Attractional vs. Missional church

In our last post, we explored the “crisis of relevance” the American church faces today in both attendance and influence. For the church to remedy these failures, what must our response be? Quite simply, the church’s age-old model of “attractional evangelism” must be exchanged for a more organic and Biblical model.
What is the attractional model of evangelism? As one might expect, the attractional model of church concentrates its evangelism efforts on trying to attract unbelievers to the church. Most pastors today spend their entire week wracking their brains, tweaking their sermons, and improving their programs in an attempt to make the church’s ministries attractive and relevant to those outside. Yet this attractional model is always built on the idea that if the church makes its services interesting enough and compelling enough, unbelievers will be drawn to Christ. The weakness in this approach, however, is that unbelievers must come to the church if they are to find Christ, a “bitter pill” that many are unwilling to swallow.
This attractional model that the church has long operated by must be replaced by a missional model if the church is to remedy its “crisis of relevance” today. The missional model simply attempts to take the good news of Jesus to the culture where people are at, rather than waiting for them to come to the church. A missional model of church, then, will often not take the traditionally recognizable form of a church with its Sunday morning service in a special building set aside for that purpose. Rather, it seeks ways to bring its community into the midst of those outside the church. The missional model often rejects the traditional Sunday morning expression of church as a service one goes to (witness the expression “go to church”), but believes the church to be a body that one experiences in the context of daily living.
In centuries past, the attractional model was quite adequate and effective, as church was the center of culture, church attendance was enforced by the state, and all were assumed Christian by birth. Yet in today’s multicultural and postmodern society, the effectiveness of this model has long since passed. The idea of “throwing a party and expecting the world to come to it,” an accurate summary of the attractional model, is fraught with difficulties today for several reasons.
First, the attractional model expects unbelievers to engage us on our turf and become one of us if they are to hear the message of the gospel. In fact, some have said that the attractional model might better be termed an extractional model, as new converts are expected to be uprooted from their existing lives to join a Christian subculture on Sundays. The attractional model requires those who would hear about Jesus to come to the church and engage us in our cultural zone if they are to follow Christ. For most unbelievers, such a proposition is very alienating to say the least. To expect those who “don’t like church” to come to Christ through such a model is folly in the highest degree. Should we not rather take the gospel to them rather than force them to come to us?
Second, the attractional model is not the New Testament model of evangelism. From Jesus to Paul to the early church, we see an active missional model embodied, with the good news being brought to those far from the Father in the midst of their cultural setting. From the church’s earliest beginnings, an active missional model was embodied and practiced as the early believers took the message of Jesus to the streets, engaging the culture on their turf and in their terms with the Gospel. Such a model was common even to the life of Jesus, who repeatedly crossed cultural barriers to take His Kingdom to tax collectors, prostitutes, Gentiles, and demoniacs, to name but a few. Most importantly, Jesus refused to assimilate these new followers into the Jewish subculture from which He came, but rather sent them back to their own people and culture to share what He had done in their lives.
Clearly, the “come and see” approach to evangelism that is so common in our day must be exchanged for a model more in line with that practiced by our Leader. In our next post, we will explore further what the example of Christ teaches us about what it truly means to be missional in our day and age.