Forge Intensive Tuesday – Alan Hirsch

I thought I’d post up my raw notes from the intensive … totally unedited I’m afraid, so please excuse anything wrong, offensive or unintelligible.

Alan Hirsch. Forge National Director.

How does the early church and chinese church grow so fast?

- there are many elements, but some don’t relate to spirituality, so they will be dealt with elsewhere.

- today – community aspect of how they grew so fast
- victor turner – Al ripped off his terminology – cultural anthropologist – studied african rites of passage – how young boys transition into being young men – ‘The Ritual Process’
- most african villages had two separate sections – female and male
- children are raised in the feminine part of the village but look forward to the rites of passage
- men come in to the female part of the village and take the boys to do the rites
- this is a time called liminality – danger, marginalisation, disorientation, ordeal
- boys find each other in a significant way through this process – this called communitas
- the type of community that develops when people are dealing with some kind of ordeal and they bond together to get over it
- being reintroduced into the village – the men’s side – creates renewal as the boys (now men) tell their stories
- for the church liminality and communitas are normative for the church – china/early church experienced these …

- September 11, Tsunami = global Communitas
- we all shared in the experience and were changed by it, bonded together
- Sports teams
- normally no relationship, no connection – give them a ball and some of the same shirts, they begin to experience ordeal and are bonded together.

- The church needs Communitas not Community
- Community is safe, secure and doesn’t do well at bonding us together, Communitas is the opposite.

- Scriptural basis
- Abraham
- David and his band
- Exodus
- Exile in Babylon
- 12 disciples and Jesus

- You start with Community – experience Liminality – this results in Communitas.

- Middle Class – obsessed with safety and security, combined with Consumerism adds convenience. this is then a very difficult environment for liminality to be introduced.

If a church begins with a focus on ministry they pretty much never get to mission, but if a church begins with a focus on mission then they will undoubtedly get to ministry. This is because ministry is the means by which you do mission.

How do we get past the fact that we seem to be able to consume experiences and get a false sense of liminality? These experiences make us feel as though we have generated communitas … but have we really?

Men stay away from the church because although it is run by men it is a feminine system – receptivity, attentive is the focus, not a cause. Men are side by side creatures, not face to face creatures. Men need a cause, the church doesn’t provide this.

Living systems theory.
- all living systems tend towards equilibrium
- life = that which exists far from equilibrium
- to activate a system you take it to the edge of chaos, this way it has to adapt, it keeps it alive.
- disturb equilibrium

80% of kids who go from high school/youth group to university lose their faith in the first year. they are taken out of the fish tank and put into the ocean.

It’s no wonder people can’t manage when they go out into the real world. The people who run our churches are only taught how to manage things inside the church, not about how to deal with the real world, so they can’t equip people to deal with reality. They are expert fish tank cleaners, they know nothing about the ocean.

Websites:
Second Hand Books – www.abebooks.com