The Prodigal Church E-Book

Jared C. Wilson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 350

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Pastors want to reach the lost with the good news of Jesus. However, we've too often assumed this requires loud music, flashy lights, and skinny jeans. In this gentle manifesto, Jared Wilson—a pastor who knows what it's like to serve in a large attractional church—challenges pastors to reconsider their priorities when it comes to how they "do church" and reach people in their communities. Writing with the grace and kindness of a trusted friend, Wilson encourages pastors to reexamine the Bible's teaching, not simply return to a traditional model for tradition's sake. He then sets forth an alternative to both the attractional and the traditional models: an explicitly biblical approach that is gospel focused, grace based, and fruit oriented.

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“Jared Wilson provides a stern warning against the excesses of pragmatic approaches to church growth while reminding us that if the power of the gospel is not driving our ministries, we may build a crowd, but we are not building a church.”

Thom S. Rainer, President and CEO, LifeWay Christian Resources

“Jared Wilson paints a vivid picture of the grievous outcome of church centered on programmatic pragmatism instead of the life-changing gospel of Jesus Christ. His critical analysis and probing confrontation, coupled with his personal encounter with grace, has the potential to bring the church to her senses and usher her back to our Father’s restorative embrace. The Prodigal Church is a desperately needed wake-up call.”

Jeff Vanderstelt, Visionary Leader, Soma; Pastor, Doxa Church, Bellevue, Washington; author, Saturate

“The Prodigal Church is indeed a gentle manifesto against the status quo. Wilson writes with humility, urgency, and true pastoral concern for God’s people. He pushes back against the consumerism and pragmatism so prevalent in twenty-first-century congregations, and points the church to something far superior—the gospel of Jesus Christ. All who love the local church will benefit from reading this book.”

Jason K. Allen, President, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and College

“Jared Wilson writes that we’ve forgotten “who the church is for.” He rightly, and with a kind spirit, questions the status quo in this book. The church is not a consumer experience. It’s not supposed to be a volunteer-draining, CEO-driven business. No, it’s much bigger, better, and more beautiful than that.”

Brant Hansen, CURE International; storyteller; radio host; author, Unoffendable

“Although I don’t agree with all of the conclusions Jared comes to, he asks penetrating questions and lovingly argues as a man who deeply loves Jesus, the gospel, the church, and pastors. I am fully confident that what he has written here will save some weary pastors from burning out and will make The Village Church a healthier place.”

Matt Chandler, Lead Pastor, The Village Church, Dallas, Texas; President, Acts 29 Church Planting Network

The ProdigalChurch

A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo

Jared C. Wilson

The Prodigal Church: A Gentle Manifesto against the Status Quo

Copyright © 2015 by Jared C. Wilson

Published by Crossway

1300 Crescent Street

Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Matt Naylor

First printing 2015

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture references marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-4461-3 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-4464-4 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-4462-0 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-4463-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilson, Jared C., 1975–

The prodigal church : a gentle manifesto against the status quo / Jared C. Wilson.

     1 online resource

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

ISBN 978-1-4335-4462-0 (pdf) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4463-7 (mobi) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4464-4 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-4335-4461-3 (tp)

1. Church. I. Title.

BV600.3

277.3'083—dc23                 2014048801

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

Contents

CoverNewsletter Sign UpEndorsementsTitle PageCopyrightContentsIntroduction: The Parable of the Prodigal ChurchEpigraph1 What This Book Is Not2 What If the System’s Broken?3 What Works?4 The Bible Is Not an Instruction Manual5 From Watching to Beholding6 Biting Off More Than You Can Chew7 Pastoring Hearts8 A Way Forward9 The Prodigal Church Comes Home10 A Portrait of the Author as a Young ManConclusion: A Call to the Gospel RenaissanceRecommended ReadingGeneral IndexScripture IndexAlso Available from Jared WilsonBack Cover

Introduction

The Parable of the Prodigal Church

Once upon a time, there was a church that loved God and loved people but had a difficult time showing it because the image they gave of God was rather one-dimensional and so the way they attempted to love people was also one-dimensional. The church believed in a holy God, a just God, a vengeful God, and so they preached wrath very well, pushing the hearts of all who darkened the church doors with the imminent foreboding of their eternal damnation.

