Christ's movement grows through living systems already latent in his people.
Hirsch says the possibility of movement is already in the ecclesia and can stay suppressed. A people then keep aiming at a model that leaves most neighbors untouched, and ordinary believers never take up the sent life Jesus has already given them.
On this page
Reading path
Where it lives in the work
Start with On the Verge of the Future so the claim has a movement, a latent potential, and a path called movementum. Read The Silver Imagination for the paradigm and the four focal points in his order. Apostolic Genius is the genetic code, and Verge Vibe is the ethos that turns the code into a culture. Embodying Movement is the practices, and it comes after the paradigm. Then read the two 2016 chapters, liminality first and organic systems second, where the seven characteristics, the networks, and the pilgrim climate are his alone. Read Scenius and Eph4Us after that, and keep the fivefold walk on alan-hirsch-apest. Read Gaining Missional Momentum last, and keep Dave Ferguson's chapter in his name.
1
Start here
On the Verge, On the Verge of the Future
2011 · introduction
Shared chapter, header Alan and Dave. Names Verge churches, the 60:40 problem, Constantine's alteration of ecclesia, latent Apostolic Genius, and movementum as imagine, shift, innovate, and move. The "I (Alan)" passage on the Forgotten Ways breakthrough is his.
2
On the Verge, The Silver Imagination
2011 · core
Alan's chapter. Paradigm, imagination, and the four focal points in his order: Christology, missiology, organization, discipleship. Dave's Response, including the Chicago napkin and Community Christian Church, stays Ferguson's.
3
On the Verge, Apostolic Genius
2011 · core
Alan's chapter. Apostolic Genius as the genetic code of movement, the Chinese underground church, and Apostolic Genius as a mindset. Dave's Response on over-familiarity with the first two elements stays Ferguson's.
4
On the Verge, Verge Vibe
2011 · core
Alan's chapter. Ethos as the operating system between paradigm and practice, and seven moves for building it: beliefs, values, vocabulary, heroes, rewards, brand, and measures. Dave's Response stays Ferguson's.
5
On the Verge, Embodying Movement-Programming Practices
2011 · advanced
Alan's chapter. Practices as embodiments of value, action before a new way of thinking, Forge, third places, and TEMPT at South Melbourne Restoration Community. Dave's Response on Community Christian's 3C measures stays Ferguson's.
6
The Forgotten Ways, Liminality and Communitas
2016 · core
Alan Hirsch alone. Liminality as the condition and communitas as the bond, argued as normal for a pilgrim people, with South Melbourne as his own account.
7
The Forgotten Ways, Organic Systems
2016 · core
Alan Hirsch alone. Living systems, movement killers, Snyder's seven characteristics, Gerlach and Hine's five elements, three network types, and the movement table.
8
5Q, Scenius
2017 · advanced
Alan Hirsch, no coauthor in the chapter frontmatter. Scenius as the intelligence of a whole scene. He then applies it to fivefold culture, which this page names and leaves on alan-hirsch-apest.
9
5Q, Eph4Us
2017 · advanced
Alan Hirsch, no coauthor in the chapter frontmatter. The apostolic metaphor of the church as a dynamic movement, a translocal network, and the mobilizing of every agent. The five functions as a set belong on alan-hirsch-apest.
10
On the Verge, Gaining Missional Momentum
2011 · advanced
Header Dave. Dave Ferguson writes the chapter in the coauthored book. He restates the strategic and missionary problems, sets missional church plus missional people as missional movement, and tells Kathy's story at Community Christian Church. Those memories stay his.
Movement Intelligence
Hirsch presents the signature characteristics of movements through Howard Snyder, and he keeps them in one order. In Organic Systems he says that to clarify the ethos of movements as it relates to Apostolic Genius, it is important to identify some of those characteristics, and for this he turns to Snyder. The seven below are that list, in the order the chapter gives them. He then compares Snyder's Wesleyan perspective with five elements from the sociologists Luther Gerlach and Virginia Hine. That second list stays in the synthesis. It is not folded into these seven, and it is not renumbered.
He is explicit that a movement's early phase feels different from the institution that later grows out of it. His working definition, given just before the list, is a group of people organized for, ideologically motivated by, and committed to a purpose which implements some form of personal or social change; who are actively engaged in the recruitment of others; and whose influence is spreading in opposition to the established order within which it originated. He says the definition fits the New Testament people of God, and that it is consistent with the situations where Apostolic Genius manifests. The seven characteristics are how he fills in the feel of that definition.
