Untamed

Alan Hirsch and Debra Hirsch

June 16, 2025

Rick Warren writes in the forward of this book:

A generation ago an English Bishop ruefully admitted, “In the New Testament, everywhere Paul went he sparked a revolution. But today, everywhere I go, they just serve tea and crumpets!” 

“We’ve become tamed by tradition, captivated by culture, and controlled by our desire to fit in, not make waves, and never offend anyone. We’ve become domesticated instead of being discipled.”  (p. 8)

Alan and Debra have written an uncommon book about discipleship. Those in the know realize that discipleship books are a ‘dime a dozen.’ The Hirsches understand that discipleship has been one of the great failures of the church over the last 70 years or so. They have been inspired to come at the topic from a new vantage point, untaming domesticated believers to become followers of the radical, even wild Christ.

Alan and Debra believe in the church, stating, “When it is true to its identity and purpose, it is far and away the most transformative force for good in society. It must be, because when it is faithful, it is the most concentrated expression of the liberating Kingdom of God.” 

They have come to believe that we are never going to be the movement Jesus wants unless we first get the issues of discipleship right. This is because the health and growth of transformative Jesus movements are directly related to their capacity to make disciples. No disciples, no movement – it is that simple. (p. 17)

Jump to the blog page here and we will add more fuel on this fire of making disciples to renew the church.

www.anakainosisforthechurch.com

Alan and Debra point to possibly the greatest issue in this discipleship dilemma, “The Jesus software is not being downloaded properly into our lives.” (p. 19)

They say, “To be a truly radical disciple does require a relentless evaluation of life’s priorities and concerns, together with an ongoing rigorous critique of our culture, to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out.” (p. 23)

Reggie McNeal makes a declaration that turns this evaluation, even critique, toward the contemporary church. It is not easy to admit something is missing in the Christian faith mode I have been a part of all my life, yet renewal can only come when we are willing to be honest. McNeal states, “Church culture in North America is a vestige of the original [Christian] movement, an institutional expression of religion that is in part a civil religion and in part a club where religious people can hang out with other people whose politics, worldview, and lifestyle match theirs.” (p. 23)

If this is the case at any point, it is a clear call for renewal in the church.

July 2, 2025

Discipleship is a key ingredient in renewal so let’s return to Alan and Debra Hirsch to talk about discipleship from their work in the book – “Untamed.”

The Hirsch’s run directly to Jesus as the cornerstone and model. They write, “Focusing our discipleship on Jesus forces us to take seriously the implications of following him, of becoming like him… like God. The spiritual agenda for discipleship is thus set: Jesus is our primary teacher, model, guide, savior, and Lord. He is the standard by which we assess discipleship and spirituality. And we must become living versions of him -- ‘little Jesuses.’  (p. 37)

They throw down the gauntlet for us. Keep reading.

“Jesus spent his ministry freeing people from evil and misery. This is what God seeks to do [through us]. Jesus wars against spiritual forces that oppress people and resist God’s good purposes. This is what God does [through us]. Jesus loved people others rejected – even people who rejected him. This is how God loves [through us]. Jesus had nothing but compassion for people who were afflicted by sin, disease, and tragedy. This is how God feels [through us]. And Jesus died on the cross of Calvary, suffering in the place of sinful humanity, defeating sin and the devil, because he passionately loves people and wants to reconcile them to God. This is how God saves [through us].” (p. 36)

Rather than discipleship as I knew it growing up, they start with emulating Jesus and build from there.  This is quite different than: read the Bible more, pray more, attend church often, volunteer at church, give, invite, avoid evil…

Jump over to our blog page and read the rest of the thoughts from Alan and Debra on a Jesus style of discipleship.

www.anakainosisforthechurch.com/today-s-post/

Alan and Debra continue this theme saying, “The first and absolutely most foundational thing we can say in a book on missional discipleship is that it must be based squarely on the founder of the Christian faith – Jesus the Messiah. And while this might seem obvious, one can easily be excused for not being able to recognized anything approximating Jesus in some of the people who claim his name. This discontinuity between Jesus and the religion that claims his name, what Jacques Ellul calls the ‘subversion of Christianity,’ has led countless people to say with political humorist Bill Maher, ‘I don’t know anyone less Jesus – like than most Christians.’ It also prompted researchers David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons to write the book called ‘unChristian,’ which is based on what most non—Christian twenty – somethings said about so – called Christians.” (p. 35)

