“If you’re not careful (with the attractional ministry approach), you’ll end up looking back after 30 years of ministry realizing the high point of your ministry was that one moment in time when you finally got all 300 people to come to your church and be happy at the same time.”
– David Fitch
imagining how the church can reorient around mission
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This response came after reading Gustavo Martin’s thoughtful comment on my FB site.
Agreed (and BTW – thanks for the interaction). That being said, I think you may have some misunderstanding of the term attractional. You might be getting it confused with the term attractive. The gathered church is to always be attractive and windsome. When most people use the term “attractional” they are normally referring to the concept of “extractional” (removing people from their natural sphere of influence for the Kingdom by eating up all their time with internal church stuff).
I don’t find many people saying that the church shouldn’t gather nor that she shouldn’t be attractive. What they are referring to is the endemic phenomenon of people operating under a religious cover because they go into a building and feeling like living out the reality of Christianity. The analogy might play into this: Just because you go into you garage doesn’t make you a car.
Your response seems to have more to it than the simple quote by Fitch. As someone who has pastored a large church for close to 20 year, I can say that there are moments when you look up and wonder if it is doing what you had initially hope it would. The larger a gathering gets, the more difficult it is to pastor effectively and the more the church structure requires/eats up peoples time – thus extracting them from culture. That is the rub.
To be sure, there is a both/and, but the key is to posture ourselves (regardless of gathering model) in the world in such a way that we can actually have the margins in our lives to intersect with those outside of faith in Jesus.
I would love to talk about your comment about “incarnational” at some point. If Philippians 2 were the only reference in the discussion, you might be onto something, but it is certainly not. Are you saying that we are not to “en-flesh” (put flesh on) the Gospel? Are we (the church) not called “the Body” of Christ? Do we not have the Holy Spirit residing within us (common jars of clay)? You may want to use a different word for it. That is a whole different discussion, but for many, this descriptive concept has been both empowering and missionally defining.
Saint John – “Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.”
BTW – thanks for the essay – good stuff.