A lifelong following of Jesus that makes disciples and keeps him at the center.
Hirsch says that if the church fails at discipleship, the other work of a movement does not take hold. Consumer culture will form the people the church leaves unformed. A lowered bar keeps the language of following Jesus and thins the practice.
On this page
Reading path
Where it lives in the work
Start with Untamed chapter 1 so Jesus defines the disciple. Chapter 2 gives the Shema and the school of love in the order he walks them. Disciplism then reads Matthew 28 as disciple-making. The Forgotten Ways sets that task inside movements. Culture, the six P's, and the handbook habits come after the creed.
1
Start here
Untamed, Jeebus Made Me Do It
2010 · core
With Debra Hirsch. Sets discipleship on Jesus, distinguishes God-is-like-Jesus from a domesticated Jeebus, and tells Matt's story.
2
Untamed, Your God Is Too Sick
2010 · core
With Debra Hirsch. Gives the Shema in Jesus's restatement and walks the school of love as right feeling, right acting, and right thinking.
3
Untamed, Kultcha-Schmultcha
2010 · core
With Debra Hirsch. Treats consumerism as a religious rival and tells the 1999 visit to Aunt Betty and Simon. Debra's marked shock stays hers.
4
Untamed, Going Out, Going Deep
2010 · advanced
With Debra Hirsch. Names the six P's and walks them as presence, proximity, powerlessness, prevenience, passion, and proclamation, in that order.
5
Disciplism, The End Game?
2014 · introduction
Alan alone. Describes discipleship reduced to a membership class or to optional disciplines, and asks what the end of the Christian life is.
6
Disciplism, Hear O Israel
2014 · core
Alan alone. Walks Matthew 28 as a command to make disciples and says evangelism is implied inside that disciple-making.
7
Disciplism, Go Make Consumers of All the Nations?
2014 · core
Alan alone. Ties consumerist evangelism to the cross, and describes pre-conversion discipleship in Jesus and in the early catechumenate.
8
Disciplism, Reimagining Evangelism
2014 · core
Alan alone. Sets pre- and post-conversion discipleship on one journey, with Soma, the Engels Scale, and NewThing as pictures.
9
Disciplism, It's All About Jesus
2014 · core
Alan alone. Defines discipleship as lifelong adherence to Jesus as Lord and Savior, and quotes Bonhoeffer and Lewis on that adherence.
10
The Forgotten Ways, Disciple Making
2016 · core
Alan alone. Makes disciple-making the strategic mDNA element after Jesus is Lord, with Methodism, consumerism, little Jesuses, and action-learning.
11
The Forgotten Ways Handbook, Disciple Making
2009 · advanced
With Darryn Altclass. Turns the element into three habits: raise the bar, develop practices, and activate the priesthood of all believers.
Discipleship
In Untamed chapter 2, Alan and Debra Hirsch quote Jesus's restatement of the Shema and give three claims. God is one. God is to be loved and worshiped in every aspect of life and with all of one's being. Jesus expands the creed to include the love of people. Asked what a school for loving God would include, they name three areas and keep this order: right feeling, right acting, and right thinking. Those three converge, they write, in a sweet spot called discipleship. This module stays with that school. The six P's in chapter 9 remain a later practice sequence, kept in their own order.
01
right feeling
The heart, as passion and will, is how a disciple comes to know God.
Clearly, the heart is faith's truest home.
Right feeling is the first room in the school of love. Alan and Debra Hirsch tie it to the Hebrew yada: to know is to come into contact, with mutuality and personal involvement, the same word used for knowledge of God and for sexual union. They cite Leanne Payne on knowing ultimate reality by union, and Kierkegaard on passion as the condition of faith. The biblical heart, as they describe it, is larger than emotion. It is also will, loyalty, and commitment. Without that heart, they say, a person cannot understand God, because passion and will are the source of the capacity to love.They refuse a spectator stance. Knowing God means loving him with all the heart, a knowledge no other route supplies. They quote The Cloud of Unknowing to the effect that God is incomprehensible to the intellect and known to love. Jonathan Edwards, as they use him, holds that no one is changed by doctrine, word, or preaching unless the religious affections are moved. True religion, in that line, is placed in the affections. The chapter's short landing is that the heart is faith's truest home.This is Shema spirituality at the point of loyalty. Feeling, in their account, is the seat of allegiance. A disciple whose heart is aimed elsewhere will still be devout. William Temple's warning, which opens the chapter, is that a radically false conception of God gets worse as devotion increases. The heart decides which God that devotion is feeding.