“The Gospels are full of stories of sinners, the bungled, the broken, and the bent clamoring to be near Jesus. Jesus was different. He wasn’t like the other holy rollers, the religious folk of his day. There was something magnetic about his person (possibly love, empathy, or compassion, mercy?) that caused even the most desperate to do the unthinkable and violate not only social etiquette of the day, but risk further marginalization by being close to him. Think of the woman with the issue of blood [and many others]. (Mark 5:25-30) 

What is it about Jesus that caused sinners to flock to him like a magnet and yet managed to seriously antagonize the religious people?” (p. 45)

One Gospel writer asked, “What manner of man is this?” Our discipleship must also delve into this question as well.

It is possible to see from our resource authors after only a few weeks of blogs that in contemporary Christianity the church has failed to make disciples. If that is true we all may agree with the ‘Reveal’ study at the Willow Creek Church (Bill Hybels) that we may be attracting people but genuine disciples are not being formed. It is possible that our ‘Achilles Heel,’ to use Hauerwas’ words would be that we have many ‘admirers’ of Jesus but few disciples. With this in mind the main focus of ‘Anakainosis for the Church’ is to talk about building people up in the FOUR Pillars so they will become ‘followers of Jesus’ rather than simply believers. 

July 7, 2025

The Surprising Jesus

Jesus was flat out surprising to almost everyone; the disciples, the religious, and the world. No doubt following in the footsteps of such a surprising Jesus will not be a tame, mundane, business as usual experience.

Alan and Debra Hirsch in their book “Untamed” say, “Jesus, the holy one, often went out of his way to connect with, or to be seen with, those the ‘holy ones’ of his day would have never even thought of entertaining. The holiness of Jesus is a redemptive, missional, world embracing holiness, that does not separate itself from the world but rather liberates it. (p. 46)

No doubt about it, Jesus’ holiness was compelling. The Gospels clearly show us that social rejects loved to be around Jesus. They couldn’t get enough of him. By hanging out with people like these, Jesus shows us that one cannot achieve holiness by separation from the unclean. We need to resist the temptation to see holiness only in moralistic terms, or else we will do violence to the idea of the redeeming God and end up seeing God as the ultimate moralist. (p. 46)

Jesus was more of a prophetic non-conformist than a tame ethics teacher. He calls people to throw everything away and follow him (Mat 13:44), to a cross (Mat 10:38), to a love for God that will make all other loves seem like hatred (Mat 10:35-37). This was no divine ethics lecturer speaking! His was a wild holiness that called to account those who preferred instead to follow the lame dictates of a religion of ethical codes and pious rituals. (p. 47)

The Hirsch’s say, “Greg Boyd is correct in his assessment: The church as a whole does not look like the Body of Christ whose outrageous love attracted people who would otherwise have had nothing to do with a ‘religious establishment’ or ‘ethical system.’” (p. 47)

Jump over to our blog page by clicking the graphic below and read the rest of these thoughts by Alan and Debra.

www.anakainosisforthechurch.com/today-s-post/

The even more amazing thing is that not only did the social outcasts and sinners want to be around Jesus, but Jesus wanted to be around them! His mission was to save sinners. He practiced ‘active proximity’ with them. (p. 46)

One of the greatest counterfeits for following the untamed Jesus comes from the substitution of morals and decency for Jesus’ untamed kind of holiness. One of the standard attempts to stereotype Jesus, and therefore domesticate Jesus, is to make him into a moral teacher, someone who taught us how to live decent, rule-based lives. He was much more dangerous and subversive than that. (p. 47)

All through the history of Christianity the temptation to make the law primary rather than the heart has been a major distraction. That contrast is one illustration of domesticating Jesus, making following him a set of rules and rituals rather than following the passion and fire of his heart and walking in his steps. 

Listen to this quote: “A sanitized Jesus is a misrepresentation of him and leads us to live sterile lives.” (p. 51)

Or this one from Soren Kierkegaard: “There is a demand by ‘the crowd,’ the mass of people, to live an ordinary and passionless life in which God is essentially irrelevant, and yet they want this life to be regarded as Christian.” (p. 50) 

Yes, words like these seem hard, yet renewal for the church will only come with honest evaluation of ourselves as the people of God. We might ask, “Do we want renewal more than we want our present comfort and status quo?”