Is it possible for a local church to grow in number while simultaneously missing Christ’s call?
The Billy Graham Center Institute and Lifeway Research conducted a study that revealed two interesting things about the church in the U.S.A. First, they found that 60% of the local churches plateaued or declined, while 40% of the churches grew in number. However, when they took a closer look at the 40% that showed growth, they found that only 10% of the growth churches grew predominantly by “conversion growth”. The rest grew primarily due to believers transferring from one church to another.
Second, the Billy Graham Center and Lifeway surveyed the lost culture and asked, “Has a believer ever shared with you one-on-one how to become a Christian?” The result: 29% said, “Yes”, while 71% said, “No or not sure.” (Source: You Found Me by Rick Richardson).
What is the point? It is possible for a church to grow in number and have little or no impact on the burgeoning lost culture all around them.
In Matthew 28, when Jesus said, “go and make disciples of all nations”, He did not simply tell us to draw or attract bigger crowds. That is where the tension between trying to reach the lost culture by being a missional or attractional church comes into play.
For the purposes of this article, let’s define missional as equipping believers within a church to go and live on mission. It is looking for and taking advantage of the opportunities in everyday life to connect with individuals who lack the hope of Christ.
On the other hand, an attractional church creates things such as events to attract the people of the lost culture to us. Jesus said, “Go… to the nations,” and the attractional church says, “You come to us.”
The attractional model to reach our communities is not inherently evil nor all bad. The problem is that a local church must decide how to invest most of their time and resources. In other words, if a local church spends an enormous amount of their time and treasure on trying to attract the lost culture to their church, inevitably, they will not have anything left to equip and encourage their members to go live on mission.
Constantly creating events or programs to attract people to your church takes a lot of bandwidth. Further, there is growing evidence that attractional is less and less effective at connecting with the lost culture around us.
Each Sunday, every local church has anywhere from a small to a large and even mega-sized army of believers gathering for worship. What would happen if we spent the majority of our time and resources on equipping and encouraging these believers to see their everyday lives through missional eyes and inspire them to do as Jesus said: “… go and make disciples of all nations.”
Each church must decide whether it is called to draw crowds or make disciples.
