Getting Movement Out of Your Head and Into Your Church

**an excerpt from Alan Hirsch originally published to his personal blog in 2015

The Process Towards the Renewal of Apostolic Movement …

1. Starts with the realization that the institutional imagination that dominates our thinking has brought us to this critical moment. The prevailing forms, derived as they are from the European experience, are Inextricably bound up with the history and hegemony of Christendom modes of thinking. In this paradigm (for that is what it is...a paradigm) Constantine is still effectively the emperor of our imaginations—he is still telling us how to think about ourselves as church. The face is unhappy here because he has come to the sobering realization that what has brought us to this point simply does not have the wherewithal to guide the church into the 21st Century. It’s the end of the road for the Constantinian church and the journey to learning starts with seeing the problem in its starkest terms (ch.1 and 2)

2. The second phrase involves “dethroning Constantine” and beginning to reimagining the church as missional movement. This is a fundamental paradigm shift that changes they way we frame or understand what was previously familiar. This means embracing the belief that somehow the future of the church is bound up with recovering its innate movement ethos and living into it. This is not a silver bullet; rather it provides us with a silver imagination, and (re)imagination is where it all starts.

3. Then it involves us recognizing that all the potentials of movement are actually latent within the church. In other words, the seeds of our future are already contained in the womb of the present. Another way of saying this is that the macrocosm is already contained in the microcosm. The potential for the whole is already contained in the smallest unit. We don’t have to import the answers; we simply have to realize that Jesus has already given us everything we need to get the job done. But we are also going to have to remove all the many “movement killers”, the residual elements of Christendom thinking that that are laced through our theology, thinking, and practices, that effectively suppress or diminish the church’s innate capacities for movement. This requires determination and vision. I am sure it can be done, but not without effort to redesign the system as movement.

4. The fourth element in the diagram is the fully birthed apostolic movement. The diagram shows that movements are incredible fertile cultures that can generate and maintain all kinds of innovative, incarnationally contextualized, forms of church. Movements can contain multiple models, are innately reproducible, and can deliver wide impact. Note therefore that existing form of church is also is very much part of the movement, but now it is not the only form. Its monopoly is broken.