A fuller version of the same presentation may be found here.
Alan Hirsch is the author of The Shaping of Things to Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church
(The video is only about 15 minutes. Stop and listen to it if you haven’t already done so.)
1. Mainline and fundamentalist churches are dying. (The conservative Churches of Christ, for example, are in serious decline.*)
2. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches are growing (or holding their own) if they adopt contemporary worship styles and otherwise adjust their worship and practices to reflect current thought on how to reach the unchurched (the “attractional” model). However, at most, they can reach something like 40% of the population (the percentage will vary with location, of course).
He calls this the “attractional” model because it involves inviting friends to church or small group with the goal of incorporating the people invited into the existing community. Those who are incorporated into the community are expected to adopt the prevailing culture of that church and so are “extracted” from their former culture. This works well for those who are not culturally distant from the church. And there are regions of the country where the prevailing culture remains close to that of the church — but this is not true everywhere.
3. The other 60% of the population is too culturally distant from 1 and 2 to respond to the gospel as they present it. Those few who do respond from a very different culture are brought into the church and re-socialized, that is, they are required to cross the cultural barrier to accommodate to the church. Because they are extracted, they lose much of their ability to preach the gospel to their former culture. But, Hirsch argues, we are sent to the culture, to enter the culture to seek the lost, not to call the lost from across the cultural divide. We should be the ones to sacrifice our preferred way of life (not the gospel, of course!!) to reach those who live in a different part of society.
Obviously, there are some cultural differences that cannot be eliminated. Christian morality is just different from conventional morality, for example. We aren’t like everyone else, nor should we be. But there are other cultural elements that are purely cultural — some would say “traditional” — they should not stand in the way of the gospel.
Now, Hirsch says some very important things about the attractional church —
a. In Western Europe and Australia, for example, 40% would be great numbers!
b. Those who feel called to pursue an attractional model should do so and do so with all their might.
c. However, if everyone were to follow the attractional model, the Kingdom would stop growing at 40% — and that assumes that the church maximizes what can be done with the contemporary Christian church model.
(In the video, Hirsch does not address how to reach the other 60%. It’s only 15 minutes. But he favors building alternative church communities in coffee shops, bars, bowling alleys, apartments … wherever the lost gather.** In short, he wants to leave the confines of the building and “do church” elsewhere.)
Now, I must add that the attractional model can be done well or done poorly. One inherent risk in the model is the tendency to create a consumerist church. If members are drawn by the services provided by the church, they may fail to learn that they are being called to service and submission. But wise leaders can guard against this tendency. After all, we all know of attractional churches that do a great job of creating disciples. (But we also know plenty of churches filled with consumers.)
But if you relocate your church to Starbucks and invite your friends to Starbucks to meet with the church planter and find community, you are just as much at risk of creating consumers. The key is not the location but what you’re doing at the location. And you can do mission in a big building or a bowling alley or a garden.
To illustrate the cultural divide, consider a white, upper middle class church with great contemporary worship that wants to reach a black housing project. There are, of course, huge cultural barriers. The church members could certainly knock on doors and pass out flyers, but it’s very unlikely that many housing-project residents would visit the white church, much less ultimately be converted. Few will be interested in white-church Christianity, even if it’s “contemporary.” They aren’t Chris Tomlin fans. Very few will be drawn by friendship evangelism, because very few members of the attractional church will have friends in the project.
But it’s more than that. There’s a level of distrust of relatively wealthy whites. There’s shame in poverty, in not having the right clothes. There’s fear at moving into a foreign culture. It’s hard for any church to attract people from a different culture, even if they have the best, most contemporary worship, the best teen ministry, open, Christ-like hearts, etc. The attractional model is very unlikely to cross those boundaries.
However, the attractional model will work well for the neighbors of the members, who may well respond to an invitation to join a small group or attend an upbeat, contemporary praise service.
This is not to say that residents of a minority housing project can’t be reached but to remove any delusion that they can be reached with slick marketing campaigns, billboards, invitations to visit church, or even old-fashioned door knocking. The attractional model works, but it only works within cultural limits — and nothing is more anti-gospel than limiting the church to a single subculture of a nation.
Therefore, we shouldn’t sneer at attractional churches, but neither should we be content to be merely attractional churches.
________________
* Some will deny this, but Flavil Yeakley’s latest numbers show a decline in the Churches of Christ as a whole. I have it from someone who discussed this with him that the progressive Churches are, on the whole, growing, whereas the most conservative Churches are in decline. In fact, there have been many thousands of congregations that closed their doors in the last several years. Some are due to mergers, but most just closed. The math dictates the conclusion that the most conservative Churches are the ones in most severe decline — and my experience and the experience of many others is the same.
