"The Forgotten Ways," Alan Hirsch (Brazos Press, January 2007)

In a captivating commentary, this Australian pastor and church planter argues that networks of believers play a more adept role at spreading the gospel than institutions.

Hirsch points to the early church, which grew from 25,000 to 20 million in a little over two centuries prior to the rise of Constantine. In more modern terms, he reviews the Chinese house church, which helped propel that nation’s Christian population from 2 million to 60 million over 40 years.

The author includes research showing the non-Christian population has intense interest in God, Jesus and spirituality, but a high degree of alienation from traditional church.

Along the way, he questions the contemporary church growth model, which he says leads most congregations to target a middle-class, family-values audience.

According to Hirsch, this leaves most evangelicals aiming at a relatively small (12 percent) segment of society. Meanwhile, he says this model draws the disdain of 85 percent of Australians and 65 percent of Americans.

One of the strengths of this book is that Hirsch doesn’t speak from an ivory tower but from the rough-and-tumble of a Melbourne neighborhood mixed with yuppies, working class people and homosexuals.

As a pastor of a rejuvenated church there from 1989-2004, he saw both the good and the bad of experiments to reach beyond tradition. At one time, his congregation included 40 percent gays, even though he didn’t embrace a politically-correct, pro-gay stance.

In an attempt to reach out to a society obsessed with food and eating out (sounds like the U.S.), the church even opened a café-bar that sponsored art classes, guitar workshops, CD and book launches, and open-mike nights.

Yet poor management decisions and the aftermath of Sept. 11’s terrorist attacks ultimately forced the establishment to close its doors.

More serious was the discovery that only one-third of the church actively backed it and one-third of the people never came.

Hirsch traces that to a failure to make disciples, even as the church proclaimed its alternative style of worship that involved more people. Yet it still fell prone to too much spectator religion.

He uses that to theorize that a paradigm shift from institutional approaches to church is needed to reach the lost, saying we are further away from getting the job done than at the end of the third century.

"Even America…is now experiencing a society that is increasingly moving away from the church’s sphere of influence and becoming genuinely neopagan," Hirsch writes.

While much ink has been spilled in analyzing the situation, he says seldom is there a call for a radical rethinking about the mode of the church’s engagement—the way it perceives and shapes itself around its core tasks.

Hirsch contends that the church must take a missional approach by sending people out into the culture, instead of relying on attractional, "y’all come" evangelism. He provides examples, such as the church in Melbourne that sold its property and buildings to invest in a shopping mall where it has a presence in suburban life.

Still, readers expecting solid examples of how to transform the average congregation into a missional, city-reaching church will leave disappointed. The bulk of this work, subtitled "Reactivating the Missional Church," is philosophical.

While Hirsch makes a strong argument in favor of scrapping traditional, building-bound forms, he offers little guidance in how to go about the task. Ultimately, the book has a "throwing the baby out with the bath water" tone, which may leave leaders wondering how to reform their churches short of closing the doors and starting over elsewhere.

Short of that, Hirsch’s ideas merit consideration as churches attempt to navigate their way through the confusing and often-hostile waters of adapting to the culture. He provides a sort of gut check for churches that are attempting to discern which programs and ministries are spectator religion and which are really making disciples.