Book Review: The Forgotten Ways

Hey all, this is a book review I just did for a class on Alan Hirsch's The Forgotten Ways. I know some people are kind of wondering what this book is about, especially those who have read the The Shaping of Things to Come. So here is a quick overview. enjoy.

The Forgotten Ways is author Alan Hirsch’s follow-up book to the coauthored The Shaping of Things to Come. It picks up where this book left off with fleshing out what the missional church looks like not only practically, but it delves more into the Biblical and historical aspects of the missional reality of church and evangelism.
For his models Alan focuses first on his failures and successes in the missional church in his home of south Melbourne, Australia. He goes on to focus on the Jewish understanding of Torah and also on the rise of the Chinese Christian church. He reveals that in his assessment of the Jewish culture, which Jesus understood and grew up in, God was a part of all that is life. “Therefore, everything – one’s work, one’s domestic life, one’s health, one’s worship – has significance to God. He is concerned with every aspect of the believer’s life, not just the so-called spiritual dimensions.” (91) This gives a model of what the church was and still is: a group of believers where God is the center of everything they do and are. He goes on to also look at the Chinese church’s rise in Christianity, despite the religious persecution over the years. Alan thinks that because of the persecution and forced choice to have to operate without a center of authority, there was a huge development of cell groups and shared leadership. This allowed the Chinese to share the Gospel in a way that was personal, relational, and with great risk. (85)
A great deal of the book centers around a model that Alan created which he calls mDNA. This stands for the missional DNA and represents the core elements that must be present for a missional movement to take place. It is the culmination of his research of the Jewish church into the apostolic church directly after Jesus, combined with his research of the Chinese Christian church. (For clarification, when I refer to the Chinese Christian church I am referring to what would be seen as the Chinese underground church, not the Three-Self Church.) The core elements he gives are: Jesus is Lord, Disciple making, Missional-Incarnational Impulse, Apostolic Environment, Organic Systems, and Communitas. All of these deserve greater detail than what I can give them, however; I do want to touch on one of them. His emphasis on discipleship gives the sense of paramount importance. This he thinks is the one asset outside of Jesus being Lord that will destroy a church the quickest. He says: “This is so because it is the essential task of discipleship to embody the message of Jesus, the Founder. In other words, this is the strategic element and therefore a good place to start.” (102) One will see over the course of the book that embodying the message of Jesus is at the heart of the entire work. The author seems to view this as a truth of the faith, one which permeates its core existence. In the closing paragraph of the book he makes the statement, “The discovery of great truths brings a certain responsibility to live by them.” I think for Alan he is speaking of the potential of individuals as the keepers of the Gospel of Christ and their responsibility and innate capability in being able to provide it to the nations.
Overall, this book is extremely challenging for those of us who enjoy the confines of the church buildings. This is because Alan shows that God does not reside in those buildings, but within the people who inhabit them. This is not a book that should be read with an objective mind, but should be taken with an openness and excitement that gives you the reader a freedom to exist outside the margins of your understanding of the Gospel and what your relationship is with it. One should be ready to encounter the forgotten ways of the Church.