01
thirst-for-renewal
A holy discontent that reaches back for the vitality of the early church.
A holy discontent with what exists precipitates a recovery of the vitality and patterns of the early church.
Snyder's first characteristic, as Hirsch lists it, is a thirst for renewal: a holy discontent with what exists precipitates a recovery of the vitality and patterns of the early church. Hirsch has already spent the opening of On the Verge on that discontent. He and Ferguson describe a strategic problem and a missionary problem. The prevailing approach, in their informed and anecdotal judgment, has cultural appeal to about 40 percent of the American population, perhaps 50 percent at best, and leaves a possible 60 percent alienated from the forms the church relies on. He says the combination is enough to precipitate a paradigm shift, and he quotes Einstein to the effect that the problems cannot be resolved by the same kind of thinking that created them.The recovery he wants is a recovery of movement form. He narrates the shift that began when Constantine co-opted Christianity and, around the Edict of Milan, gave an underground people-movement money, status, power, and buildings. Seventeen centuries later, he says, Constantine is still the emperor of our imaginations. The thirst for renewal, in this account, is a thirst to see the church as Jesus designed it. Christology is the first of four focal points in The Silver Imagination, in this order: Christology, missiology, organization, and discipleship. Jesus, he writes, retains full rights regarding the church's core intellectual property. Any imagination of a future has to represent what the Founder wants. He calls that return reJesusing the church, and he says the scriptural name for the dream is the kingdom of God.
02
work-of-the-spirit
The Spirit is treated as a present experience, active in the movement now.
The work of the Spirit is seen not only as important in the past but also as an experience in the present.
The second characteristic is a new stress on the work of the Spirit. Hirsch's summary of Snyder is that the work of the Spirit is seen as important in the past and as an experience in the present. He ties that stress to the actual life of a movement. In the Apostolic Genius chapter he says the phenomenon has everything to do with God's Spirit, the transformative power of the gospel, and the way Monday is as spiritually important as Sunday. The opening chapter says it is the missional God, initiator of the Missio Dei, who is most invested in the church becoming missional, and the Holy Spirit who moves and shapes the church. The shift they are describing is therefore, in their words, a matter of the heartbeat and purposes of God's people.He reaches for a witness on this point in the Chinese church, through Philip Yancey. A missionary expelled in 1950 told Yancey they had felt sorry for the church they left behind: no teachers, no printing presses, no seminaries, no one to run the clinics and orphanages, no resources, really, except the Holy Spirit. Yancey's conclusion, which Hirsch quotes, is that it appears the Holy Spirit is doing just fine. Hirsch's own theological caution sits beside that story. He says the potentials in the people are real because of the ever-present kingdom of God, the lordship of Jesus, the transforming power of the gospel, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in and among the people of God. Reactivation is a recognition of what God has already invested. In Verge Vibe he says leaders have to overcome the desire to control, because the Holy Spirit can and does guide his people.
03
institutional-charismatic-tension
Renewal strains the structures it is born in, which he calls the wineskins question.
In almost every case of renewal, tensions within existing structures will arise (this raises the issue of wineskins).
The third characteristic is an institutional-charismatic tension. Hirsch's line from Snyder is that in almost every case of renewal, tensions within existing structures will arise, and that this raises the issue of wineskins. He spends the longest stretch of Organic Systems on that tension, and he refuses a simple demolition. He says he is not trying to be anarchic. Movements have to create culture and routinize values if they are to outlive the founding. All living systems require structure. Structure does not itself create life, as a machine does not, and without structure life cannot exist for very long. The structure he trusts is simple, reproducible, and internal.The danger he names is the next step, when institution becomes institutionalism. Organizations set up to serve a function begin to embody an ism. The center becomes the locus of power. Uniformity replaces mission. He says no one seems to intend this. It is the law of unintended consequences. His tragic exhibit is the meeting at the Abbey of Whitby in 664, where the centralist Roman church hobbled the organic Celtic mission, and the Celtic movement was never the same again. He also borrows David K. Hurst's marks of the shift from hunters to herders, in this order: mission becomes strategy, roles become tasks, teams become structure, networks become organization, recognition becomes compensation. Most Western churches, he believes, will be hybrids of adaptive and operational forms, approximating a movement by incremental activation of Apostolic Genius, which is the both/and he and Ferguson argue in the opening chapter. The tension is the characteristic. The wineskin has to be able to strain.