02
right acting
Obedience in ordinary life is the test of what a disciple knows.
In the Bible, the real test of what you know is how you live your faith.
Right acting is the second focus, and they place it after the heart is open. The follower broadens knowledge of God by living truth. They note that the Bible is one-third ethics, and they tie obedience of body and soul to the covenant and to the commission in Matthew 28. C. S. Lewis, as they quote him, calls obedience the holy courtesy required for entering the divine relationship. The test they give is plain. In the Bible, the real test of what you know is how you live your faith. Kierkegaard's line, as they use it, is that as you have lived, so have you believed.The people they admire are people who did something in their worlds, named saints and anonymous ones. Study without obedience, they say, damages the capacity to integrate Scripture.Disciplism uses the same test on the commission. Teaching the nations to observe all that Jesus commanded is a disciple-making motif. An altar call or a sinner's prayer is a different act. The Forgotten Ways says disciples live with Jesus, watch him, minister with him, make mistakes, and are corrected, in ordinary life. Hirsch's phrase for the method is to act our way into a new way of thinking. The handbook, with Darryn Altclass, says mission belongs inside discipleship, because Jesus formed the Twelve on the road: proclamation, service of the poor, healing, and deliverance from the start.
03
right thinking
Loving God with the mind means thinking thoughts after God.
But if we think thoughts after God, we become more like him.
Right thinking comes third in the walk, after an open heart and a commitment to obey. They say love of God with the mind is required, and that God does not ask every disciple to be an intellectual giant. They quote Shelley: the mind becomes that which it contemplates. Thinking about nothing empties the mind. Thinking thoughts after God makes a person more like him.They also mark the limits of the other two rooms. Feeling God in worship and prayer is necessary and, by itself, insufficient for a full Shema spirituality. Obedience alone, apart from the other aspects, can terminate in activism or legalism. A mature community engages God with minds, hearts, and actions together. People are wired toward one of the three, so knowledge of God is reached in the community: activists learn from theologians, theologians from pastors, and the body covers what one person underdevelops.Disciplism chapter 6 aims this thinking at Christology. Discipleship is Christ formed in a person and that person formed in Christ, after the pattern of Jesus, whose humanity is the image of what a disciple is to become. He says Western forms, and evangelical forms in particular, have built theology around the cross as the work done for us and have diminished his words, his person, and the life he lived. The thinking he wants holds Savior and Lord together. Jesus is the gospel. The whole gospel includes him as Lord and as Savior.
An inner-city restaurant in Melbourne, around Easter · received
Matt and the perfect man
Matt, a gay man in the restaurant's circle, met Jesus at Easter and told his friends the new man in his life was a Jewish carpenter named Jesus.
*Untamed* chapter 1, written with Debra Hirsch, sets this story against a narrowed picture of Jesus. They have just described a sermon image of Jesus as a punch-you-in-the-nose dude, and they ask where that picture leaves men whose manner does not match it. Their community at South had become a home for many homosexually oriented men and women. Matt, not his real name, was a gay man active in the gay community, out at parties and clubs, living what they call a reckless life of drugs, sex, and disco, and searching, as his friends were, for the perfect man.
Stories he tells
A cafe called Elevation, in the mission work he describes in section 1 of *The Forgotten Ways*failure named
Elevation
When commitment failed at Elevation, Hirsch concluded the leadership had cultivated religious consumerism by not making disciples, and he vowed to change his practice.