They did their best to scare the hell out of people, and when that didn’t work, they cried and pleaded and begged. Wretchedly urgent, the church regularly reminded its people of the dire importance of obedience to God, of being holy as God is holy. And the church grew vividly aware, year in and year out, of the “thou shalt nots” of the Bible. And they came back for more, because guilt can be a powerful motivator.

But guilt is not a very enduring motivator, so as time went on and people grew weary of the burden of the law laid so heavily upon them, they began to drift away. Some had begun to suspect this church’s God was not quite love and that this God could never quite be pleased, so they stopped trying. But some kept trying, of course, fearful and diminished.

One day some brave soul gently suggested that the old way wasn’t working. People could not be won by a God who seemed angry all the time, he reasoned, and in fact it made no sense to expect people to have interest in a God who didn’t seem to care about their happiness. The God of the old way seemed so preoccupied with holy things that he did not care much for people’s everyday lives. “Couldn’t we make the way of the church more practical, more appealing?” this person asked. “The way we may see growth again,” he reasoned, “is to deconstruct the old way, remove the old barriers, and reassert that God is love.”

So, where once the church emphasized God’s perfect holiness, now they emphasized his abundant love. Where once the church emphasized obedience, now they emphasized success. Where once the church emphasized sin, now they emphasized happiness. Where once the church focused on God’s demands, now they emphasized man’s specialness and abilities. “If we help people tap into their inner potential and remind them of how special they are,” the church decided, “and if we highlight how God loves them no matter what, people will be interested in church again.”

They changed the songs, the architecture, the style of dress. They took the crosses down, because they seemed too religious. It was a clean slate. And, lo and behold, people began to come to church again.

The church grew in attendance week by week and year by year. People came excited and exuberant. This was not their grandfather’s church!

But as the years went by, the church noticed something. Little by little, they discovered that while some new people were discovering church for the first time, most who came to experience the new way of doing church were actually in recovery from the old way of doing church. And while helping wounded people recover is not a bad thing at all, the church began to discover that most of their people—new Christians and “old” Christians alike—were not growing very deep in their faith. The lack, it seemed to them, was of a more relevant way to apply their faith to everyday life.

So the church came up with some new ideas to help people grow. They changed traditional Sunday school to innovative small groups, outdated special music to contemporary video montages. In order to help people see God’s Word in the world around them, they began applying Bible verses to songs on the radio and movies at the theater. The church continued deconstructing more things, making more things over. The church had—in their own estimation, cleverly—traded out the “don’ts” for “dos,” but in the end, they discovered that even the regular dispensing of practical helps for victorious living wasn’t having the desired effect. People certainly enjoyed the weekend experience now. But, day by day, they still seemed no closer to God than in that old way of doing church. In fact, though it scared them to admit it, people actually seemed less interested in God than before.

For him who has ears to hear, this is the parable of the prodigal church.

For my own part I hate and distrust reactions not only in religion but in everything. Luther surely spoke very good sense when he compared humanity to a drunkard who, after falling off his horse on the right, falls off it next time on the left.

—C. S. Lewis, The World’s Last Night

And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.”

—Mark 8:15

1

What This Book Is Not

I dare you to read this book.

I don’t dare you as someone who aims to make you mad (or sad), but as someone who himself has been dared to read things that have challenged his own assumptions and presumptions—which benefited him greatly in the long run. I just want to appeal to your desire as a leader to stretch and grow and be thoughtful and have firmer convictions than ever before. I just want to ask you some questions. I want to show you some things. I want you to consider some different lines of thinking, even if they end up leading you right back to affirming what you already thought.