04
countercultural-community
Movements call the church into a live tension with the world around it.
Movements call the church to a more radical commitment and a more active tension with the world.
The fourth characteristic is a concern for being a countercultural community. Hirsch's summary is that movements call the church to a more radical commitment and a more active tension with the world. His working definition of a movement already includes influence spreading in opposition to the established order within which it originated. Gerlach and Hine's fifth element, which he quotes in the same chapter, is real or perceived opposition from the society at large or from the segment of the established order inside which the movement has arisen. He names Wesley shunned by the Anglican church, Booth, and Martin Luther King Jr. rejected by the hegemonic Christianity of his day.Liminality and Communitas is his long account of what that tension feels like from the inside. Liminality, following Victor Turner, occurs in disorientation, marginality, danger, ordeal, humiliation, or challenge that a group must meet or fail. Communitas is the bond that emerges when people have to rely on one another. He says exemplary Jesus movements were expressions of communitas. The early Christian movement and the Chinese underground church lived this through being outlawed and persecuted. He lists the biblical clusters where revelation and miracle gather in extremity: the patriarchs, the exodus, the giving of the Torah, the prophets, the exile, Jesus, Paul, Acts, and John. Middle-class culture, as he isolates it, can carry an enemy within when safety and security, then comfort and convenience, fuse with consumerism. The countercultural note is a willingness to be a pilgrim people in that tension, with Jesus at the center of the risk.
05
nontraditional-leadership
Spiritual authority, often in people without formal office, leads the renewal.
Renewal movements are often led by people with no recognized formal leadership status in the church.
The fifth characteristic is nontraditional or nonordained leadership. Hirsch's summary of Snyder is that renewal movements are often led by people with no recognized formal leadership status in the church. Spiritual authority is the key. Women and other marginalized groups are noticeably more active in movements. He connects this to the priesthood of all believers, which he calls one of the most potent ecclesial doctrines in the New Testament and one seldom lived. A callout in the opening chapter puts it in a sentence: in the church Jesus built, conversion is commission, or baptism is ordination.Organic Systems quotes church-planting movement researcher David Garrison: in vigorous Jesus movements, leadership authority is decentralized, and every cell or house-church leader has the authority to do what evangelism, ministry, and new church planting require without seeking approval from a hierarchy. Curtis Sergeant, whom Hirsch calls an expert on the Chinese underground church, is quoted to the effect that external human control over new converts and churches is inversely proportional to the potential growth. Embodying Movement adds the practice he wants attached to conversion: recognize that a new follower is commissioned into ministry. In Eph4Us he says the apostolic function mobilizes all the agents in the system, so that all disciples are in the game. The fivefold shape of that ministry is the theme [alan-hirsch-apest](alan-hirsch-apest). Here the characteristic is the one Snyder names: leadership that does not wait on formal religious status, and a movement that makes room for people the inherited office had left at the edge.
06
ministry-to-the-poor
Movements start at the grassroots, on the edges, and among the poor.
Movements almost always involve people at the grassroots level.
The sixth characteristic is ministry to the poor. Hirsch's summary is that movements almost always involve people at the grassroots level. They actively involve the masses, the uneducated or socially outcast, and often start as mission on the edges and among the poor. The examples he attaches are St. Francis, the Wesleys, and the Salvation Army. A page later he adds an aspect he says is worth adding to both lists: new missional movements almost always begin on the edges of society and among the common people. As people movements, they are non-elitist. They have the ability to excite and enlist others as leaders and participants.His own early story sits on that edge. At South Melbourne Restoration Community the first energy, as he tells it in the liminality chapter, was a community radically open to people on the fringes. The later middle-class stability brought transfers and thinned the conversions. He presents that sequence as a loss of the grassroots grain. The opening chapter of On the Verge makes the same point as a missionary problem: the possible 60 percent will need the gospel in culturally meaningful ways, which means the message has to travel to them. In The Silver Imagination he says the sent people take church to the people as well as bring people to church, and that the church consists of the people of God. One of the major keys he names is unleashing all of God's people as missional agents of the King in every sphere and domain. Ministry to the poor, in this list, is that grain: the movement's life among ordinary people, at the edge, where the poor already are.
