Yesterday Andrew Jones named the best Emerging Church Blogger of the Year, Scot McKnight. I have already agreed with this, but I want to hand out another award, the Best New Emerging/Missional Church Blog of 2006. And the winning blogger is….

The bio on Alan’s blog currently reads:

I am Alan Hirsch. I am hurtling towards 50 and loving it! I live in Australia with my hero and wife Debra and our dog, Ruby. We live in a communal house called ‘Como’ with Mark, Sally, and Andrea. I am a writer, church leader, strategist, educator, and missional activist. I love reading philosophy, studying Judaism, leading a magnificent movement called Forge Mission Training Network, cellaring (and subsequently imbibing) good red-wine, walking, movies, etc.

Next year, Debs, Ruby, and myself will be living in the USA for a few years.

The only thing here that I can hold against him is not living in Canada! ;^)

Alan Hirsch is the national director of the Australian-based Forge network, “an innovative Mission Training Agency dedicated to the identification, development and nurture of missional leaders, and to the cultivation of missional communities in Australia and beyond.” He’s also the co-author of one of the (absolutely) best-available resources for the emerging/missional church, The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21 Century Church, and his latest book, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, with which his blog shares its title, has just been released.

Although he hasn’t been at the blogging thing all that long (since September), his virtual space is very promising. He already seems to have a fairly wide readership and puts out some extremely insightful posts which spark a lot of further thought and discussion… evidence to all of these is that one recent post generated somthing in the range of 100 comments… and 30-50 comments on a post is not entirely uncommon. He’s definitely got us thinking!