Not too long ago I was an assessor at an assessment center for potential church planters. One of the candidates shared in his philosophy of ministry about how his church was going to have this big multi-media production on Sundays and have grass-roots-based neighborhood ministries during the week. It didn’t strike me at all as odd, but my fellow assessors jumped all over him, peppering him with critical questions like, How can you be attractional and missional at the same time? “Obviously, you haven’t really thought much about this,” was the insinuation. (And in this case, he hadn’t really thought it through). But are attractional and missional really two mutually exclusive ministry philosophies?
Missional is the new buzzword in pastoral ministry. It is the kinder, gentler cousin of emergent. Like any buzzword, missional has been co-opted and used to mean many divergent ideas, but its original idea is that the church is “a sent people” (see Missional Church, ed. Darrell Guder). Conversely, attractional (many people use this word disparagingly, but I don’t mean to do so) is the seeker-sensitive movement all grown up, although the language from the 1980’s has shifted mildly from Sunday entertainment to Sunday experiences.
The attractional philosophy is associated with getting people to come to church, while missional is depicted as getting the church to go to the people.
Attractional is associated with mega-churches that are surfacy and shallow, while missional churches are often self-described micro-churches that are authentic and genuine.
Attractional churches are accused of focusing on programs, while missional churches focus on people.
Attractional churches are charged with being guilty of producing consumers, while missional churches boast of producing disciples.
Given the descriptors above, one can easily see why missional is gaining ground and why it would be considered to be the antithesis of the attractional model (thrust into the same debate as traditional vs. contemporary and modern vs. postmodern). But I suggest that church can and needs to be both attractional and missional.
Why can’t a church be attractional on Sundays and missional the other six days of the week? Why can’t a church be focused on people, yet have good programs? After all, most people are consumers before they become producers. So is it incompatible to think that we can be both mega in the sense of attracting crowds, while maintaining micro in our mission. Just like we live in a culture that is both modern and postmodern at the same time, we can reach people by being both attractional and missional. The two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. They are what you make of them. They will either compete with each other or compliment each other depending on what you emphasize and how you implement them.
Our church will probably never be mega (we are in a community of 8,000), but we still want to attract a crowd. So we do a lot of advertising and events and put many of our resources into our facilities (we meet in a constantly-renovating gas station). But attracting a crowd is not our goal. It is only a means to an end. Our goal is to take every person in the crowd and move them to the core by equipping them to be missionaries in their social networks (family, friends, neighborhood, work, school, etc.). We emphasize kindness, service and generosity as tangible expressions of loving people that can’t or won’t love you back.
Jesus walked from town to town and healed people, but he also sat on a hillside and let people come to him as he taught them. Jesus attracted crowds and he went to the crowds. He did both. So can we. HT
Jeff Gauss is a church planting pastor of Epiphany Station in Thief River Falls, MN.
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