07
energy-and-dynamism
A young movement can excite people and enlist them as participants and leaders.
New movements have the ability to excite and enlist others as leaders and participants.
The seventh characteristic is energy and dynamism. Hirsch's line from Snyder is that new movements have the ability to excite and enlist others as leaders and participants. He repeats the enlistment line when he adds the edge-and-common-people aspect to the lists. The energy, in his account, is what the uptake side of an organizational life cycle feels like. Movements believe their message and believe they are responsible to deliver it. On the decline side, programming and administration replace vision and mission, and doubt replaces belief. Verge Vibe is his account of how an ethos carries that energy: beliefs, values, a vocabulary, heroes, rewards, a brand understood as a promise kept, and measures that show what is actually prized. He quotes Bob Roberts Jr. that every church that values multiplication will measure success or failure outside its walls.The dynamism he trusts is metabolic. In Organic Systems he says this is precisely how the early church grew from 25,000 to 20 million in two hundred years, and precisely how the Chinese church grew from 2 million to 120 million or more in forty years. The forty-year sentence belongs to that 2016 paragraph. The sixty-year sentence, about 2 million to over 120 million, belongs to the 2011 Apostolic Genius chapter. He illustrates the same energy with a pay-it-forward covenant: each person brings two people to the Lord and disciples them to do the same, and each church plants two churches that plant two more, applied to evangelism, discipleship, and church planting. Movementum, defined in the opening chapter, is the process of gaining missional momentum until an apostolic movement is born, by taking the church through imagine, shift, and innovate again and again. The seventh characteristic is that capacity to enlist. A movement that cannot excite and include new leaders has already begun to cool.
China across the decades he names, and a 2005 conversation Michael Frost reports · movement
The Chinese underground church
Hirsch presents the Chinese underground church as the clearest modern manifestation of Apostolic Genius, a movement activated when the familiar institutions were removed.
In the Apostolic Genius chapter of *On the Verge*, Hirsch says that during the Chinese Communist revolution, leaders of the underground church had to adapt quickly because their lives and the survival of the church were at stake. He calls the result a gift. The phenomenon of the last sixty years, the persecuted church growing from about 2 million to over 120 million, is in his words quite possibly the most remarkable manifestation of Apostolic Genius in the history of the church. It teaches the rest of the church about itself, as a different cultural expression of the same ecclesia, with the same latent potentials. The church Jesus started, he writes, already has everything in it to get its job done. Ecclesia is perfectly designed to fulfill its mission and purpose. That is as true for the Chinese peasants, in his sentence, as it is for churches elsewhere, because Jesus is the Founder and Designer.
Stories he tells
Inner-city Melbourne, the years he describes as formation and then as middle-class stabilityrecovered
South Melbourne loses the ordeal, and finds it
The church began as a missional communitas among people on the fringes, settled into a consumer pattern, and recovered by a painful recalibration.
A Jesus-people Bible study in the early 1970s, then south-central Pennsylvania, then fifteen countriesmultiplied
DOVE gives the church away
A house-church movement hit a ceiling of centralized management, named itself an apostolic movement, and grew as a network by giving the church away.
Questions people ask · asked along the way
Questions to sit with · 1 / 8
Where is our church in the four stages he names: structure and normalcy, anomalies, crisis, and transition or restructuring?
With your team
Try it
01This month
Tell the church's story as a movement
This month, find the seasons when your church already had the vibe of a movement, and retell that story in the hearing of the people, tied to the early church.
02This quarter
Step past the expert line
Name one learning project for the year, then move the team to the edge where most of you are beginners.
03This month
Plant the gospel in a third place
With a few others, spend time in a social space that is neither home nor the gathering, and let the questions of good news and church arise there.
Ask the work
Ask how the patterns of Christ's movement are already present in the people you serve, and which of Snyder's seven is thin.
Go further
Questions people ask
Questions and misreadings
Organic Systems gives the definition in full and then asks the reader to test it against Acts, and against what they know of the church in China, South America, and Africa. Movements, he writes, move, while monuments are not going anywhere soon. They are living, responsive, adaptive, growing, and social. The feel of the early phase is belief: people believe the message and believe they are responsible to deliver it. The feel of decline is doubt, with programming and administration in the driver's seat. Snyder's seven characteristics and Gerlach and Hine's five elements are the two lists he uses to make that feel specific. Apostolic Genius is his name for the system that carries a Jesus movement. He is careful to say the phenomenon, apart from Jesus as Lord, has analogues in other movements, and that in the church it takes a Jesus-shaped form.
