Sunday Afternoon Musings
Are We Selling a Product or Heralding a King? (part 1)
A few years ago, I was having coffee with a church planter who was both exhausted and discouraged. His launch team had spent six months fine-tuning their branding, dialing in their sound system, and designing direct-mail flyers that looked like they came straight out of an Apple design lab.
He was tired, broke, and frustrated because the “crowd” he’d been promised by the latest church planting manuals hadn’t materialized.
As I listened to him talk, I realized he had bought into a subtle lie that has quietly infected much of modern evangelicalism: the belief that the Gospel is a product and the church is a showroom.
We call this the Attractional Model.
Now, hear me clearly—I am not against excellence, clean signage, or good music. But when our primary strategy for making disciples relies on getting people to travel past ten zip codes to sit in our auditorium for 75 minutes a week, we have traded an incarnational calling for a centripetal show. Incarnation is personal, local, and often, mundane. A show is impersonal, on a stage, centered on an event and time.
Here is how the attractional model views the neighborhood: “Come to us. We have built a program for you.”
It treats the Gospel like a sales pitch. It spends all its energy hunting for “selling points” that might entice a self-absorbed consumer to try out our religious product over the competition down the street. But as I’ve written here before, the Gospel is not a sales pitch. It is a royal proclamation. Ambassadors don’t hawk products; they declare the authoritative, compassionate reign of King Jesus.
And that brings us to a fundamentally different paradigm: Intensely Local Ministry.
More on that tomorrow.
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