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The Forgotten Ways: Chapter 1

December 26th, 2007 cultural, literary, political, spiritual

I’m reading Alan Hirsch’s The Forgotten Ways in preparation for the Ecclesia National Gathering Feb 12 -14, 2008. (Fortunately, I’ll have time to vote in the VA primaries on Feb 12 before I leave.) Last year, I read a book Hirsch co-authored The Shaping of Things to Come. This book continues on similar themes. It consoles me in some places and brews frustration in others so I look forward to interacting with the author in person.

Hirsch’s perspective comes as a pastor of a church in Australia, where Christianity has become even less significant in common culture than in the US. From his experience, rather than the church inventing new progressive ways to engage the public, she needs to start over freshly and return to her roots.

This theme runs clearly through my recently broadened understanding of the decline of western culture in general. Today we neglect, in much the same way, the wisdom and practice of our nation’s founders as well as our ancient text, the Constitution. Must all good things come to an end? For the church, we know somehow it will prevail. For the country, perhaps it will have to end eventually, but must it be during the lives of my offspring? Out of love for both, I’m trying to think and work the best I can towards the salvation of both human culture and the destiny of souls which reside therein. (I’ll save a deeper comparison of this concept for another post.)

In the first chapter, Hirsch reminisces on a time when a drug dealer came to Christ and led fifty of his friends (and customers) to Christ and into a church Hirsch was beginning to lead fresh out of Bible college. Many of these folks lived together in the same house where Bible studies would be going on in the living room while drug deals would go on in back rooms. This group grew vibrantly to the point where the older members of the church became increasingly uncomfortable with what to do with these new converts. As the story goes on, the church invested in a new form of coffee-house artsy-fartsy outreach to such people which ultimately exerted a lot of resources with comparatively little fruit.

It seems everywhere spontaneous excitement bursts out, the attempt to institutionalize it fails. The key is not cooler programming but human-to-human discipleship, he says.

Hirsch’s story relates to my own. When I reminisce back to my own spiritual primordial soup, I was living in the dorm interacting with people about the gospel on a regular basis. Crazy things were happening all around me as people were discovering the grace of Jesus and telling their friends about him. Since then, as I’ve become a full time staff worker, my role in the Kingdom seems to have moved from the periphery to the middle. I now help organize the “establishment”. I hope Alan Hirsch will help point my soul back into a state of zealous, chaotic, immersed, cultural, spiritual engagement.