Contrasts
The locked theme file has no binary block. Organic Systems still prints a comparison table, which Hirsch says is adapted and developed from Bill Easum, and he asks the reader to test it. H. R. Niebuhr's older contrast, which Hirsch quotes, sits beside the table: one conservative and one progressive, one anxious and one prepared to take risks, one guarding boundaries and one crossing them.
Organic missional movement
Institutional religion
Leadership at the center
Pioneering missional leadership
An aristocratic class inheriting leadership by loyalty
What is lived
The way of life of the Founder
A codified belief system to be believed and confessed
Where the principles sit
Internal operational principles, latent mDNA
External legislating policies and governance
Relation to the cause
Has a cause
Is the cause
Where the mission points
To change the future
To preserving the past
Feel of the organization
Agile and dynamic
Static and fixed
Where power sits
A decentralized network, power and function at the edges
A centralized organization, power and function at the center
Who it draws
The common person, through the gospel's appeal to the heart
An increasingly elitist circle of complex scholarship and liturgies
Basis of influence
Inspirational leadership and spiritual authority
Transactional leadership and institutional authorization
Name for the people
People of the Way
People of the Book
Set
Centered-set
Closed-set
Hirsch says the reader should test the table against movements and institutions they know, and against their own experience of church, adding or subtracting elements that do or do not fit. The rows above follow his two columns in the order the chapter prints them. He believes most Western churches will be hybrids, so the table is a diagnostic, and he has already said structure itself is a gift when it serves the movement. The closed-set note points to a description in The Shaping of Things to Come, which was not opened for this page.
The liminality chapter names these two ideas as the shift South Melbourne lived, from a missional grammar to a consumptive one, and back.
The community for me
Me for the community, and the community for the world
Who the common life is for
The attender's stability and experience
The member's sent life, and through that the world
What the growth was made of
Transfers from other churches
A flow of conversion
What the week felt like
Busy religious goods and services
A communitas formed around a shared ordeal
The bond
Voluntary association of autonomous individuals
Comrades bound in a common mission
He is explicit that the middle-class names safety, security, comfort, and convenience are cultural values that came along in the deal, and that he is describing a culture he himself comes from. The recovery he reports included numerical loss. The rows stay with the contrasts that chapter draws.
When it is missing
When it is missing
The word church used only for a building, a service, or a brandmovement ethos
Heroes who are only the scholar and the communicatormovement ethos
Success counted as attendance and budgetmovement ethos
A story that never ties the church to the movement in Actsmovement ethos
Safety and security as the unspoken goals of the common lifeliminality and communitas
Comfort and convenience fused with a consumer patternliminality and communitas
Transfers rising while conversions dry upliminality and communitas
A community that is busier and less on missionliminality and communitas
A boss at the center of every decisionliving systems
External control treated as care for new churchesliving systems
Cells that still report upward like a hierarchyliving systems
A seminary, office, or board that the grassroots cannot move withoutliving systems
John 12:24
The seed of a movement, dormant until the familiar form is let go
Organic Systems reaches for this verse at the end of the Chinese-church argument. The possibility of movement was always present in the ecclesia and was suppressed by historical traditions. The seed was dormant in the womb of the established church and was brought to life when the familiar institutional forms were removed. He cites John 12:24 there, the grain that falls into the earth and dies. He does not print the verse. The reading he attaches is latency: the movement is already in the people, and the death of the imposing form is the condition under which it comes up. The same chapter's seed-and-forest picture in On the Verge belongs with this reading. In every seed there is a tree, in every tree a forest, and the forest is in the seed. He is talking about Apostolic Genius, the code Jesus has already put in his church.
Historical witness
Historical witness
The early fourth century, as his table dates the Catholic Christendom church from AD 320
Constantine and the Edict of Milan
Hirsch says that when Constantine co-opted Christianity, an illegal underground people-movement was given money, status, power, and legitimacy. The church received magnificent buildings at the centers of towns, pressure to standardize theology and creeds, and a formalized clergy. Constantine became Pontifex Maximus, a title later given to the popes. The deal made the church the religious and cultural center of the empire. He says this fundamentally changed ecclesial life, and that the movemental aspect was almost entirely ejected from the prevailing paradigm within decades. The table in that chapter lists the Edict of Milan as the threshold just before which forms, theology, ritual, and structure were already developing, and after which the marriage of church and state gave birth to Christendom.
