
This isn’t a book to outline chapter by chapter. Rather, I want to engage the really great ideas that have been kicking around in my head since I finished it. You’ll also notice that I’m a network thinker: I can’t talk about a book without talking about a few others, because I’m more interested in tracing the idea than I am in critiquing the work. Do try to keep up, won’t you.
What next
I read this right after Kester Brewin’s book, Signs of Emergence, a book 
that begins an idea that Hirsch finishes. Brewin argues that we’re headed towards something new, but that we have no real idea of how to get there from here; nor can we. Like Abraham, we must leave and go to a land God will show us. What we can do is create the conditions for that thing to emerge. His two great metaphors are mountains and binary code.
Of mountains he writes that we are realizing now that we’ve climbed about as far up the mountain we’re on as we can, and looking about us we see that there are actually much higher peaks. The only way to get to one of these higher peaks is to venture back down into the valley and explore until we emerge on the other side. In a sense, we won’t know where we’re going until we get there, and we can’t get there from here. Now amount of effort on our part will accomplish that for us, and of course the reason we don’t like the sound of that is that it requires risk from those safely up the mountain, and sacrifice from those who have spent a lot of effort climbing this peak.
Of binary he tells the story of a programmer attempting to break the record for code speed (something I know nothing about, except that faster is better). Nobody had come close to the last record in some time, and so rather than try himself, he creates a program that randomly generates code, and another that works as a predator, eating code that doesn’t perform. The result? He breaks the record by several steps. But here’s the kicker: after he does it he isolates the blazing fast code, and he’s got no idea how it works, even though he’s responsible for its creation. He never could have made the next thing, but he could create the conditions for it to emerge.
While Brewin talks about some of those conditions, things like freedom to experiment, and support from the establishment for new ways of doing and being the church, he leaves his readers with an incomplete picture. Hirsch picks up where Brewin leaves off, not by defining where exactly we’re going (again, impossible), but by pointing out all the different components that need to come together in order for the new thing to begin to form.
Brewin draws heavily on James Fowler’s stages of faith development, and Hirsch’s picture of the Emerging Missional Church shares much with Fowler’s depiction of Conjunctive Faith. It embraces where we’ve come from, holds differing movements in tension, and avoids an antagonistic stance by keeping Jesus at the centre. It is more concerned with walking in the way than having it precisely defined, and so is open to journeying into the unknown.
As he is wont, Hirsch defines this shift graphically (click for larger).
Like the internet, Hirsch argues, the future of the church can only take shape when enough people are plugged into it. 10 networked computers is alright, 1,000 is kinda cool, but once you get millions all plugged into the same network, things like Flickr, Facebook, and the blogosphere emerge. There’s no way Al Gore could have planned the shape of social networking from his desk while inventing the internet, but once the conditions exist and enough participants are connected, these things take shape on their own.
The reason I love this so much is that it embraces where we’ve been whilst looking to the future. Alt Worship convinced a lot of us that creativity and expression belong in our corporate worship, and gave us permission to do some incredible stuff. But by itself, it tends to become a bit of a love-in. The radical discipleship movements of the past few years are invaluable and Spirit driven, but by themselves they’re not the new thing. However, when all these things take their place at the table, and enough people become disgruntled with the status quo and plug into where we’re going, the next thing will emerge. As with the missional training conversation, it lacks the negativism of many who are calling for change, and embraces and affirms what has come before without leaving us there.
Discipleship
. . . but my own experience and observation indicates that perhaps this element, namely that of discipleship and disciple making, is perhaps the most critical element in the mDNA mix. This is so because it is the essential task of discipleship to embody the message of Jesus, the Founder. C. S. Lewis rightly understood that the purpose of the church was to draw people to Christ and to make them like Christ.
It is interesting that when we really look at the dangerous stories of the phenomenal movements, at the most uncomplicated level, they appear to the observer simply as disciple-making systems. From Hirsch 102-03.
I’m deeply involved in western world missions, alt worship is swanky, urban mission is appealing, and house church is cozy, but discipleship is where I cut my teeth, and it remains my greatest passion in all this. Spiritual formation must be the measure of our success, and I am well pleased to see this be the defining component of mDNA (missional DNA). In case you wanted to know all 6 components of Apostolic Genius, here they are.
- Jesus is Lord
- disciple making
- missional-incarnational impulse
- apostolic environment
- organic systems
- communitas, not community
For more on the first item, see my earlier comments on the book.
APEPT
APEPT is shorthand for the five gifts of leadership Paul lists in Ephesians 4: Apostles, Prophets, Evangelists, Pastors/Shepherds, and Teachers. Keep in mind that the ability itself is not the gift (evangelism), but the person (the evangelist) is God’s gift to the church in order that it might grow up into the fullness of Christ. Hirsch (and Mike Frost in Shaping) both go too far in claiming that everyone in the church can be filed away under one of these five giftings. However, Paul’s words do imply that you need the full APEPT matrix in place to see a church grow up into the fullness of Christ. The tragedy of this is that we have elevated Pastor Teachers to the central and often only role in church leadership, and we’ve no good idea what to do with APEs, so we run them off, or make them campus ministers, or send them oversees, or pat them on the heads and tell them to do their thing so long as it gets people to church. All of those are great places for APEs to be, but when we give them no place in our churches, and specifically no voice in the leadership makeup of the church, the whole church suffers. Of course, it’s easier to have a church led completely by pastors/teachers. They aren’t nearly so likely to make us uncomfortable, to challenge heretical teachings, to insist that we measure ourself by our impact on the world, or to call us to plant churches when we have plenty of things to do in our own church, thank you very much.
Don’t get me wrong, Pastor/Teachers are essential, and the mission agency that lacks them is just as crippled as the church with no APEs. The point is that we need all 5 wherever we’re the church, and where we don’t have them, we ought to be praying and searching to fill those roles in the lives of our churches.
Who should read it
You, probably. It’s not a devotional book, but if you put energy into starting or leading anything that has to do with following Jesus, this book is well worth your time.
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Our church got together tonight to talk about the future of 