South Africa, 1999, a homestead and then a house at the end of dirt roadscontrasted
Aunt Betty and Simon
On Alan's first return in twelve years, Aunt Betty envied his peace, and Simon's household struck Alan and Debra as deeply content. Debra's shock at the money is hers.
Questions people ask · asked along the way
Questions to sit with · 1 / 8
If Jesus and his influence were removed from our faith, what would be left, and what would we still be following?
With your team
Try it
01This month
A Shema inventory
This month, with people who may ask you hard questions, inventory the loyalties that compete with loving God first.
02This quarter
Walk the six P's
For six weeks, take the incarnational practices in the order chapter 9 walks them, one practice a week, in a real place among people who are not already your church circle.
03This month
Act, then tell the truth about it
With at least one other person, take one action Jesus's way of life requires, then let a coach or a partner help you understand what you just did.
Ask the work
Ask how this community follows Jesus, lives the Shema, and makes disciples, and which of the six P's is thin.
Go further
Questions people ask
Questions and misreadings
Disciplism chapter 3 prints Matthew 28:18-20 and then moves through the scene. The risen Jesus, with all authority, commands the apostles to go. They stand for the church that will come from them, so the commission binds Christians in every time and place. They are to make disciples of the nations, which assumes they are themselves disciples who will reproduce. Baptism brings the nations into the triune name. Teaching them to observe all he commanded is obedience to his reign, a different act from an altar call or a sinner's prayer. His presence stays with them. Hirsch then asks where evangelism appears. He finds no overt mention. The practices on the page are discipleship and disciple-making. Evangelism is implied in that process. He says the church-growth movement recovered a task the church had forgotten and brought millions into contact with the gospel, and that it hung the agenda on a shortened reading of this text, with event-based proclamation and altar calls in the place of disciple-making. The correction he wants leaves proclamation inside the longer work.
Contrasts
The locked theme file has no binary block. The Forgotten Ways names these two paths and illustrates them in a figure he captions Action-Learning (Discipleship) vs. the Academy. He learned the second phrase from Pascale, Millemann, and Gioja, and he applies it to how Jesus formed disciples.
Think our way into a new way of acting
Act our way into a new way of thinking
Where knowledge lives
Concepts, ideas, and the classroom
Concrete existence, obedience, and wisdom for life
What the student receives
New thinking, with behavior left in place
Action in ordinary life, with thinking happening as one goes
How Jesus is said to have worked
Information transferred apart from the context
Life together, ministry, mistakes, and correction on the road
Hirsch traces the left path to a Hellenistic view of knowledge that, by the fourth century, had overtaken the Hebraic one in the church. The assumption he names is that right ideas will change behavior. Leaders return from a conference with new thinking and an unchanged congregation, and they find their own habits unchanged. Dallas Willard, as Hirsch reports the quip, says we are educated beyond our capacity to obey. The right path is the one he finds in Jesus and in the movements. Forge, as he describes it, puts interns at risk, has them meet at least weekly with a coach, and lets only practitioners who can do the work teach the intensives. Mission, he says, was always the mother of good theology. The diagram is named in the chapter. It is not redrawn on this page.
The Forgotten Ways and Untamed chapter 4, with Disciplism chapter 4, describe consumerism as a religion that asks for the same allegiance discipleship gives to Jesus. Hirsch sets the two aims side by side.
Consumerism
Adherence to Christ
What it offers
Identity, purpose, meaning, and community through the market
A lifelong response to Jesus as Lord and Savior
How people are won
Entertainment, convenience, and a religious shopping experience
The cross at the start, and a life of observing what Jesus commanded
What mastery is called
Brand loyalty
Discipleship, which he says cannot be consumed into
He was trained in marketing before he followed Jesus. Advertisers, as he and an executive he cites describe them, step into the space left as Christianity leaves Western public life. Douglas Rushkoff, Mark Sayers, and the car ad that sells community without mentioning the car are his evidence that the offer is religious. The church, competing in that market, becomes a vendor. He names two live responses. Pete Ward suggests redeeming consumer rhythms. Hirsch's warning is the long spoon. The path he takes is a prophetic challenge, embodied in the marks of new monastic communities he lists, and in the simpler systems of CMA, Soma, and NewThing. Aunt Betty and Simon are the household version of the same pair. Elevation is the version he confesses in his own leadership.