If you don’t like the book, return it and ask for a refund. Tell them I’m an idiot and these pages should line birdcages. But please give me the chance to earn your rejection. And if you will make the commitment to hear me out to the very end, I make these promises to you:

This Book Is Not a Rant

I’m pretty good at rants. Or at least, I feel pretty good when I rant. But this book will not be a grand venting. Who wants that? Not you. Not me. We’ve all had enough yelling in the Christian world, I think, or at least enough yelling about things that don’t need yelling about.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got LOUD NOISES fatigue. When someone who disagrees with me thinks the only way to convince me is to trigger the All Caps button and lay heavy hands on the Exclamation Point key, I tune them out right-quick.

When I came up with the idea for this book, it began as an extension of things I’ve been thinking, writing, and preaching about for nearly ten years now, but this project is really the culmination of twenty years of life and ministry. I’m not writing purely from theory but from experience. But I also knew that some of the ways I’ve written about issues related to church models and methodology in the past would not be suitable for this book. Not because those previous ways were wrong, necessarily, but because they were often for different audiences, perhaps too often for the already convinced. Like many of you, I have that “spiritual gift” of sarcasm, but too often that kind of humor is used in harmful, cutting ways, in ways that are counterproductive. Like lots of people, I can too often vent my frustrations rather than plead my case. I want to take the Bible seriously when it says that venting is foolish (Prov. 29:11).

There’s definitely a place for harsh words. We see them used in a variety of ways in the Bible, including to correct wrong belief and wrong action. But what I want you to read here isn’t intended as a rebuke. I don’t want to appall you; I want to appeal to you. I won’t snip at you or nag you. I might pester you, but I definitely don’t want to pick on you.

I’m also not writing this book to preach to the choir, which is all that ranting really ends up accomplishing. Preaching to the choir can be fine and good (the choir needs the preaching, too), but I know that if we expect others to not just hear what we’re saying but also to actually consider it, we have to be kind, respectful, and affirming of all that we can affirm. So I won’t lie and say this isn’t a manifesto. It is. But hopefully it will be a gentle one. You can be the judge of whether I succeed or not.

This Book Is Not an Argument for a Traditional Church

You may think I want to sell you on a particular way of doing church. I do. I absolutely do. But I hope you will relax as it pertains to music styles, clothing styles, or almost any other kinds of styles, because this isn’t that kind of book.

Many times, when a person complains about the so-called “attractional church,” people understandably assume that the person is arguing for a “traditional church” instead. If I complain about the superficiality of certain contemporary worship songs, the response can be something like, “So you think we should just sing hymns?” Hymns are great. More churches should sing them. But there’s nothing intrinsically holy about old music. When someone argues that too much contemporary Christian music is superficial or theologically suspect, it is not a call to give up songwriting but a call to write better songs.

I was once part of a rather large church that fell apart. The elders had to dismiss the lead pastor for a variety of sins, including ongoing verbal abuse of numerous staff members. The pastor announced a public meeting, which I attended, to give his side of the story, part of which consisted of saying the elders had kicked him out because they wanted to make the church more traditional. This was not true at all, and most of us saw right through it. But the pastor knew it would gain some traction because many people in our church were there “in recovery” from bad experiences of legalism and lifelessness in traditional churches. Traditionalism had become a handy bogeyman.

There are all kinds of churches in the world, and there are good ones and bad ones among all those kinds. There are good traditional churches and bad ones. There are good contemporary churches and bad ones. But when, faced with critique, the contemporary church holds up an idea of the traditional church as boring or fundamentalist or backward, it is the cheapest kind of defensiveness and self-justification.

So in my critique, I hope this kind of response will be set aside. I am not asking anyone to give up their guitars or their coffee bars—just, perhaps, to reconsider what they do with them. This is not an argument for a more traditional church so much as it is an argument for a more biblical one.

This Book Is Not a Reactionary Rejection

It has been said that the prophets of one generation become the Pharisees of the next. Maybe that’s true.

