Twitter Updates

Another class-required review:

Let me begin with an affirmation of Hirsch’s book. He is essentially a mirror to evolving ecclesiology; articulating the trends as he sees them. This statement, however, is followed with a proviso; for while I regard Hirsh himself as a capable author, my beef is essentially with the self-avowed experts, those Hirschites who polemicize against all things remotely organized or institutional. Having personally been the target of some claiming the authority of the attractional / incarnational critique (who currently belong to no church, I might add) I have found the criticism to be not only unfair but somewhat elitist in tone, as well as reactionary and containing a polemical ring. No one likes a ranter.

Now, on to an engagement with Hirsh’s ideas themselves.

He would be the first to admit this polemical quality as he shows his cards early on: “Another feature of this work is the consistent critique of religious institutionalism” (23). He uses his own experience as the model exemplar, chronicling his beginnings in the alternative scene, tracing its digression into “cool church”, his foray into “café church”, the move to “cell church”, and the arrival at “organic church”, replete with “Apostolic Genius” and “mDNA”. Personally, on these themes I would rather read Donald McGavran or the late Ralph Winter. Still, I credit his purists’ approach towards ecclesiology as earnest at worst and thoughtful at best. It is the familiar pursuit towards a New Testament model of church. I do resonate with his Christological emphasis: “Christology determines missiology, and missiology determines ecclesiology” (142). Criticism aside, the only hole I find is the hole I find in most “missional church” literature – the ignorance towards the ethnic dimension of missional church, that is to say, ignorance and unengagement of immigrant populations, which is fastly and largely comprising the church today. Engaging tattooed motorcyclists and former drug addicts and pimps (as important as that is) is not a wholistic picture of the margins of society.

But in closing I must extend my critique to his high valuing of decentralized forms of ecclesia. I don’t think this is the answer, and the shirking of structure keeps communities constantly immature, in my view. Were it a reforming impulse, I think I could appreciate his ecclesiology more. But it seems not; rather he wants to do away with structure altogether – and I find that line of thinking incomplete. I wish there were a greater engagement with the current trend back towards “high” church. What then?

Like

Unlike