** I reject the use of “missional” to refer to a church built on a non-attractional model because that usage implies that attractional churches are necessarily not missional. And that’s just not true. In fact, if someone were to convert 40% of, say, London to Christ, we’d declare them truly missional indeed, even if they did it with a non-cutting edge model. If inviting friends to a worship service would convert 40% of the West, well, we should do just that — but not just that.
This is not to reject “missional” as a useful word but to reject “missional” as the opposite of “attraction.” In fact, many attractional churches are very missional indeed.
The use of “attractional” vs. “missional” terminology is one reason that discussions about these things rarely communicate. The language presumes to judge nearly every church more than 10 years old as fatally flawed and utterly incapable of creating disciples, and that’s not true. I’ll use “experimental” instead, because to my knowledge, there is no proven way to reach the 60%. Indeed, the likelihood is that we’ll have to find lots of different models.
This is an enlightening and challenging post. It is the worst of worlds: a profoundly disturbing idea which rings true at a deep level. It suggests to me that we must move well beyond any change of methodology to reach the majority of lost people in our communities. As gut-wrenching as it has been for some congregations to embrace something as internal as a new song list, this problem suggests change on a different order of magnitude. What’s the problem with “change agents”? They aren’t moving fast enough or far enough.
I will actually suggest that the problem is not that we are so unwilling to modify current church practices that are an established part of our culture, that we sacrifice mission to tradition. No, it’s worse than that. It may well be that traditional church culture is inherently incapable of the mission we have before us. Our model can continually be tweaked for better functionality, but the numbers suggested in this post are beyond “tweaks”.
The 18th century model which we have continued to remodel and repaint for the last couple hundred years depended on certain aspects of 18th century culture. Cultural homogeneity was one aspect. When everyone in our culture had nominally the same general cosmic view, we only needed to inculcate the operative details into the members of our community. Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney were not surrounded by Muslims and atheists. They did not much penetrate the culture of African slaves. They functioned in a predominantly white/Christian/Protestant culture and did not stray too far from it. Even when the church sent out missionaries, it generally planted a white/Christian/Protestant version of the church. It was what we knew. We are like a tribe who has lived for generations in boats on the water– only to find out one day that the lake is drying up and that much of our former range is no longer accessible to watercraft. Newer, shallower-draft boats improve things a bit, for a time. But at some point, our grandchildren will have to learn to live on land… or become further and further isolated on the shrinking lake.
While I share Jay’s general concern about producing and feeding religious consumerism, I think this is a problem more inherent to the believers than to the unbelievers out there. Unbelievers are not even in that market. An entire generation is arising who was never fed religion at home and never developed any taste for it, nor desire for it. It is something that belongs to Grandma, like lye soap. It is becoming more and more a cultural artifact in large segments of modern society.
If we insist on maintaining the traditional church at all costs, and cannot bring ourselves to think or talk beyond that paradigm, then we are headed for the anthropology museum. There is something beyond our model. Hey, our model looks little one we see in first century Asia Minor! So, why is our own form immutable?
I am not advocating tearing down all the buildings. No, what I am saying is that we are going to have to begin to think much much differently about what the church is going to look like. Far more radically than even we troublemakers have done so far. Much of what currently passes for change in the church is just remodeling. House churches miniaturize their larger progenitors. That little kaffeklatch of ten believers at St. Arbucks looks and sounds just like a Sunday school class. We continue to tack on features to our institutions that did not grow there naturally. (“We built this nice fellowship hall and it has a nice kitchen, so we should open a soup kitchen.”) As Jay observes, we can’t get volunteers to staff perfectly-good programs.
I don’t have the answer here, but I think I know what the first step is. We have to open our minds and hearts to the idea of a church which is foreign to our experience. To hear radical ideas and to actually consider their import, instead of rejecting them because such ideas simply “won’t work in our church”. To accept that after all our insistence that we know the will of God, that He may just be doing something we have never seen before. Our dialog must range much further than it has so far. We must become unafraid of even wild-eyed ideas. We can hear the Lord regarding such things; we need not be afraid. Some bad ideas have in them grains of truth that we won’t discover until we actually chew on them for a while.
We also will have to accept that much of our tradition is unlikely to survive the transition. (And by “our tradition”, I mean “the way I have always walked as a believer”.) As God reveals to us how to really reach into the world around us, a lot of perfectly good “stuff” is going to go begging. If we cannot fathom the useful death of our own church, that it might die and go into the ground so the gospel might spring forth from it, it’s going to be very difficult to move far into that 60%. If we cannot consider the possiblity that the clergy profession may itself have to disappear in order to scatter the message, we may find ourselves holding on to something that is less than our calling. If reject out of hand the idea that the leadership of the church may arise among people thirty and forty years our junior — well, we are going to get stretched.