What we see in the cyclical nature of the church in the Western world is how each generation in some way rebels against the values and establishments of the generation before it. Some track this reactionary cycle through the generations of church models, as well. It is possible that the rise of the so-called “seeker church,” with the primary influences of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois and Saddleback Community Church in California, precipitated a reactionary movement of similar churches against the traditional—maybe fundamentalist—churches before them. Then my generation, often called Generation X, began to flirt with things like liturgy, creeds, more structured worship, even candles and incense. In response to the loosened-up church style of the Boomers, the Xers went further back than their fundamentalist grandparents even, and adopted some sort of merging of contemporary church with elements of high church formalism, seeking less relevance and more reverence. We might say the movement known as the emerging (or emergent) church came from this reaction.

Today the church world is a bit fractured, with tribes springing up all over the place. The mantle of the Boomers’ “seeker church” has been passed through the “church growth” movement, on to a new phase in contemporary church styles predominant in the American megachurch movement. But we have to be careful there, because not all megachurches are created equal. There are very big traditional churches and very big contemporary churches. The bigness of a church is no indicator of its style or approach to worship. Similarly, the seeker church paradigm can be found in hundreds of smaller churches around the nation.

The emergent church seems to have fractured off from evangelicalism altogether. Although there are certainly evangelicals in the emergent church movement, as a stream of church life it seems to have found itself more at home within the denominational mainline, where religious and political liberalism are more common.

The tribe sometimes called the “neo-Reformed”—or alternately, the new Calvinists, the neo-Puritans, the “young, restless, and Reformed”—is another offshoot of the contemporary church that ran parallel to the emerging church for a time. Those of us who identify with the slightly larger tent we might call the “gospel-centered” movement would align more with the neo-Reformed, but there is plenty of variety denominationally and stylistically even in this group. Just get the Presbyterians and the Baptists talking about baptism, for instance, or the traditionally Reformed folks and the Acts29 Network gang talking about church music.

There is a beauty in all of this diversity. It is legalism when we place a burden on another local church body to look more like our own than Christ’s. So in all this beauty lies a great danger, and the danger is this: assigning a level of spirituality according to one’s stance on an open-handed theological issue—that is, important but nonessential issues that we hold more loosely than the essential tenets of orthodox Christianity, which of course we hold very tightly in a “closed hand.” We must be very careful that our modes and models of church are sincere attempts to contextualize our common faith to our particular mission fields and communities. In this vein, it is just as narrow-minded to suggest that a traditional church is necessarily boring and legalistic as it is to suggest that a contemporary church is shallow and worldly.

We’ve got to get out of reactionary mode. When we find ourselves making particular transitions from one way of doing church to another, we have to be on guard against shaking a fist at those in the places we leave behind.

I have deep concerns about the current approach to what used to be called the seeker church, what some today may call the “attractional” church. I think there are some fundamental assumptions and instrumental decisions being made at the heart of this way of doing church that are not in step with the truth of the gospel. I am trying to be totally up front about that. But if you are committed to that approach, I do not question your faith. I do not question your love for Jesus. I know that you do what you do precisely because you do love Jesus and because you love the people Jesus loves and want to be about the business Jesus was about. I know you do what you do because lost people need to know Christ; your way of worship style and preaching style—your entire mode of “doing church”—comes from a desire to do what many churches have simply left undone for many, many years, which is to say, reveal the loving heart of God for those spiritually far from him. You want lost people to be saved and you want found people to walk more closely with him. I see that, and honor it.

I will tell you, in the final chapter, my own personal story of transition from the traditional church to the attractional church and then into another way. But you should know, ahead of time, that I invested in the attractional church because I shared its heart for the lost. I still have not rejected its primary aims. I simply come at those aims from another angle now. So this book isn’t intended as a reactionary diatribe. You wouldn’t read that. I wouldn’t read that. So I won’t write that.

