Attractional vs. Missional: How It Might Be Done

So how do we actually lead a church to be both attractional and missional? It’s not altogether obvious, largely because few of us have ever experienced such a thing. But I have an idea or two.

* I’m not sure that you do one first and then the other. But the reality is that a church with a lousy worship service or lousy children’s or teen programs isn’t going to grow. In fact, it’ll die. Just as I must first nourish my body and make it healthy before I can do any work for anyone else, it makes sense to first focus on getting the basics rights: high quality worship, classes, children’s program, and teen program.

Manifestly, larger churches have an advantage here, as it’s just easier to have a great children’s or teen program when you have a large pool of kids and teens. That’s okay. We aren’t competing with each other. I’d go so far as to recommend that churches merge, when possible, to achieve critical mass — a large enough pool of members to provide for their own children and to be, well, attractive.

In a true mission location, where you’re the only church, merger isn’t a possibility, but then you aren’t worried about being compared to the bigger churches in town. 

A church plant can likely overcome the lack of programs through zeal and the excitement of the effort — and through excellent leadership. After all, many megachurches began as churches of a dozen people. It’s possible to grow while small — but most small churches don’t grow. I think the reason is that most small churches don’t have the leadership needed. Church plants, however, are often seeded with top notch leadership, and so church plants often take off where larger, more established churches fail.

* Early on, the church’s culture needs to be shaped by its leadership to be missional. We need to encourage and support those who volunteer in the church, serving the church — but we need to focus our vision on reaching outside the church to the lost — both through evangelism and through service. Thus, that great youth program needs to be a missional youth program in which teens are given the opportunity to serve hurting people outside the church. The children’s ministry should teach even very young children the importance of helping the poor and needy. And the excellent worship service needs to continually point people toward God’s mission. Mission has to be in the church’s DNA from the beginning.

* The ideas found in the Simple Church become critically important. We have to eliminate programs and events and church services that we don’t absolutely have to have to be attractively missional. Sunday night worship has to go (except in churches small enough for the Sunday night program to serve the same purposes as a small group ministry serves in a larger church).

You see, if we want our members to be involved missionally, we have to unburden them from ministries that don’t serve the mission. They don’t have the time to do traditional church the traditional way plus volunteer at the homeless shelter. It’s just not going to happen.

* The other Simple Church idea is to make existing events multipurpose. Small groups (or Bible classes) can become the center of mission by taking on ministries to the world. They can be the place where parenting and marriage are taught. We don’t have to take up weekends and extra evenings to do these things.

* Early on, the church’s culture has to be that members work in church or in mission or both — but all members serve. Some allowance is given, of course, for times when we can’t be involved — such as when we have to care for sick parents or children — as this is Kingdom work as well. But the notion that it’s okay for a member to just show up for church, write a check, and go home has to be expunged from the church’s culture.

I really think we ask too little and too much of our members. We need to ask only for what’s important, but we need to have high expectations for doing what’s important. Our involvement rates should be around 80%, not the usual 20% to 40%. And this needs to be explicitly talked about with the congregation. No one should join the church unaware of the expectations.

Early on, some members will transfer to churches with lower expectations. They’ll make up excuses: they don’t like the preaching, the elders are legalistic, whatever. But in time, the members who stay will build a church that is truly missional — and a truly missional church will be truly attractive if done right.

Now, I can’t pretend that my own church has done all this. We haven’t. But we’re well down the path. We still have too many events, and we have plenty of members who aren’t involved — although most are. And I’d bet we have an unusually  high number of members involved in ministry to those outside the church. We really ought to measure these things, you know, but who has the time?

A great book along these lines is the Church of Irresistible Influence by Robert Lewis, about Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, a megachurch that made the transition. This congregation has gone so far as to drop its classes for members who’ve been members for over 2 years, asking them to instead be involved in community service. They would argue, what better class is there than actually serving those in need?