Alan Hirsch is a South African-born missiologist and a leading voice in the missional movement of the Christian West. He is an internationally recognized author of five books on missional living. Additionally, Hirsch founded one and co-founded two organizations devoted to equipping people for missional living

Missional living

"Missional living" is a Christian term that describes a missionary lifestyle; adopting the posture, thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in order to engage others with the gospel message. The missional church movement is a church renewal movement predicated on the necessity of...

. He and his wife Debra have been married and in ministry for over twenty years in Australia and the United States.

Early life

Hirsch was born into a Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1959. He moved to Cape Town, in 1963 where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence. Then, he went to university in Cape Town where he studied business and marketing and moved to Australia in 1983 with his family. Although his family was not particularly religious, he was very much influenced by his Jewish heritage as his writings make clear. He also became politically active in opposition to racism as early as thirteen years old because he thought it to be “morally reprehensible”. He served a two years compulsory call-up in the South African military where he was “first introduced to drugs and then Jesus”. Although he was not around many Christians in his childhood, he recounts having deeply religious experiences and being fascinated with Jesus as a teenager. After having moved to Australia, he had a life-changing experience with the Holy Spirit that has deeply affected him. Soon after moving, he married Debra who was living on "the margins of society" like Alan. They have been married and in Christian ministry together for over twenty years.

Education and Ministry

During his first year of seminary at Australian College of Theology (ACT), he led a small group of newly converted Christians that included “gays, lesbians, Goths, drug addicts, prostitutes, and some relatively ordinary people.” He maintained involvement with this group throughout his Seminary education.

After graduating, he and his wife were called to go to South Melbourne Church of Christ in 1989. This group was later renamed “South Melbourne Restoration Community”. Hirsch spent the next fifteen years leading this community. Five years after having begun ministry at South, he became the director of the Department of Mission, Education and Development for the Churches of Christ in Australia. During these years, he and his wife planted churches on the edges of society, the marginalized and urban poor in Melbourne, Australia. It was here that he learned about being missional and incarnational first-hand. Hirsch calls this the “missional-incarnational impulse” in his book The Forgotten Ways. This paradigm has become central to his life and writings. During this time Hirsch pioneered the innovative missional training system called Forge Mission Training Network. Forge became possibly the major voice and agency for rediscovering missional forms of Christianity in Australia and its influence has spread to other parts of the Western world (there are now active networks in Canada and North America).

After fifteen years of ministry at South, Alan and Debra considered a broader role in the church. They began to see a need for missional movements in other parts of the world, and in August 2007, they moved to the United States for this reason. They maintain that the church in North America will be a major determinant for the continued sustenance and future vitality of the church in the West.

Organizational Involvement

Hirsch has been directly involved in four organizations in various countries around the world and has spoken at five colleges. He is:

• The founding director of Forge Mission Training Network International (“Forge”), a missional training center that exists to help “birth and nurture the missional church”.http://forge.org.au/about/mission-and-distinctives/ This organization exists to train leaders in the USA,http://www.forgeamerica.org/ Canada http://www.forgecanada.ca/ and Australia.http://forge.org.au/
• The co-founder of Shapevine.com,http://www.shapevine.com/ a ministry of Leadership Journal http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/ and Christianity Today
  Christianity Today
  Christianity Today is an Evangelical Christian periodical based in Carol Stream, Illinois. It is the flagship publication of its parent company Christianity Today International, claiming circulation figures of 140,000 and readership of 290,000...
  
   that focuses on providing people with missional resources, training and networking opportunities.
• The co-founder and director of Future Travelers, a learning system that helps mega-churches become missional.http://www.exponentialconference.com/
• Increasingly involved in 3 Dimensional Ministries, a company that trains churches and leaders how to do discipleship and mission in an increasingly post-Christian world. weare3dm.com
• A past lecturer at Fuller Theological Seminary
  Fuller Theological Seminary
  Fuller Theological Seminary is an accredited Christian educational institute with its main campus in Pasadena, California and several satellite campuses in the western United States...
  
  , George Fox University
  George Fox University
  George Fox University is a Christian university of the liberal arts and sciences, and professional studies located in Newberg, Oregon, United States. Founded as a school for Quakers in 1885, the private school has more than 3,400 students combined between its main campus in Newberg and its centers...
  
  , Western Seminary
  Western Seminary
  Western Seminary is an evangelical, non-denominational theological seminary with campuses in Portland, Oregon, as well as in San Jose and Sacramento in California. The seminary offers Master’s Degrees in Divinity, Counseling, Intercultural Studies, Leadership and Theology along with Doctoral...
  
  , Wheaton College
  Wheaton College (Illinois)
  Wheaton College is a private, evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago in the United States...
  
   and Tabor College.