I’m writing this book not as a reactionary rejection of what you do, but as a reaction to what God has done in the gospel.

I’m asking you to thoughtfully consider the different angle laid out in these pages. You may think this is much ado about nothing, that this kind of stuff is petty. But I ask you to consider this carefully. I simply want to suggest that, even if we agree on the goal we are trying to reach, if we are just one or two tiny degrees off, the further we go the further away we will be from our intended destination.

And while faithful Christians may disagree on church forms and the like—while we may, in love, differ on all manner of secondary doctrinal matters—could it not be that some of these secondary things we differ on have implications for how people receive and believe primary things? How we “do church” shapes the way people see God and his Son and his ways in the world. If you agree with that, it behooves us to constantly evaluate what shape our church is taking and what shape of Christian our church is making.

This Book Is a Call to Question Ourselves

Many of our strongest churches began when a group of visionary people began to question the way they’d always done things. The best missionary work begins with an evaluation of previous work in the same field. The strategy begins with asking, “What has been done before? How fruitful has it been? What changes, if any, ought we to make?”

The worst ministry work assumes that the old ways of doing things are the best ways simply because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” You and I laugh at this idea when it comes up in our churches. When we’re not laughing, we’re weeping. Many a great ministry initiative has stalled out, many a necessary alteration in the way of doing church has stopped before it began, because influential voices have raised the objection merely of its newness. No pastor wants to hear, “That’s not the way the previous pastor did it.”

The problem is that all of us are susceptible to this kind of thinking, including those of us in cutting-edge churches. We get locked into our ways of doing things and end up ruling out any questions or objections. The new way becomes the old way after a while, and we ourselves won’t give any quarter to any newer ways of thinking because our old new way has been working just fine, thanks. Do you see how that works?

But if you are in a successful contemporary church, you didn’t get where you are by doing things the way they’ve always been done. (I’m appealing to your sense of innovation here, and your willingness to evaluate things.) What happens when the innovative, relevant, cutting-edge ways of doing church become the old way? How do you know, for instance, that the way has gotten old? How do you know when the measurements you’re making don’t tell the whole story?

Do you, for instance, allow anyone to suggest that, despite all appearances, perhaps the way things are being done isn’t the best way they could be done?

So here’s what this book is intended to be:

You and I are sitting down for coffee. Or a long breakfast, since this is a book, not a pamphlet. I ask you, as a friend, to hear me out. I have some concerns about the way you’re doing church. You’re on guard, because you’re tired of rants, tired of legalistic whining, tired of reactionary diatribes. You just want to get on with God’s mission. I want that too. But for this long breakfast, I ask you to put the guard down and let me speak to you as a friend. As one iron sharpening another.

In Mark 8, Jesus and his disciples are in their boat after he has miraculously fed the four thousand. The disciples, as always, are a few tacos short of a combo. Jesus had just performed this great miracle using bread, and they very soon after are wondering where they’re going to get some bread. Jesus, as he often does, turns their doubts into a teachable moment. In verse 15, he says, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.”

This appears to come out of left field. The disciples miss the point right away and continue wondering about where to get bread. They don’t know it, but their missing the point is actually quite on point.

When Jesus says to beware of the leaven (yeast) of the Pharisees, he is referring to self-righteousness, what we often call legalism. But legalism doesn’t always look like rigid fundamentalist hellfire-and-brimstone Captain Bringdowns. (We’ll talk about this later.) The point is that self-righteousness is very subtle. Just a little can spread and take over. The same is true of the leaven of Herod, by which I take Jesus to mean, essentially, “worldliness.”

The leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod appear on the surface to be opposite dangers. Pharisees are religious; Herod is irreligious. Pharisees are legalistic; Herod is licentious. These are the two extremes we sinners often find ourselves swinging between on the great spiritual pendulum of life. Because this is true, it is true that our churches tend to swing between these poles as well. And often we justify our own tendencies by in some way saying, “Well, at least we’re not like those guys.”

But, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump” (Gal. 5:9). If we give either legalism or license an inch, they will take a mile. This is why Jesus says to “beware” of them both. And he also says to beware of them both so that we won’t think that a dose of one is the antidote to the poison of the other.

That is the way many have forged their church movements. We hope to flee legalism by “loosening up.” Or we hope to repent of worldliness by “tightening up.” Certainly we could all use some loosening and tightening in strategic places, but this is not what Jesus is teaching.

In Mark 8 he has just fed the four thousand. The disciples are still wondering where they will get bread. Jesus says to beware of the bread of the Pharisees and beware of the bread of Herod. Because he wants us to find our bread in him, to find in fact that he is our bread.

If Jesus is, as he claims to be, the bread of life, what implications might this have for the way we do church? I don’t simply mean that we will want people to know Jesus—I’m assuming you and I both already want that. That’s the whole purpose of your church. The issue is this: Is it possible that the way we communicate the bread of life has been compromised by one of these other leavens that ought not be there? Jesus says to beware of this happening, so we shouldn’t simply take for granted that good intentions will rule the possibility out.

What if the way we communicate Jesus actually works against people trusting him? Could we consider that together?

For all of the evaluation we tend to inflict upon ourselves—from test marketing felt needs to measuring the participation of our churchgoers, from studying the demographics of our target mission fields to critiquing the level of excellence of what takes place on our stages—I hope we have never ruled out asking, “What if what we’re doing isn’t really what we’re supposed to be doing?”

We should ask that. All of us.

2

What If the System’s Broken?

The attractional church movement might be said to have begun with the rise of the seeker church movement—Willow Creek in Illinois and Saddleback in California being the two biggest pacesetters—but it has grown out of that movement into a nice amalgamation with the church growth movement, the multisite church movement, and—oddly enough—some of the traits and strategies of the traveling revivalists of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.

I am intimately familiar with the attractional church model, having both worked on staff and served as a layperson in attractional churches, and having been an ardent student and apologist of the seeker church movement for years. (Torn between two loves, I even once canceled my subscription to Modern Reformation magazine because I thought they picked on seeker churches too much.) I’m not an expert on the attractional model, and am for all intents and purposes a (hopefully respectful) critic of the model now, but I do believe I know some things about this way to do and be church.

A definition of “attractional” would perhaps be something like this: a way of ministry that derives from the primary purpose of making Christianity appealing. By this definition, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the attractional church makes its primary aim in worship to get as many people through the doors of the church as possible so that they may hear what it means to have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

The attractional paradigm does not necessarily neglect those who already believe, however; it seeks to help believers experience a more practical way of following Jesus, trusting that such instruction will also meet the primary aim of reaching the lost—by showing the appeal of Christianity as relevant to their daily life.

Let’s be clear: These are noble aims. They are good-hearted and well-intentioned. The genesis of the seeker/attractional movement addressed very real problems—namely, that church members were not reaching their unsaved neighbors, and the unsaved neighbors could not see how Christianity had any relevance for modern life. Seeker churches sought to address such problems with very practical solutions. They wanted to make the experience of church as comfortable and comprehensible as possible so that those untrained in insider church lingo and unfamiliar with the Bible would see how utterly practical Christianity is. The goal, as we used to say, was to remove every stumbling block but the cross from between the lost and Jesus.

When I first read Rediscovering Church by Lynne and Bill Hybels in 1996, it opened up a whole new world of ministry and mission for me. It expanded my vision of what church could be, but not at the expense of what I had always assumed church should be. I read these words of confirmation from Bill Hybels in his introduction:

I can honestly say that building a big church was never the conscious desire of my heart. I never set out to see how innovative I could be with drama or music, or how many cultural codes I could crack. Those were simply a few means to an incredibly valuable end. What motivated me twenty years ago, and what motivates me today, is the priceless goal of seeing redeemed people become the church.1

The message of the cross was not absent from the Hybelses’ vision for a new kind of church. “We need to be reckless purveyors of saving grace,” they said. “In the end, it’s only this love of Christ that can change [us].”2

This book, along with Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church3 and the blueprint for a seeker-targeted model of ministry they presented, scratched a big itch for me and for many others. And it wasn’t because they planned to discard the gospel.

