mDNA is the six-element code of Apostolic Genius, latent in every church that follows Jesus.
Hirsch says this form of church in the West is either forgotten or actively suppressed. What is at stake is Apostolic Genius lying dormant in God's people, and with it spiritual, theological, and missional renewal. One strengthened element can help. The movement he describes waits on all six together.
On this page
Reading path
Where it lives in the work
Start with Preparing for the Journey so mDNA, Apostolic Genius, and the six-in-relation claim are in place before any single element is practiced. Read Jesus Is Lord next, then Disciple Making, the missional-incarnational impulse, liminality and communitas, APEST Culture, and organic systems. Read the Handbook after that meaning, and read Apostolic Environment as APEST Culture.
1
Start here
The Forgotten Ways, Preparing for the Journey
2016 · introduction
Defines mDNA and Apostolic Genius, states the claim that all six elements must inform one another, and grounds that code in Church Multiplication Associates.
2
The Forgotten Ways, The Heart of It All: Jesus Is Lord
2016 · core
Makes the confession the center of the code, through the Shema, christocentric monotheism, and the distillation of the message in China and the early church.
3
The Forgotten Ways, Disciple Making
2016 · core
Treats disciple making as the strategic element after Jesus Is Lord, with Methodism, CMA, and the conspiracy of little Jesuses.
4
The Forgotten Ways, Missional-Incarnational Impulse
2016 · core
Joins going out and going deep in the pattern of the sending of the Son, and names six incarnational practices for a people on mission.
5
The Forgotten Ways, Liminality and Communitas
2016 · core
Names liminality as the condition and communitas as the bond, and treats both as normative for the pilgrim people of God.
6
The Forgotten Ways, APEST Culture
2016 · core
Develops apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher as one ministry culture, with the apostolic task of embedding and guarding mDNA.
7
The Forgotten Ways, Organic Systems
2016 · advanced
Describes movement organization as a living system, including movement killers, networks, and a simple code ordinary local disciples can reproduce.
8
The Forgotten Ways Handbook, Introduction to the Forgotten Ways
2009 · introduction
Coauthored with Darryn Altclass. Retells the early-church and China questions, lists the six elements, and points to the habit chapters that follow.
mDNA
Hirsch presents mDNA as six elements, and the 2016 book keeps them in one order. Each is a concentrated area of theology, practice, instinct, habit, culture, and commitment. Viewed in a line, they are six centers of essential activity, and each can be a focal point for diagnosis and development. Viewed as a system, they connect. Apostolic Genius is the ecosystem that appears when all six accumulate and inform one another. The Holy Spirit is the context of that system. The Handbook's Apostolic Environment is the earlier name of APEST Culture. This module keeps the 2016 names, count, and order.
01
Jesus Is Lord
The confession that Jesus is Lord is the center and circumference of the code.
At its very heart, Christianity is therefore a messianic movement, one that seeks to authentically and consistently embody the life, spirituality, teachings, and mission of its Founder.
Hirsch says it is hard to place this material as one element, because it is also more than an element. Every genuine Christian movement involves, at spiritual ground zero, a living encounter with the one true God through whom all things came and through whom we live. If a people miss this center, he writes, they will not understand the Jesus movements or reinvoke the power that infused them. Steven Addison's phrase, which Hirsch affirms, is white hot faith, brought about by a rediscovery of the place of Jesus.Persecution, in his account of China and the early church, forces a people to distill the message until faith is linked in simplicity to Jesus, the Author and Completer of the faith. The message has to travel light, profound and simple enough to pass along relational lines. He finds the distilled confession in biblical monotheism. Israel's Shema, Hear O Israel, declares that Yahweh is one, and that love of God runs through heart, soul, and strength, into the house, the road, and the doorposts. The New Testament confession "Jesus is Lord" carries that same claim, now gathered around Jesus the Messiah. Hirsch calls this christocentric monotheism. The early church refused Caesar's total allegiance. The Chinese underground church, as he tells it, refused a state claim that would displace the lordship of Christ. The same confession is his test for how far incarnation can go before a culture's claim turns the gospel into syncretism.
02
Disciple Making
Disciple making embodies Jesus in people who can pass him on.
I have come to the dreaded conclusion that we simply cannot consume our way into discipleship.
