Alan Hirsch

I've heard him speak several times.

His name's Alan Hirsch.

And he talks about if we are going to know Jesus, there are three things that have to happen in our life.

If we're truly going to know Jesus, not just know about Jesus, but know as an experience of Jesus, we've got to do these three things.

It has been reduced to the equivalent of a Myers-Briggs test that if you are entrepreneurial in nature and you've never planted a church in your life, you're apostolically gifted.

If you pull up Alan Hirsch's work, and I've interviewed Alan, I used to be really interested in his material, but the more I've thought about it, the less and less I think it's actually biblical.

I don't see that in the scriptures.

You can have people who are apostolically gifted, like John the Revelator, be a little bit more gentle, a little bit more poetic in his writing, a little bit more emotional, what's the word I'm looking for? And then you have Paul, who's an apostle who can be a bully sometimes, telling men that they should emasculate themselves for trying to circumcise people.

I don't know if you've seen this chart before.

I got this from a guy called Alan Hirsch, really kind of adapted it really helpfully, though.

At various points in life, and certainly in the faith journey, we have moments of what you could call deconstruction, where, if you like, our old ideas of things are torn apart, deconstructed, and it feels like a downhill moment.

And some of us just kind of end there.

So here's the distinction.

All of us need all five, right? So you have like a pest, like Alan Hirsch is a friend of mine, like I understand Apest and I've had great conversations with him.

I love him.

But all of us, we are all possessing these cups.

see

they're gonna lift that idea out but the point that I lucy bebe makes is that um that's available to all people uh the spirit has been poured out now without distinction and that every believer gets the opportunity to be a part of this now i'm going to try and hitch this to some ideas from alan hirsch and who we also would recommend and place some some credence in some of his thoughts and some of his ideas and that there is a a point that he makes um in my words to make his point um that the church is functioning in health when it responds um in this spirit-led missionary movement this idea that the the reason to again like we've had a couple of stabs out now of like laying out why we've stepped this conversation the way that we've stepped it of like this is who god is this is what god does this is what you're invited into so now our expectation is that health looks like the way that flesh gets on those bones what health looks like in that we are not a dismembered, defleshed collection of bones scattered across the desert floor.

That's not where we are supposed to identify in our reception of that story.

We are supposed to pick up much, much later on, like a community has been brought back together and reanimated.

We'll get to Jesus in a moment and how he looks as this archetype teacher.

But in this series, what we've been doing is we've been looking at someone called Alan Hirsch.

Alan Hirsch is a bit of a five-fold ministry scholar and commentator.

And he says this, this is his definition of the gift of the teacher.

The teacher is the philosopher, the person who seeks understanding and brings coherence.

It's what happens in the learner.

That's actually what tells us if we're doing any good teaching is that people are learning and applying and living.

5Q, who is Alan Hirsch's ministry, say this, teachers don't just relay information, they shape how people think, live and grow in wisdom.

Yeah, we preach at them.

I was just reading an article by Alan Hirsch today, and he did the math on the number of sermons that we have in the last 50 years, and it was like millions of sermons.

And he asked the question, has this changed us? Is it doing the work of transforming people into the image of Christ? And the answer is no.

But we know how Jesus did this.