But the problem, as many of us see it now, is that this message of the cross appears to have gotten lost despite our best intentions, contrary to plan, obscured in the well-meaning zeal to remove the unnecessary barriers. In one church I was a part of, they literally removed a cross from the sanctuary wall because it seemed too churchy. (It actually wasn’t so much churchy as cheesy, made of Plexiglas and wire.) There’s not really anything wrong with having or not having a cross on your church walls, but for many of us, in retrospect this removal became symbolic of what seemed to be taking place message-wise.

Now, many attractional churches still preach that Jesus died for our sins, of course. But too often this message of Christ’s death has become assumed, the thing you build up to rather than focus on. Or, in too many other cases, this message is treated as the “add-on” to other messages, the proposition presented at the end of a message that is more about our personal success than Christ’s personal victory.

A cognitive dissonance can result for those who hear a message all about what they should do to be more successful or victorious or happy or what-have-you, only to then hear the proposition that Jesus died for our sins. To hear a lengthy appeal to our abilities, culminating in an appeal to our utter inability, can cause spiritual whiplash.

But the appeal is easy to see. Attractional is certainly attractive. These kinds of messages, over time, communicate to seeker and believer alike that Christianity is about themselves, making the faith more about self-improvement or life enhancement—which are things we all want deep down. But are they the real message of Jesus?

The dominant message in so much attractional preaching is that Jesus has come to make life easier or better for us, that his teachings can help us in pursuit of our aspirations. So the attractional church sometimes struggles to talk about sin. Not always, of course, but sometimes. Sin is recast as problems, baggage, “issues,” brokenness, all real and true things but none quite getting at what sin really is—a cancer deep inside all of us that is a hideous offense against the holiness of God.

This, of course, is not speaking the attractional church’s language at all! I know, because I’ve been there. Right now, if you are committed to the attractional church model, you may be taking issue with my claims, saying the gospel is the ever-present reason behind everything you do and that it’s exactly “Christian-ese” like this talk about cancerous sins and offending the holiness of God that turns lost people off. And you may think that churches that focus on that kind of stuff will never have the kind of impact churches can have when they focus on more positive things.

Because the proof is in the pudding, right? If the attractional message didn’t work, the attractional churches would not be filled with people (and getting bigger by the week).

But maybe numbers don’t tell the whole story.

What If Perception Is Not Reality?

When it comes to influence, could it be that Christians have a perception problem? Consider the issue of “celebrity Christianity.” Idolization of celebrities is, of course, a problem in any culture. Within evangelicalism, however, we have our own common celebrities—Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, et al. And then each tribe within evangelicalism has its own set of celebrities—John Piper and Matt Chandler and Tim Keller in one, Perry Noble and Steven Furtick and Craig Groeschel in another, T. D. Jakes and Benny Hinn and Paul Crouch in yet another. The emergents and progressives, for all their rhetorical rejection of consumerism and hierarchicalism, have their own celebs too.

We look at our guys who have “platforms” and project their influence into the world wider than it actually is. I’ve walked with Matt Chandler around a conference venue and experienced how intense it is to be met at every step with folks who want to say hi or thanks or tell him their story or get him to sign their Bible(!)—to each of which interruptions he responds with great patience and grace. And then I remember talking with him later and saying something like, “You probably can’t even go out to eat in Dallas without being recognized.”

“Nah,” Matt said. “You have to really be somebody to get recognized in Dallas. If I was T. D. Jakes, maybe . . .”

It put things in clearer perspective for me that this guy that many of us consider a huge celebrity in the Christian world wouldn’t even get noticed in his own town. His statement put Christian celebrity culture in its rightful place.