After Jesus Is Lord, Hirsch calls disciple making the next most critical element, because it is the task of embodying the message and mission of Jesus the Founder. He quotes C. S. Lewis to the effect that the church exists to draw people to Christ and make them like Christ, and that cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, and even the Bible are a waste of time if the church is missing that purpose. Jesus, he writes, invested his life in a small band of followers and entrusted the movement to them.Missional movements, as he observes them, appear as disciple-making systems, and disciple making remains the core practice: the starting point, the abiding strategy, and the key to lasting impact. He says the Western church has a historical language of discipleship and a thin practice of it, for lack of a clear process, because discipleship is reduced to the assimilation of ideas, and because consumerism forms people in a rival way. Neil Cole's aim for Church Multiplication Associates, which Hirsch quotes, is to lower the bar of how church is done and raise the bar of what it means to be a disciple. Life Transformation Groups, a staple of Bible reading, storytelling, personal accountability, and prayer, are required of the Christians in that movement, including leaders. The aim Hirsch names is a world filled with little Jesuses. Jesus, in his phrase, is the teacher, the curriculum, and the classroom.
03
Missional-Incarnational Impulse
The gospel goes out by mission and goes deep by incarnation.
Following the missional impulse, the message goes out; following the incarnational one, the message goes deep.
Hirsch chooses the compound name because two theological motivators meet in one impulse. Jesus charges his people in words Hirsch translates, "Just as the Father sends me, so I send you." The church is sent, and the church is sent in the way the Son was sent, as embodied message. The missional impulse is informed by the mission of God. The incarnational impulse draws on the incarnation. He likens the two to the blades of a pair of scissors. Following the missional impulse, the message goes out. Following the incarnational one, the message goes deep.He lists six practices for a people who mean to act in the pattern of the incarnation. Presence: God was in the Nazarene neighborhood for thirty years. Proximity: Jesus ate with Pharisees, tax collectors, and prostitutes, and his followers remain available in real friendships. Prevenience: God is already at work, and Wesley's prevenient grace means the missionary joins that work. Powerlessness: the pattern is servanthood. Passion: Debra Hirsch's phrase, the incarnation of the heart, names a felt share in human pain. Proclamation: the people are a message tribe, and the invitation remains part of the calling.Over time, he says, incarnational practice embeds the gospel so a people worship Jesus in ways that belong to their own culture. He warns that control can slow a movement from multiplication toward addition and then subtraction. Contextual listening asks what a people face, what excites them, and where they seek redemption.
04
Liminality and Communitas
Shared ordeal forms the comradeship Hirsch calls communitas.
liminality and communitas are much more the normative situation and condition of the pilgrim people of God.
Hirsch borrows Victor Turner's pair and makes it an element of mDNA. Liminality, as he uses Turner, is the experience of disorientation, marginality, danger, ordeal, humiliation, or challenge that a group must meet or fail. Communitas is the bond that happens when people find one another through that common ordeal. He insists the two stay linked. Communitas is the togetherness of a group inspired by a vision of a better world who attempt to do something about it.He learned the loss in his own middle-class church. Under what he calls the gather-and-amuse impulse, the community grew by transfer, the flow of conversion dried up, and the church became busier with less missional impact. The phrase he uses for the drift is the move from "me for the community and the community for the world" to "the community for me." Recovery meant recalibrating along missional lines, with pain and with numerical loss. The early church and the Chinese underground church, outlawed and persecuted, are his cases of liminality endured over a long time. He treats that condition as normative for the pilgrim people of God.He surveys Scripture and finds revelation clustered in times of extremity, from the exodus and the exile to Jesus, Paul, and Acts. The loss of this element diminishes Apostolic Genius, which needs all six to flame up. The Handbook titles the same material Communitas, Not Community, and keeps it inside the six.
05
APEST Culture
Apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher form one ministry culture.
APEST culture is a comprehensive category by which to assess, understand, and develop the full ministry of the church.
APEST is Hirsch's abbreviation for the Ephesians 4 ministries: apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd (pastor), and teacher. He uses the phrase APEST culture because he wants vocation and calling, and also the social functions, language, and symbols by which a church understands ministry. It is his comprehensive category for the full ministry of the church. The Handbook calls the same territory Apostolic Environment and asks what kind of environment lets the elements of mDNA flourish. This page keeps the 2016 name.He states the claim in categorical form. There has never been, in his study, a genuine missional movement with exponential growth and wide transformational impact that lacks APEST ministry. A church needs at least the five types to start, develop, and maintain a movement. He also says the apostolic ministry is the one most excluded in the West, and the one most needed, because the apostle is the person charged with the sentness of the church. To lock the apostolic out of the organization is, in his words, a movement killer of the first degree.The 2016 chapter names four apostolic functions: embed mDNA by pioneering new ground, guard it through apostolic theology, network the movement by a common vision, and create the environment in which the other ministries emerge. Authority, as he defines it, is inspirational. Apostles belong inside the fivefold complex, with shepherds and teachers. Ephesians 4:11-16 is the text he treats as Jesus's design for maturity and for the fullness of Christ.
