Alan Hirsch discusses the essentials to a missional movement.
In the video clip below he says, “I’ve spent pretty much most of my adult life being reasonably obsessed with trying to unlock the codes of what makes for highly transformative missional movements. I mean I’m talking about those type of movements in history that really get it done—Get ‘er done. Is that right? I mean those ones with explosive growth and high transformation where whole societies are impacted.
I’m pretty much obsessed with that and tried to understand what makes them tick. What factors have to come together? How can we learn from them? What does it say about the church that Jesus has designed us to be? All those things kind of come into play. With some reflective authority, I don’t claim too much, but I’d say I’ve done a little bit of learning in this, I’d say this categorically that one of the clearly, most demonstratively true aspects, the keys about these movements, one of them is that they are obsessed—yes, that’s the word I’d use—obsessed with discipleship and disciple making. In other words if you took discipleship out of the equation of these movements they wouldn’t have been.
Discipleship is critical. Discipleship is the means by which it all happens. Unless we get discipleship right, whatever we intend to achieve through the rest of what we achieve in missional movement is never going to happen. If we fail in discipleship, it fails.”