Last week Alan Hirsch was visiting Bergen. I had the privilege of attending a full day seminar as well as having a dinner with this servant of God with Jewish background from Australia. He shared some good insight on the missional church with us.

According to Hirsch, the church is a result of the great mission of God – not the other way around. It’s not so much the church that’s got a mission, but the mission that’s got a church.

He had an equation looking like this: X -> M -> E
Our Christology results in our Missiology, which again results in Ecclesiology; meaning: Our view of Christ makes us live out his Mission, resulting in true fellowship of believers – the church.

The elements of the missional DNA

Jesus Christ is Lord of all areas of life

Missional incarnational impulse

Communitas not community

Organic systems

Making disciples

Apostolic environment

Movement Dynamics: Addison

• White Hot Faith, by which he means a direct and personal encounter with the living God, followed by social renewal. Whether this be a Paul, Wesley, Francis, Luther, a Wimber, Mother Theresa, or any other great Christian leader who founded a movement, transformative movements start with a direct and transforming encounter with God.

• Commitment to the Cause: that the people who are touched in such a way by God, give their lives to the cause as articulated by the movement. Commitment levels tend to be significantly high and catalyze a certain kind of synergy that comes through mutual cooperation and commitment.

• Contagious Relationships: Ideas travel like a virus. Powerful ideas like the gospel are passed on from one person to another. For movements to extend themselves beyond a narrow network of people and a single generation there needs to be a network of relationships that become ‘contagious.’

• Rapid Mobilization: there needs to be a apostolic type of leadership and organization that develops to be able to coordinate and maximize the efforts of the adherents of the movement.

• Dynamic Methods: it is significant that movements tend to use new, innovative, methods and techniques to communicate their message. .

Movement Dynamics: Gerlach and Hine

• A segmented, cellular organization composed of units held together by various personal, structural and ideological ties.

• Face-to-face recruitment by committed individuals using their own pre-existing, significant social relationships..

• Personal commitment generated by an act or experience that separates a convert in some way from the established order, identifies him/her with a new set of values, and commits him/her to changed patterns of behaviour..

• An ideology of articulated values and goals, which provide a conceptual framework for life, motivates and provides a rationale for change, defines the opposition, and forms the basis for the unity among the segmented networks of groups in the movement.

• Real or perceived opposition from the society at large or from that segment of the established order within which the movement has risen.