06
Organic Systems
The church organizes as a living organism with a reproducible code.
Structures are either movement killers or movement enhancers.
Hirsch asks how expanding movements reach scale and still keep their core ideas, and how they pass those ideas on while leaving room for experiment. Structure, he says, matters. It is necessary for growth over time and distance. Structures are either movement killers or movement enhancers, and the answer sits in the system as a whole. In its remarkable form, when Apostolic Genius is manifest, the church organizes as a living organism consistent with the way God has structured life.Latency is the good news of this element. A church does not have to import a foreign genius. He writes that the answer is already there, waiting to be born, and that working all six elements to the point of catalyzing Apostolic Genius changes everything. Movement killers are the factors that block a potential Jesus has already put in his people. Institutionalism, as he describes it, begins as a needed support and can become the mission. He says he is prescribing a recovery of organic systems, and he affirms the need for structure that can last.Reproduction is the test he lingers on. Living systems reproduce. He describes copying a mother church as cloning, and he wants the variety of a living transmission, with mDNA as the simple guiding system built into the new work. David Garrison's line, which he quotes, says that if you want reproducing churches, you set out to plant reproducing churches. Simplicity is the gift he sees when a people learn what they can carry.
The Roman Empire, AD 100 to AD 310 · multiplied
From 25,000 to 20,000,000
A 2003 seminar question sent Hirsch looking for how a persecuted movement grew from as few as 25,000 Christians to as many as 20,000,000.
In the Handbook's introduction, Hirsch recounts a 2003 seminar on missional church. The speaker asked how many Christians there were in AD 100, and how many just before Constantine, around AD 310. Hirsch records the answer he was given. AD 100: as few as 25,000 Christians. AD 310: up to 20,000,000 Christians. The footnote points to Rodney Stark's *The Rise of Christianity* and says Hirsch averaged Stark's estimates and compared them with other sources. The question that haunted him was how they did it.
Stories he tells
China, from Mao's rise through the late twentieth centuryflourished
The underground church in China
Long Beach, California, then sixteen countriesmultiplied
Church Multiplication Associates
Cole left a successful church model in order to pursue a multiplication movement built on discipleship, organic design, and APEST.
Eighteenth-century Britain; the United States, 1776 to 1860declined
When Methodism made discipleship optional
Hirsch tells Methodism's expansion and then two American decisions, in 1850 and 1860, that he says hamstrung the movement.
Questions people ask · asked along the way
Questions to sit with · 1 / 6
Is the real Jesus really Lord in our community?
With your team
Try it
01This month
Make the Gospels the primary text
For one month, let a community reread the Gospels as the primary text that recalibrates life around Jesus, before any new program is added.
02This month
Name the discipleship norm
This month, write the everyday requirement for a Christian in your community, with mission included, and tell the truth about whether you practice it.
03This quarter
Ask the proximity questions
For one quarter, answer the Handbook's questions about proximity, frequency, and spontaneity in the actual places your people already live.
Ask the work
Ask which of the six elements is alive in the congregation, and what happens when that element is read together with the other five.
Go further
Questions people ask
Questions and misreadings
Preparing for the Journey asks the question in his own words. What DNA does for biological systems, mDNA does for ecclesial ones. He wants the metaphor to explain why a simple, intrinsic, reproducible, central guiding mechanism is necessary for genuine missional movements to reproduce and last. As an organism holds together because each cell understands its function in relation to its DNA, the church finds its reference point in its built-in mDNA. Each element is a meta-idea, a foundational idea that supports the production, organization, and transmission of other ideas. He also calls the six originating archetypes, built-in instincts that guide the patterns of behavior in movements. The 2016 order is Jesus Is Lord, Disciple Making, Missional-Incarnational Impulse, Liminality and Communitas, APEST Culture, and Organic Systems.