Published Books

Hirsch has authored two books and co-authored three books from The Shaping of the Things to Come (2003) to Untamed (2010). He integrates theology, sociology and leadership in his writings as he utilizes his strength of ideation. The five books are:

• The Shaping of the Things to Come with Michael Frost (2003). As the title of the book suggests, Frost and Hirsch envisage the Western church of the future. Having concluded that Christians in the West are going through a “second reformation”, they describe how the church is moving away from being institutional and towards being missional. This work elaborates on the incarnational element of missionality as described in The Forgotten Ways.
• The Forgotten Ways (2006). In this book, Hirsch describes the six elements of mDNA (see below). Each of his books correlates with at least one of these six elements. For this reason, The Forgotten Ways is the most foundational of Hirsch’s published writing to date.
• ReJesus with Michael Frost (2009). This is an elaboration of the Christological center of his theology. The authors state the purpose of the book as “reJesusing the church”.
• The Forgotten Ways Handbook. This book is as practical as the original book is theoretical. It seeks to help churches and leaders apply the Apostolic Genius approach in the local church and organization.
• Untamed with Debra Hirsch (2010). Alan and Debra Hirsch describe missional discipleship in Untamed. They focus the readers on becoming “better and deeper disciples” by expressing the need to challenge “personal and cultural assumptions”.

Books in Process

He is currently co-writing four books to be released in 2011:

• Right Here, Right Now with Lance Ford is being published through Baker Books and will provide a nuts and bolts approach to the missional lifestyle. The appeal is to the average Christian and away from Hirsch’s traditional leadership audience.
• On the Verge with Dave Ferguson integrates the missional movement with current models of church in the West. The 2011 Exponential Conference, a conference with the theme by the same name, will utilize this book as a centerpiece to bring missional ideology to established churches.
• The Permanent Revolution with Tim Catchim will be released at the 2011 Exponential Conference as well. This book elaborates on the apostolic element of mDNA by focusing on APEST, the five-fold ministry
  Five-fold ministry
  Fivefold Ministry is a Christian belief that the five offices of Apostle , Prophet , Evangelist , Pastor and Teacher referred to in remain active and valid offices in the contemporary Christian church.Adherents of this ecclesiology also commonly...
  
   model from Ephesians 4, and its significance for the missional movement.
• The Faith of Leap with Michael Frost is a book concerning a theology of risk and adventure and its implications for church, mission, leadership and spirituality.

Apostolic Genius

Probably Hirsch’s most distinctive contribution was to articulate what can be called a phenomenology of apostolic movements. By probing the question of what comes together to create exponential, high impact, multiplication movements, he came up with the concept of he calls 'Apostolic Genius' which is defined as “a unique energy and force saturating phenomenal Jesus movements.” Hirsch defines it elsewhere as “the built-in life force and guiding mechanism of God’s people.” As to its phenomenology, it is made up of the symphonious interplay between six core elements, or “mDNA”. These six are explained as follows:

1. Jesus is Lord—a confession made by Christians that Jesus is the ruler over every aspect of life (pp. 83–100). This is the most central element, around which the other five orbit . By locating this at the center, Hirsch asserts the Christology (the whole phenomenon of Jesus’s incarnation, life, teachings, role model, saving and redeeming work in cross and resurrection and return) must be the central defining theology of all Christian movements.
2. Disciple making—a practice of becoming like Jesus and leading others to do the same (pp. 101–126). This follows directly from the statement that Jesus is Lord and in essence is the calling of disciples to live in Christ and allowing him to live through them.
3. Missional-incarnational impulse—the dual-element of mission and incarnation by which a disciple goes into the surrounding world missionally and embodies the actions of Jesus incarnationally (pp. 127–148). This forms the basis of how a Jesus movement extends itself into the world.
4. Apostolic environment—which highlights the catalytic role that the apostolic person plays in both generating and sustaining movemental ecclesiology (pp. 149–178). Hirsch then highlights the role of Ephesians 4 in movements. He maintains that missional church requires a missional ministry to generate and sustain it. The prevailing Pastor-Teacher combination is not generative enough for movemental forms of Christianity, he asserts.
5. Organic systems—in contrast with a centralized institution, missional movements are structured more like an interconnected organism than through hierarchical organization. Organic systems manifest (i) an ethos of a movement (as opposed to institution), (ii) the structure of a network, (iii) spread like viruses and (iv) are reproducing and reproducible.
6. Communitas, not community—in contrast with an inward-focused group, communitas is an outward-focused group, who by engaging in various forms of risk and liminality, begin to relate to each other on a significantly deeper level (pp. 217–242).

Hirsch maintains that all six elements are needed to create highly transformative, exponetially growing, missional movements. In his book, he displays that it is critical to think in a systemic way about Apostolic Genius and not see each mDNA as a silver bullet. Rather it takes the whole (Apostolic Genius) to create the kind of movement he is describing.

mDNA

“mDNA” stands for “missional DNA”. This is the name he gives to the six components of Apostolic Genius as mentioned above.

APEST

APEST is an acronym for the five ministry vocations described in Ephesians 4:11

Epistle to the Ephesians

The Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, often shortened to Ephesians, is the tenth book of the New Testament. Its authorship has traditionally been credited to Paul, but it is considered by some scholars to be "deutero-Pauline," that is, written in Paul's name by a later author strongly influenced by...

: apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers. He has initiated and developed a profiling instrument to help people find their gifting using these five terms. Following his teaching that Jesus has designed the church in such a way that every church (indeed every believer) has everything necessary to get the job done, he maintains that every Christian has all the five ministries latent in them although they will generally only operate from the primary and secondary ones. Hirsch believes that each believer is made up of a complex of APEST callings or ministry, and therefore a profile is never simply one-dimensional, but rather is somewhat nuanced. Nonetheless they can each be described in such a way:

1. Apostles extend the gospel.
2. Prophets know God's will.
3. Evangelists recruit.
4. Shepherds nurture and protect.
5. Teachers understand and explain.