He calls Constantine the emperor of our imaginations seventeen centuries later, and he says the institutional imagination is what keeps the church from becoming genuinely missional and exponential. The witness is the dated shift from an underground movement to a religious center.
664, at the Abbey of Whitby
The meeting at the Abbey of Whitby
Hirsch calls the meeting one of the most tragic examples of the conformist impulse in institutions. The organic Celtic mission was hobbled there by the profoundly centralist Roman Catholic church. He says the Celtic movement was never the same again. He uses the episode as a picture of what happens when a living mission is brought under a centralist settlement.
Whitby is his exhibit of institutionalism as a movement killer. A mission that had been organic was conformed to a central church, and he says it never recovered its former freedom. The point for leaders is the unintended path he describes just before the story: structures meant to support a cause take on a life of their own and become the cause. Whitby is the dated moment he chooses for that path in the Celtic mission.
The sixty years named in 2011, the forty years named in the 2016 metabolic paragraph, and a meeting around 2005
The Chinese church under confiscation
Hirsch says the underground church learned to adapt during the Communist revolution because survival was at stake. Familiar institutions were confiscated and official leaders killed or imprisoned. In the 2011 telling the church grew from about 2 million to over 120 million. In the 2016 telling the figure is 2 million to 120 million or more in forty years. Around 2005 Michael Frost met three underground leaders who asked prayer that the limits on gathering size, buildings, and separate training organizations would lift. Yancey reports a missionary expelled in 1950 who thought the church had been left with nothing except the Holy Spirit.
Hirsch treats this history as the revelation of Apostolic Genius. The potential was in the people. Extreme liminality was the condition under which it became a movement again.
Vocabulary
Vocabulary
Apostolic Geniusalso "movement thinking"
His name for the intelligence, distributed through the ecclesia, that encodes apostolic movement.
In the Apostolic Genius chapter he says it is a paradigm and more than a paradigm. It describes the genius distributed throughout the system the New Testament calls ecclesia. It has to do with God's Spirit, the gospel, and the spiritual weight of Monday as well as Sunday. He says it is latent in the ecclesia and can be reactivated. In Organic Systems he says movement thinking, what he has specifically called Apostolic Genius, is the key to advancing the cause of Jesus in our day. He also says it is a mindset, not a technique. The six elements of mDNA that compose it are the theme alan-hirsch-mdna.
A group committed to a change, recruiting others, with influence spreading in tension with the order it came from.
Organic Systems gives that working definition and says it fits Acts and the places where Apostolic Genius manifests. Movements move. Monuments do not. He says Christianity is designed to be a people's liberation movement and a viral idea passing from person to person through gospel and discipleship. Verge churches, in the opening chapter's table, are reproducing churches beginning to reframe church around the missional and apostolic function and to organize toward exponential movement.
latent potentialalso "dormant potentials"
The full capacity for movement already present in every believer and every church.
In On the Verge he says he calls this dormant or latent potentials. It is why a highly institutional church can end up looking like the early church when the institutional forms are removed. The potential was already in the system. He extends the picture: in every seed a tree, in every tree a forest, in every spark a flame. Organic Systems says each disciple and each group has the full potential for movement already in it, because the group has the Holy Spirit, Jesus, mDNA, and the possibility of human choice.
living systemsalso "organic systems"
Seeing the ecclesia as a living organism and the church as a dynamic system.
Organic Systems says a living-systems approach requires those two seeings. In a system the elements are interrelated and interdependent, and everything is happening at once. He says failure to understand this blocks the transformative power of movements. The body metaphor is his exhibit: about thirty-five trillion cells, no boss cell, each cell carrying the code. Structure is required and must be simple, reproducible, and internal. He lists related names he is drawing on, including learning organization, complexity theory, and networked intelligence, and he lands on movement thinking.
liminality
The threshold condition of disorientation, risk, or ordeal that catalyzes a deeper bond.