Contrasts
Preparing for the Journey says the six can be viewed as stand-alone centers of activity, and that the world-changing power appears when they are viewed as a nonlinear system in which everything is connected.
Six centers in a line
Apostolic Genius as a system
How the six appear
Strategic centers of essential activity
An ecosystem, a platform for movement
What one element does
A focal point for diagnosis and development
A subunit that reciprocally shapes the others
Discipleship's place
A critical center any church can strengthen
Necessary to movement, and in need of the other elements
APEST's place
A way to bring wholeness to ministry
In need of discipleship, mission, and structure
What activates movement
Improvement in a chosen area
All six connecting under the Spirit
Hirsch wants both views, and he says the second is where movement thinking unlocks its power. Enhancing Christology, disciple making, or APEST brings benefit. He then says discipleship by itself will not produce movement. Risk, incarnational mission, movement organization, and APEST ministry have to enter the equation. The same paragraph says APEST alone, without discipleship, mission, and the right structure, will likely cause a blowup. The Holy Spirit is the context of the whole diagram. The rows stay with the comparison he draws in that chapter. The spectrum flag stays off, because he is describing two ways of seeing one code, and the activation he describes is the presence of the system.
The liminality chapter tells his own church's drift into a consumptive community, and it sets communitas beside the community middle-class churches have learned to expect.
The community for me
Communitas
What the church offers
Zesty religious goods and services
A common mission and a dangerous journey
How it grows
Transfers, under a gather-and-amuse impulse
A bond forged in shared ordeal
What happens to conversion
The flow slows to a trickle and runs dry
Jesus movements thrive in liminality
How long it lasts
A refuge from a busy life
Normative for the pilgrim people of God
The phrase he uses
The community for me
Me for the community and the community for the world
Hirsch says the loss was primal. The church grew in numbers and became busier, with less missional impact. Recovery meant recalibrating along missional lines, and he says that recalibration included pain and numerical loss. He distinguishes his use of the terms from missiologists who treat liminality as a temporary passage between Christendom and a missional mode. In the movements he is studying, liminality and communitas are the ongoing condition. The Handbook's chapter title, Communitas, Not Community, names the same contrast. The early church and the Chinese underground church are the cases. They were marginal, and they lacked legitimacy, and he says Apostolic Genius activated in that shared ordeal.
Organic Systems compares church planting that copies a mother church with the reproducibility of a living system whose guiding code is mDNA.
Cloning a model
Reproducing with variety
What the new church is
An attempted replica of the original
Unique offspring of the same species
What gets passed on
The parent model, including its weight
A simple guiding system, mDNA
Genetic result
A closed pool, homogeneity
Variety that can survive a new field
Who can start it
People who can stage the full original
Average Christians carrying a sneezable gospel
China, as he uses it
New converts absorbed into existing churches
New converts as the basis of a new church
Hirsch says all organic life seeks to reproduce. He says church-planting programs have often worked more like cloning than like the variety built into sexual reproduction in his biological metaphor. The daughter becomes an exact replica, and the internal variety a different field needs is minimized. Reproducibility, in his account, is the capacity to perpetuate life through simple mechanisms. mDNA is that mechanism. It has to encode what a healthy church requires. Garrison's sentence, which he quotes, ties the result to the intention: set out to plant reproducing churches if that is what you hope to see. He applies the same test to the megachurch template and to the seminary. If the form cannot be carried by ordinary disciples, it will not travel as a people movement. Curtis Sergeant's suggestion, as Hirsch reports it, is that the Chinese underground church kept variety by forming new churches around new converts.