We must be able to seriously consider the possibility that our 18th century church model, with all its accomplishments, may have become like a pair of tonsils– once useful, even needful, but now as much an obstacle to our health as they once were a benefit to it. Jay suggests that we will need many models. In fact, I would suggest that the very idea of an optimal human model– where we see success and try to copy it — has long been a candidate for the dustbin.
One more analogy. Ancient sailors once would not stray from the sight of land. The unknown was out there beyond the horizon. But the people who opened up the world to us are the ones who made the terrifying choice to go out and discover just what was out there.
Jay, thanks so much for this post. Here’s to a MUCH bigger dialog.
Jesus was the biggest showman of all time.
What a crowd we could draw if we just performed a little of the crowd drawing healing, miracles He did.
Nothing wrong with doing that to draw aw a crowd.
I see the problem starting with the teaching of the children in the conservative churches especially of those of us who will not teach our children and grandchildren some of what we were taught.
For instance, children do not like to look at their friends and see them burning in hell because that do not attend where you do. So, as they get older they leave that teaching of the conservatives (antis) and attend a progressive church..
The interesting thing to me is how many are leaving the Antis and so their numbers are falling while beginning attending a progressive church so their numbers are growing. It would be interesting to know what if those in the progressive churches changed their name to something else if the antis would still come over to still be associated with the name or would they go somewhere else?
I don’t think having a different name would bring near as much condemnation and scorn from the antis as keeping the name.
AJ, indeed there are several progressive congregations who were asked by other local CoC’s to change their name after they added a service which used instrumental music. In fact, I think that experience is probably more the rule than the exception.
Funny thing to me is, if that does not tell us that the CoC is a “denomination”, I don’t know what does.
As to teaching our children such nonsense as you noted, the beauty of things is that these children grow up to learn to hear their Shepherd’s voice for themselves. (A promise is a promise, after all.) And when that Voice contradicts what their congregation insists is true, they often vote with their feet.
Charles would you say that the Biker Churches and the Cowboy Churches are attempts to move into other sub cultures in our society?
They certainly can be. But they can also be ways of simply building a flock of “birds of a feather”. I have seen both.
Watch the harvest. If you see an influx of unbelievers, that says one thing. If you see a harvest of sheep from other sheepsheds, that means something else.
Thanks, Charles. For a while there I was wondering if the post had even made to the blog.
Excellent.
Now here’s another observation: This won’t work top down. You can’t appoint a study group to read books and come up with a missional plan. That’s like appointing a committee to decide who should fall in love with whom. Won’t work.
Rather, you teach the gospel in all it’s beauty (including the Kingdom, of course) and give your members permission to follow the Spirit’s lead. You see, the only way to escape our present mess is to let the Spirit lead — and the Spirit fills the congregation, not just the elders and not some committee.
Hence, teach the Spirit, let the wind blow where it wills, pray without ceasing, be patient, and be ready to say yes when Jesus comes calling.
In a couple of days, I’ll give some examples from my own experience and I’ll ask the readers to post their own.
Charles,
PS — Excellent comment (4:27 PM). I wish I’d written it.
Pingback: One In Jesus » Attractional vs. Missional: A Presentation by Alan Hirsch, Part 1.5 (A Guest Post by Charles McLean)
Jay,
Maybe I missed the announcement for this blog topic. I got here from reading part 2 and then tracing it back.
Have you ever read Ed Stetzer’s blog? He is a Baptist and the CEO of Lifeway Research, a church growth research company that is seeking to help the church to understand what it takes to reach the unreached and then grow the ungrown. You could learn a lot about the real differences between “attractional” models and “missional” models.
What is described so far is not attractional versus missional. What is described so far is attractional with and without outreach programs that go beyond the building/facility doors. I could not find a missional model description at all, despite a lot of smoke using that term but failing to understand it.
Attractional versus Missional is NOT about location. It has next to nothing to do with where you gather for worship. 60 people meeting in a mobile trailer that can relocate by starting up the tractor to move it can be very attractional. Graphics on the side of the bus do not change it from attractional to missional any more than parking it all over town would change it. Location has almost nothing to do with it.
On the other hand, no matter the location, the FOCUS of the church is extremely relevant. If you believe the church exists to grow the gathering of believers for the purpose of developing more and greater resources to serve the growing gathering of believers, then you have an attractional model. However, if you have any size or shape or talent pool of believers focused on reaching out and serving and saving the lost who do not yet know Jesus, seeing a growing congregation as one that is always seeking to find the lost and introduce them to Jesus, seeing growth as maximizing the gifts of the congregation to maximize contact points with the lost so we can reach them with the Gospel and then reach others, then you are most likely involved in a church using a missional model.