Following Victor Turner, Hirsch says liminality occurs in disorientation, marginality, danger, ordeal, humiliation, or challenge that a group must meet or fail. It is the unfamiliar, the place of risk, challenge, or deliberate adventure. If communitas is the result, liminality is the condition that produces it. He argues it is the normative situation of the pilgrim people of God, the climate of the early church and of the Chinese underground church, and the cluster-point of biblical revelation. Refusal of essential risk, he says, declines any living system.
communitas
The comradeship that emerges when people rely on one another in a shared ordeal.
He distinguishes it from community as usually conceived. Communitas happens, in Turner's account as Hirsch uses it, where individuals find one another through ordeal, humbling, transition, and marginalization. In the Apostolic Genius chapter he defines it as the enhanced community that emerges from a shared ordeal, a common task, a challenge, even danger. Associates become comrades. He says it is easy to spot in a sports team, a deadline, a short-term mission, friends painting a house. In Verge churches it means becoming less risk-averse and more willing to learn in the open. He says the loss of it diminishes Apostolic Genius.
movementum
Missional momentum gained by cycling through imagine, shift, and innovate until an apostolic movement is born.
The opening chapter defines movementum as the process of gaining missional momentum until an apostolic movement is born. It occurs when a church is continuously taken through the three stages imagine, shift, and innovate. Part 4 of the book, Move, is the exploration of how to generate and maintain that momentum. The same cycle is for a person and for a whole community: see it, get it, do it, and repeat. He says this is not a change process you complete once.
ecclesia
The biblical word for church, which he reads as a gathering that is movement at every scale.
He says ecclesia does not refer to a building or a religious institution. It was borrowed from Roman city assemblies and means gathering. He finds four levels: the people of God expressing the ministry of Christ in every sphere, the local church, the citywide church, and the universal church. The term applies at every level. In that reading, ecclesia is movement. Verge Vibe suggests that if the word movement is too much, a church can use ecclesia and try to live into what the Bible means by it.
chaordic
Enough order at the center for a shared purpose, and enough freedom for creativity.
Hirsch takes the word from Dee Hock. Purpose and principle, clearly understood and commonly shared, are the genetic code of a healthy organization. To the degree a people hold them in common, they can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave and will do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization becomes a vital, living set of beliefs. He says this is how the original Jesus movement was organized, and how Verge church thinking should reframe ecclesia. Organic Systems returns to the same Hock passage as the glue of a network.
movement killersalso "institutionalism"
His name for what blocks the movement potential Jesus has put in his people.
Organic Systems says that if a group is not flourishing, factors are blocking a potential that is already there. Leaders identify and remove the blockages. Institutionalism is the main killer he describes: the structure taking on a life of its own, rewarding conformity, and ejecting the innovation it needs. Whitby in 664 is his historical exhibit. Falling in love with the system is the phrase he uses for the loss of capacity to change it. He says we are perfectly designed to get what we are currently getting.
silver imaginationalso "apostolic imagination"
His name for the imagination that can see the church Jesus wants, where no single fix will do.
He writes, "there is no silver bullet, but there is a silver imagination." The fundamental job of apostolic imagination, in the same chapter, is to produce out of the church we now experience a vision of the church Jesus wants us to experience. The four focal points, in his order, are Christology, missiology, organization, and discipleship. He says Verge church thinking is first an exercise in that imagination. The Bible's name for the turn, as he gives it, is metanoia, a turning in the mind.
scenius
The intelligence of a whole scene, a communal form of genius.
In Scenius he quotes Brian Eno: scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. Eno's line, which Hirsch quotes, is that scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in a gene. Hirsch says 5Q is what he chose to call the marvelous scenius laced into the body of Christ. That fivefold application is alan-hirsch-apest. On this page the word names the distributed intelligence of a movement: the genius is in the scene, in the people together, which is the same latency he has argued since The Forgotten Ways.
Verge vibealso "ethos"
The operating system that turns the movement paradigm into values, language, and choices.
Verge Vibe uses a computer picture. The apostolic movement paradigm corresponds to the machine language, the ethos to the operating system, and the practices to the programs. Most people meet the church at the level of practices. The ethos is what makes the paradigm usable. He lists seven pieces of work: identify beliefs, formulate values, develop a vocabulary, identify heroes, reward consistent behavior, brand the movement as a promise kept, and set measures. Dave Ferguson's response defines ethos as spontaneous repeated behaviors by a group of people. That definition is Ferguson's, offered inside the coauthored book.
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.