When it is missing
When it is missing
A confession that never leaves the worship hourJesus Is Lord
Work, money, and politics under other lordsJesus Is Lord
Jesus pictured outside his own churchJesus Is Lord
A sacred space that leaves the rest of life unclaimedJesus Is Lord
Discipleship offered as an optional extraDisciple Making
A lowered bar for belonging and a complex churchDisciple Making
Leaders exempt from the community's own practiceDisciple Making
Consumer religion shaping people the church does not formDisciple Making
Ministry limited to shepherd and teacherAPEST Culture
Apostolic people frozen out or sent to the edgeAPEST Culture
A title of apostle used to dominateAPEST Culture
Parachurch agencies carrying callings the church exiledAPEST Culture
The institution has become the missionOrganic Systems
New churches copied from a form most people cannot reproduceOrganic Systems
Control that slows multiplication toward subtractionOrganic Systems
Guilt in small churches measured against a megachurch stageOrganic Systems
Deuteronomy 6:4-9
The Shema as the claim on all of life
Hirsch calls the Shema Israel's basic confession and the original instance of God's complete claim. He sets it against ancient Near Eastern polytheism, in which different divinities ruled field, tree, river, economics, state, family, war, and fertility. The declaration that Yahweh is one meant, for the person who came under it, that there were no longer different gods for different spheres. Yahweh is Lord of home, field, politics, and work. Love of God is impressed on the children and tied to sitting, walking, lying down, and rising, to hands, forehead, doorframes, and gates. He says this is covenant loyalty. It trains worship as the bringing of every sphere under God. The Torah's jump from temple to a donkey in a pit to mildew in the kitchen is, in his reading, a nonlinear logic that connects all of life to Yahweh. Paul, he notes, calls the law a guardian that leads to Jesus, and he cites Galatians 3:19-4:5 for that function. The confession is the epicenter of the first element of mDNA.
Historical witness
Historical witness
AD 100 to AD 310The Roman Empire
The early Christian movement
Hirsch records a 2003 seminar's figures: as few as 25,000 Christians in AD 100, and up to 20,000,000 around AD 310. He points readers to Rodney Stark for the estimates he averaged.
The episode is the question that opened his search. He stresses what the movement did not have: legal protection, ordinary church buildings, a finished canon, professional leadership, and an easy door. By the late second century, initiation was demanding. By AD 170, in the disciple-making chapter, catechumens had to prove they were worthy, and many were turned away. He reads the growth as Apostolic Genius operating in a people willing to die for the confession that Jesus is Lord. The Handbook says persecution kept them close to the gospel and purified them of unnecessary paraphernalia. The element this most clearly displays, alongside the whole code, is the latent potential of mDNA when external supports are gone.
From Mao's rise to the early 1980s, and a seventy-year span in the 2016 chapterChina
The Chinese church under Mao
The Handbook starts from about two million adherents at the purge, then estimates of about 60 million when the country reopened, and Aikman's suggestion of as many as 80 million. The 2016 Jesus Is Lord chapter says around 2 million to around 120 million in seventy years.
Hirsch tells the removals in sequence. Foreign missionaries banished, property nationalized, senior leaders killed, second- and third-level leaders killed or imprisoned, public meetings banned on pain of death or torture. The Cultural Revolution's aim, as he states it, was to obliterate Christianity. The returnees of the early 1980s expected a battered remnant and found a movement. He pairs this with the early church as the contemporary witness that a people can intuit the pattern when external structures are destroyed. The confession clashes with the state's claim to supreme governance. Few Bibles, no professional clergy, and no central organization are part of the argument. The numbers stay in the form each book gives them.
Wesley's lifetime through 1860Britain and the United States
Methodism's expansion and the American decisions
Within a generation, one in thirty people in Britain were Methodists. In America, Hirsch's Handbook figures are under 2 percent in 1776 and 34 percent by 1850. In 1850 ordination studies were required. In 1860 classes and bands were no longer required.
Addison, as Hirsch uses him, ties the success to a high commitment of discipleship. The 1850 decision responded to the charge that Methodist ministers were uncouth and unlearned. Circuit riders and local ministers had to complete four years of study. Hirsch says growth ceased straightaway. The 1860 decision made discipleship an optional extra, and he says the movement has declined as a percentage of the population ever since. The missional-incarnational chapter remembers the earlier form: decentralized, reproducing, committed to holiness, and planting thousands of communities, including a raised status for slaves and women. The episode shows mDNA being suppressed by a movement's own later choices. It is the mixed witness on this page.
About sixty years undergroundRussia, in the time of Stalin
A Russian Baptist church under Stalin
After buildings were confiscated and religion outlawed, a small Baptist church went underground and emerged sixty years later numbering around twenty thousand.
Hirsch puts the story in Organic Systems, beside the early church and China, as a people driven to eliminate all that did not matter. A pastor's remark, as he reports it, is that they had to rediscover the faith in uncluttered simplicity. Beloved institutions, buildings, and public services were gone. He calls the emergence a discovery of Apostolic Genius embedded within the church, latent and forgotten. The questions he hands to the West come from this episode. What is the irreducible minimum of the faith? What is too complex and heavy to carry into an adaptive challenge? The significance for mDNA is reproducibility. A simple code can travel when the heavy form cannot.