When it is missing
When it is missing
A devotion aimed at a God who does not look like JesusShema
Money, sex, or power given a theology that protects themShema
Worship that ends when the singing endsShema
A private morality with no neighbor and no public lifeShema
A crowd that can be counted and a discipleship that cannotDisciple Making
Leaders produced by a pipeline that never made disciplesDisciple Making
Church made complicated and following Jesus made easyDisciple Making
The newest believer kept away from the missionDisciple Making
A sign that says God loves you, and no shared life with the neighborhoodpresence
Christians who spend their weeks only with Christianspresence
Proclamation that arrives before anyone has listenedpresence
A humility that has not yet cost a freedom or a preferencepresence
Matthew 28:18-20
The commission to make disciples
Disciplism chapter 3 is his exposition for this theme. He reads a risen Lord with all authority, a command that binds the whole church, a charge to make disciples of the nations, baptism into the triune name, teaching them to observe what he commanded, and the promise of his presence to the end of the age. Obedience, in that reading, is the response to his reign. He asks where evangelism is mentioned and answers that it is implied inside disciple-making. Chapter 6 prints the same passage again as the command under the whole book. The Forgotten Ways asks what Jesus had in mind and answers with many little versions of him in every part of society, conformed to his image. The handbook, with Darryn Altclass, uses the same commission to say the church's vocation is to continue Jesus's missionary endeavor. The commentary here follows those readings and does not reproduce the RSV paragraph.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
discipleshipalso "missional discipleship"
A lifelong response to Jesus as Lord and Savior, in which Christ is formed in us.
His definition in Disciplism: discipleship is a lifelong, heartfelt response to Jesus as Lord and Savior, Christ formed in a person and that person formed in Christ. Untamed calls the book a recovery of missional discipleship and says the stage of discipleship is the destiny, not a first step toward something else. The Forgotten Ways says a follower never moves beyond being a disciple on the way.
disciple-makingalso "disciple making"
The church's commission to reproduce disciples who can reproduce disciples.
Matthew 28, as he reads it, is this task. It includes baptism and teaching them to observe. He calls it the strategic element of mDNA after Jesus is Lord, the starting point and the abiding practice of movements. The handbook says it is perhaps the most critical element because it is the work of becoming like the Founder.
Shema spiritualityalso "the Jesus Creed"
The disciple's basic orientation, taken from Jesus's restatement of the Shema.
Untamed chapter 2: the Lord is one; love him with heart, soul, mind, and strength; love the neighbor. Scot McKnight's name "the Jesus Creed" is the phrase they borrow. They call it a worldview in a sentence. Nothing in life sits outside the claim. Mission is inside the confession. The school of love is how they train it.
school of lovealso "right feeling", "right acting", "right thinking"
His three foci for loving God, in the order feeling, acting, thinking.
A school for loving God, as they design it, focuses on right feeling, right acting, and right thinking, converging in discipleship. Feeling is the heart as passion and will. Acting is obedience of body and soul. Thinking is loving God with the mind. A mature community needs all three because each person prefers one.
little Jesusesalso "Little Jesus", "little Christs"
His name for disciples who become living versions of Jesus in ordinary life.
Untamed says we must become living versions of him, little Jesuses. The Forgotten Ways calls the aim a conspiracy of Little Jesus: many Christlike presences in every neighborhood, transposing him into daily existence, the Guardini line he quotes. Lewis, whom both Disciplism and the Forgotten Ways chapter cite, says the church exists to make people little Christs. Hirsch's own phrase is little Jesuses.
disciplism
His name for evangelism reframed inside discipleship.
The book's title and its central idea: the faithful way forward is to reframe evangelism within the context of discipleship. Evangelism happens as you go about making disciples. Pre-conversion and post-conversion are stages of one process. He says we do this because it is what Jesus commanded, and he notes that it is also how the movements he studies actually worked.
pre-conversion discipleship
Walking with Jesus, and being formed by him, before new birth is complete.