Go visit Stetzer’s website. He will say it much better and with more clarity and he will let those in the emerging churches see where Kimball has missed the point and done something altogether different from addressing attractional v. missional issues. Kimball addresses the Greatest Generation-to-the Baby Boomers versus Generations -X and -Next issues. That is an entirely different discussion.
Don’t take my word for it. Investigate the matter beyond the surface. These issues are not going to be addressed well until they are clearly understood in accurate terms.
Thanks for the start. Please do not make the mistake of thinking this is anywhere near to the present reality. The discussion so far is at least 2-5 years BEHIND the wider discussion … as are the observations. And it only gets harder to have this discussion or to make any transitional changes when we are mistaken about how the discussion terms should be defined.
Blessings,
Grizz
My apologies.
Please ammend my last paragraph to read as follows…
Thanks for the start. Please do not make the mistake of thinking this discussion and this blog is anywhere near to the present reality. The discussion here at One In Jesus so far is at least 2-5 years BEHIND the wider discussion … as are the observations. And it only gets harder to have this discussion or to make any transitional changes when we are mistaken about how the discussion terms should be defined.
Charles said (during his rant) “I don’t have the answer here, but I think I know what the first step is. We have to open our minds and hearts to the idea of a church which is foreign to our experience. To hear radical ideas and to actually consider their import, instead of rejecting them ”
Charles! maybe we should throw out the bible, and erect a “Golden Calf” !!
This subject is of supreme importance as we look to the future of our churches. Charles points to truths we may not want to accept. Obviously many do not want to believe our traditions are not apostolic even though they are obviously NOT apostolic. If we’re sincere about wanting to restore ourselves to apostolic Christianity, we’ll look very carefully at what Charles has written. And it is to be hoped that we will recognize that the apostolic church was what is described as missional. Those who were scattered preached about Jesus (not about the Holy Spirit) wherever they found themselves. I am surprised that anyone would think we should become a church of the Holy Spirit in order to honor and obey JESUS.
That reminds me of all the folks I knew that only had the book of John.
When you mentioned or quoted the letters written to churches in different locations they would say, I have never lived there it is not to me.
Their reading education emphasis was about the love of God, the Holy Spirit and Jesus for us, not the laws.
Ray said: “I am surprised that anyone would think we should become a church of the Holy Spirit in order to honor and obey JESUS.”
Ray, have you actually seen someone doing this? I am around lots of charismatics, but I have never seen such a thing. But I hear about new things every day, so perhaps you could relate your experience.
Grizz, it is true that the discussion here sometimes time-trails the discussion elsewhere, but that’s not a bad thing. Jay’s discussion, like anyone else’s, reflects where his circle is at the time. It is important that we not compare ourselves with ourselves. There are places where I think I have found SOME truth some of my brothers have not touched yet, but I still need to learn from them.
Oh, and while I haven’t read Setzer yet, the very existence of a “church growth research company” is SO 1980’s. ;^)
Are we saved by Jesus or by the Spirit? I’m hearing and reading several now who credit the Spirit with cleansing us from sin and “sanctifying” us. I believe that Jesus saves. I’m confident that the gospel we should teach and preach throughout the world is about the risen Lord Jesus, not about His Spirit. I’m sure that JESUS is head of the church. Read the book of Revelation again and see how prominent the Spirit is in the eternal heaven. That’s exactly how prominent He is in today’s world.
Some are saying that the fatal sin is to not acknowledge the Spirit of God. I feel sure the fatal sin is to not acknowledge the SON of God.
It’s by reading and hearing current representatives of “the church” that I determine what is being NOW taught in the name of the Master. Perhaps others read different essays and sermons than I read. If they saw what I’m seeing they’d not doubt that some of “our” preacher/teachers are crediting the Spirit with much that is being done by the Son of God. Do Christians belong to Jesus CHRIST or to His Spirit? Is there even one example in inspired writings of anyone praying to the Spirit of God? Did Jesus teach that we should pray to the Spirit for anything at all? I think not.
Ray,
We are saved by Jesus.
(Tit 3:4-7 ESV) 4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, 6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, 7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
The scriptures seem deliberately vague about where God, Jesus, and the Spirit end and the other pick up. Both are called “Savior” here, for example. The Spirit is credited with regeneration and renewal. But the Spirit was poured out by God. Through Jesus.
There are other ways the relationship of the Trinity to salvation is expressed, but faith in the NT is always faith in Jesus.
I entirely agree that faith in JESUS is the essential test of salvation, not faith in the Spirit. The Spirit’s work is of critical importance, but faith in the Spirit is never made a test of salvation.
And I agree that the scriptures do not speak of praying TO the Spirit. We might well pray to God for gifting and even empowerment via the Spirit, but not to the Spirit. The Spirit, rather, points to Jesus.