How the idea developed
Then · 2009 · The Forgotten Ways Handbook
With Darryn Altclass, Hirsch lists six elements in the Handbook's order and names. Apostolic Environment is the name for apostolic influence and the APEST environment. Communitas stands last, under the chapter title Communitas, Not Community. The early-church and China questions, and the claim of latency, are already the frame.
Now · 2016 · The Forgotten Ways, 2nd edition
The element chapters use APEST Culture for the ministry element and place Liminality and Communitas before it. Hirsch notes that veteran readers will see the Holy Spirit restored to the diagram as the ground of apostolic movements, a context he refuses to count as one of the six. He also says that in the ten years since the first edition he has gone deeper on APEST.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
mDNAalso "movement DNA", "missional DNA"
Hirsch's name for the movement DNA of the church, a simple reproducible code of six elements.
The m distinguishes it from biological DNA and means movement. What DNA does for living systems, mDNA does for ecclesial ones. Each element is an irreducible component of the genetic code of the movement he calls Apostolic Genius. Because of latency, the seed of the future is in the womb of the present. The Handbook also calls the same reality missional DNA.
Apostolic Genius
The movement system that appears when all six elements of mDNA work together.
Hirsch coined the phrase for a hard-to-name energy he saw in the New Testament church and in other apostolic movements. It is the ecosystem, or platform, formed by the accumulation of the six elements. It can be seen as six centers in a line, and it is activated as a nonlinear system. He believes it is latent in all true Christians and is one of the works of the Holy Spirit.
latent potentialalso "latency"
The full coding of movement already present, often dormant, in God's people.
Hirsch's biological image is that each cell carries the full coding of the organism. The macrocosm is in the microcosm. The tree is in the seed. He says the possibility of movement lies at the root of the church's existence. The Handbook's Wizard of Oz retelling makes the same point. The travelers already had what they were seeking. The Western task is to recover and reactivate what is dormant.
Jesus Is Lordalso "christocentric monotheism"
The central confession of mDNA, the Shema gathered around Jesus the Messiah.
Hirsch reads "Jesus is Lord" as Israel's confession of one God, now restructured by the incarnation around Jesus. It claims every sphere of life. It excluded Caesar's claim for the early church and the state's claim for the Chinese underground church. He calls the New Testament form christocentric monotheism, and he says a church recovers Apostolic Genius by returning to this founding confession.
Disciple Makingalso "disciplemaking", "the conspiracy of little Jesuses"
The lifelong embodiment of Jesus, the strategic element after the confession.
Hirsch says missional movements appear as disciple-making systems and do not move past that practice. The aim is many little Jesuses in every sphere, the Founder living on in his people. Jesus is the teacher, the curriculum, and the classroom. Consumerism is the rival formation he names in the West. Leadership, in the same chapter, is an extension of discipleship.
Missional-Incarnational Impulse
The twin movement of going out in mission and going deep by incarnation.
Two doctrines meet in one practice: the mission of God and the incarnation. Hirsch's rendering of the sending is, just as the Father sends me, so I send you. The message goes out and the message goes deep, like two blades of a scissors. Six practices unfold the incarnation for the church: presence, proximity, prevenience, powerlessness, passion, and proclamation.
Liminality and Communitasalso "Communitas not Community"
The ordeal that forms a people, and the comradeship that ordeal creates.
From Victor Turner, liminality is disorientation, danger, and challenge at the edge of what a group can manage. Communitas is the bond of people who survive that ordeal together. Hirsch treats the pair as normative for the pilgrim people of God. The Handbook's title Communitas, Not Community is the 2009 name for this same element.
The fivefold ministry culture of apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher.
Hirsch uses APEST culture for personal vocation and for the functions, language, and symbols of ministry. It is his category for the full ministry of the church, grounded in Ephesians 4. The Handbook's Apostolic Environment is the earlier name for this element and is mapped here, so it is not a seventh. The apostolic task embeds and guards mDNA and makes room for the other ministries.
Organic Systems
Movement organized as a living organism, with a simple code that can reproduce.
Hirsch says the church, when it manifests Apostolic Genius, organizes in a way consistent with how God has structured life. Structures are movement killers or movement enhancers. Reproducibility means embedding mDNA so ordinary disciples can pass on a church. Cloning a heavy model is the failure he describes. The answer, he says, is already in the people, waiting to be born.
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.
