"The Forgotten Ways"

As I mentioned in a blog yesterday, I have recently purchase The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch. He is a passionate advocate for revitalizing the church and has developed a way of understanding and reconfiguring the church that I believe has merit. I intend to blog on this book from time to time over the next several weeks.

In the "Introduction" of his book he offers some interesting statistics. By AD 100 some historians estimate that there were approximately 25,000 Christians in the world, which would have been the Roman Empire. In AD 310 they estimate that there were 20,000,000 Christians. Clearly, in 200 years Christianity exploded. And this despite the fact that christian were an illegal religion throughout this period, they didn't have any church buildings, the New Testament was not completed, there was no professional leadership, and they made it hard to join the church.

He then points to the explosive growth of Christianity in China. At the time that Mao expelled the missionaries and started severe persecution scholars estimate that there were about 2,000,000 Christians. After Mao died and missionaries were allowed to reenter the country, they expected to find a fragmented and anemic church. Instead they were amazed to find a church of 60,000,000 people.

Hirsch asks what can account for this phenomenon, one ancient and one modern example. He believes that he is rediscovered the secret to the church's flourishing and shares what he has learned in this book.