The Attractive vs Attractional Church

Having just come through an Easter season that challenged our traditional thinking to its very core, let me encourage you to keep shifting your thought process in one critical area by asking yourself, “Is my church attractional or attractive?”
     The word attractional has developed a negative connotation in many Christian circles as it is associated with glitz, glamor, and over the top techniques to attract a crowd. An attractional strategy forces a church to continually create bigger and better ideas to keep people coming because what you use to attract people is what you have to use to keep them.
     Let me use a common magnet as an analogy. There are two simple principles we know about magnets:

1. The more powerful the magnet, the heavier the object it can attract
2. Not all materials, nor even all metals are attracted by a magnet.

     With an attractional model, a church is required to continue finding bigger and better magnets realizing that there is not a single one that will grab the attention of everyone. So, attractional churches are always busy planning and promoting one new activity or another.
     I would suggest we focus on becoming a more attractive church. I’m not talking about having your building and grounds committee create a more aesthetically pleasing physical facility. Rather, I suggest we prioritize time, energy, and resources to create more attractive people. Remember, God cares about what is in the heart, not what we look like on the outside.
     The attractive vs attractional wordplay came to my mind as God put me in touch with two books. Gene Stockton recommended Frances Chan’s book Letters to the Church. In chapter four he uses the experience of a friend who was saved out of a gang lifestyle to challenge churches to model for the world supernatural unity and love. In my role as a DoM, I have lost count of the number of times I’ve been invited to intervene in a “church family squabble.” At some point, I will tell them, as lovingly as I can, “We don’t need to teach the world how to fight. They’ve got that figured out pretty well. What we can show them that will be attractive is how to have genuine differences, but still be able to love one another.”
     The second book was recommended by my daughter, Emily, and is entitled: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger. The book points to PTSD research and uses the term “tribe” in a similar way that Chan uses “gang.” Polite church circles would prefer the words “community’ and “family.” A point in Junger’s book is that many soldiers experience “tribe” while deployed, but have no similar support network when they return home, causing mental and emotional stress.
     In a post COVID-19 world, don’t return to an attractional model. Instead, place your energy and focus on becoming a loving, caring, unified body of believers. Be a family that welcomes other members into your community and loves them and disciples them so they become attractive and welcoming to others. Become a Christian gang, a Christian tribe.  
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:34-35


In HIM, 
ME 
Mark Elliott, DoM