Perception, however, has become reality. We can see this as we hear statements like the one I read this morning on Facebook from a young woman who used to attend my young adult ministry in Vermont. She was objecting to the biblical pattern for church governance and church discipline because it simply has become irrelevant, given “all these massive churches.” In her mind, evangelical churches have become so huge, they can no longer be expected to accommodate the outdated structures laid out in the Bible (notwithstanding Acts 2:41 telling us that three thousand souls joined the church in one day, I guess). Now, this young woman once lived in Vermont, so she knows that massive churches aren’t the norm everywhere. But she now lives in the South, where massive churches very much are part of the regular evangelical perception. Perception has become reality.

But the actual reality is quite different from many of our perceptions.

First of all, I think evangelicals have an overinflated sense of the numbers, which in turn distorts the big picture. The presumption is that big, attractional churches are the norm, mainly because it is the big, attractional churches that get most of our media coverage. It is the big, attractional church pastors who get book deals and speaking engagements. When celebrities go to church, they typically land at big, attractional churches. When the media does news reports about churches, they tend to focus on the big, attractional churches. The bigger platforms take up the biggest real estate in our evangelical vision. That’s not necessarily either good or bad. It just is.

But it can distort our perception of the evangelical landscape. According to Duke University’s 2010 National Congregations Study, the median church size in the United States is 75 regular participants.4 And when they calculated the approximate distribution of churches in the nation based on size—including Protestant and other Christian churches but excluding Catholic and Orthodox churches—they learned that churches with 1,000 or more regular participants constituted only 2.5 percent of all churches. Churches running 500–999 regular attenders account for only 4 percent of all churches. Instead, what we might call “small churches” today, the ones whose pastors do not get book deals or speaking invites, account for the vast majority of churches in the country—those with 100–499 people make up 35 percent of all churches, and those with 7–99 make up 59 percent.

The perception that most churches are big, or even that the most successful churches (when measuring things like reproduction, for instance) are big churches is simply that—perception.

But while they still remain the minority in the evangelical church landscape, the number of big churches is increasing, and the big churches are getting bigger. Statistics bear this out as well:

[I]t is evident that the number of megachurches per million Americans is increasing at an ever faster rate. Not only are there more megachurches, but also there are more megachurches per million Americans now than previously, and they are growing more rapidly than the population.5

But what if the numbers don’t represent the people we think they do?

What If We’re Not Reaching Those Whom We Think We Are?

In 1995, Sally Morgenthaler published Worship Evangelism, in which she articulated and pioneered the blueprint for seeker/attractional church worship. Morgenthaler became an in-demand speaker and writer, and the principles she defended so well became standard for many attractional churches, even ones who had never heard of Morgenthaler and her book. Her idea was simply that “God designed worship to witness . . .”6

This is absolutely true. Worship is witness. And, in fact, witness is worship. The theological point is sound: when believers are engaged in the worship of God, this worship communicates to a lost world who God is and what he has done. Morgenthaler goes on to explain that when believers demonstrate that the deepest longings of our hearts are satisfied by God, it bears compelling witness to those who are seeking the same kind of satisfaction.

This theological truth is played out practically by the idea that the worship service in particular—the regular gathering of believers to hear from God’s Word and exalt him in worship—ought to be conducted with the aim of bearing witness. So Morgenthaler cites multiple practitioners of “worship evangelism,” including megachurch pastors who design multiple services with different styles and “feels” (their word, not mine) to reach a variety of kinds of seekers. It is not uncommon now for large churches not just to offer multiple services or campuses to accommodate more people but to offer multiple genres or “experiences” in these venues to accommodate more tastes and preferences.

If the purpose of worship is evangelism, this makes sense. So to advertise our worship experiences we add adjectives that communicate the intended effect. We call our worship “dynamic” or “exciting” or “engaging.” The unintended message is that worship is not for God but really for the worshiper. Which raises the question, Who are we worshiping?