His proposal in Disciplism: discipleship starts before a person is a regenerated convert and continues to the end. The Twelve and the seventy are his biblical picture. Catechumens who learned the Sermon on the Mount before baptism are his early-church picture. Soma, as he reports Jeff Vanderstelt, keeps evangelism inside discipleship before a confession and keeps evangelizing after it.
the six P'salso "presence", "proximity", "powerlessness", "prevenience", "passion", "proclamation"
Six incarnational discipleship practices, in the order chapter 9 walks them.
Forge used them with interns. Chapter 9 suggests them for anyone who would engage the world in Jesus's way. The numbered walk is presence, proximity, powerlessness, prevenience, passion, and proclamation. He says proclamation follows the preceding practices. An earlier sentence in the chapter lists proclamation before passion. The walk is the teaching order.
ordinate lovealso "first love"
Loving God first, so that everything else can be loved in its true place.
The theological name they use for Shema loyalty. Loving God as primary love frees a person to enjoy the world. Loving anything ahead of God turns it into an idol. Lewis, as they use him, says we do not love the creature too much. We love God too little in proportion. Revelation 2:4's "first love" is the biblical tag. The big three under this heading are money, sex, and power.
the big threealso "money, sex, and power"
The three idolatries they say most often redefine God and shrink discipleship.
In chapter 2 they treat sex through cognitive dissonance and Campolo's question to a student, money through prosperity teaching that is almost true, and power through leaders who enslave and are enslaved. They know there are subtler idols. These three are the ones they unpack. Shema spirituality is the answer they give: love God with mind, heart, soul, and strength.
Jeebus
Their name for a Jesus remade in our image.
From Homer Simpson's panic in a Simpsons episode, which opens Untamed chapter 1. Jeebus is the manageable lord who legitimates a lifestyle, a nation, or a masculinity. The antidote they name is the Jesus of the Gospels, allowed to offend, because God is like Jesus and disciples are to become like him.
consumerismalso "Maar'kit"
The religious rival he says asks for the allegiance discipleship owes to Jesus.
If religion offers identity, purpose, meaning, and community, consumerism, in his account, fulfills all four. Marketers are its priesthood. Untamed personifies the market as Maar'kit. He says the church cannot consume its way into discipleship, and that what you win people with, you win them to. Elevation is the failure that taught him the sentence about culture discipling the people the church does not disciple.
action-learning
His name for discipleship that acts its way into a new way of thinking.
The Forgotten Ways contrasts this with an academic path that thinks its way into a new way of acting. Jesus forms people in ordinary life. Forge's internship is his working example: risk, a weekly coach, practitioners as teachers. The handbook tells communities to explain this phrase while they build common practices.
Life Transformation Groupalso "LTG"
Neil Cole's simple, reproducible group for ongoing disciple-making, as Hirsch reports it.
In The Forgotten Ways, an LTG is Bible reading, storytelling, personal accountability, and prayer, required of every Christian in Church Multiplication Associates, including leaders. The handbook, with Darryn Altclass, describes groups of two or three of the same gender, meeting weekly, and multiplying once a group would grow past three. DNA groups at Small Boat Big Sea, two to five people, are the companion example in that chapter.
About the authorAlan Hirsch
ALAN HIRSCH is a global thought-leader on missional movements and leadership. He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including The Forgotten Ways, The Shaping of Things to Come, 5Q, ReJesus, Reframation, Untamed, The Permanent Revolution, and, most recently, Metanoia. He has worked with churches and organizations worldwide, with a primary focus in North America, Europe, and Australia. He co-founded Forge in Victoria in 1996 with Debra Hirsch and Michael Frost, and is one of the founders of Movement Leaders Collective. He serves as movement mentor for NewThing International and resident consultant for Redeemer City to City, among other roles. His experience spans leading a local church movement among the marginalized, developing training systems for innovative missional leadership, training leaders in movement dynamics, and heading the mission and revitalization work of his denomination.
