I haven’t found Alan Hirsch’s book The Forgotten Ways to be easy to read. I’ve found it disturbing, irritating, uncomfortable and thought-provoking. One of the things that Alan says is that the missional church needs to have liminality and communitas. Liminality involves being on the marginal edge, possibly but not necessarily in a position involving danger and disorientation. Communitas means the sort of relationships formed through shared ordeals.
No longer can the church hide safely inside buildings in the confident expectation that people will come to it. No longer can church be something which affects only the Sunday mornings in a believer’s life. Church needs to be reincarnated as something in the community all day every day. The holy huddle of comfortable fellowship needs to be replaced by the sort of friendships which can only arise when comrades risk all in pursuit of a vital purpose.
Something that I’m not sure about is whether Alan is right when he seems to imply that the new missional approach needs to be done by smaller bands in informal settings. In my own experience, smaller missional groups have not been as effective as larger groups. Alan is right in suggesting that the larger the group is, the more difficulty you have in deploying the talents of all members fully; but it seems to me that the smaller the group is, the more trouble you have in finding people with gifts and talents sufficient to create momentum.