Missional or Attractional? Yes.
PLUMB LINE:
“The Week Is As Important As the Weekend.”
I was sitting with nearly 200 church leaders listening to a very charismatic, giga-church pastor explain that at least once a week he has to remind one of his staff members, “It’s the weekend, stupid.” He wanted his staff to understand that the primary factor in determining whether someone attends their church is the quality of the weekend experience. Period. Thus, most of their energy, money, and creativity should be spent crafting that weekend experience. A church can have the most incredible programs running throughout the week — they can excel at caring for members, small groups, counseling, outreach, and youth programs — but if their weekend experience stinks, the church will not grow.
What he said made sense. And I cannot deny that the quality of the weekend experience is often the reason people begin attending a church, at least in certain parts of the United States.
But is building an audience the same thing as growing a church? Is “attendance increased” the same things as “mission accomplished”?
Not hardly. Our mission, according to Jesus, is not to gather audiences, but to grow disciples.
Pundits criticized President George W. Bush for declaring “Mission Accomplished” from the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, after US forces had obliterated Iraq’s defenses and captured Saddam Hussein. Crippling Iraq’s defenses through a “shock and awe” campaign, the analysts said, is not the same thing as establishing a stable regime. In their view, President Bush had accomplished only the first — and easier — part of the mission, premature for celebrating a mission accomplished.
Do churches that proclaim “success” when they gather large audiences make the same mistake? Do they confuse a milestone en route to the mission with the end goal of that mission?
To be clear, I’m not against celebrating large weekend numbers. New Testament writers do that regularly. They often tell us when Jesus or the apostles gathered large crowds and sometimes exactly how many people were in those crowds. Twice Luke celebrates the specific number of baptisms the church performed on a given day. Jesus’ “good shepherd” in Luke 15 was so in touch with the number of his flock that he knew immediately when just one lamb had gone missing! And, of course, there’s a whole book in the Old Testament called . . . well . . . Numbers.
God is into numbers, because they represent people. Think about it: We know, to a penny, how much offering was collected the week before. Why would we not know then, to a soul, how many people were at church? Are pennies of more value than souls?
I believe, however, that we should be counting and celebrating the right numbers. Weekend attenders aren’t the primary number to celebrate. The number of disciples is. Unfortunately, what gets you on our lists of “fastest growing” or “largest churches in America” doesn’t necessarily correspond with the rolls in heaven. And if that’s the case, the week is every bit as important, if not more so, than the weekend.
The Weekend Is Only the Beginning
What happens during the week establishes the difference between a disciple and an attender. And in our post-Christian age, the weekend is becoming less effective for reaching truly unchurched people. Fewer and fewer lost people are moseying their way into our weekend services. Thus, equipping disciples to reproduce outside the church, during the week, is becoming vastly more important than having a great weekend show. As our society becomes more and more “post-Christian,” training members to “go” will be far more effective than inviting the community to “come.”
We see our weekend gathering of the church like a huddle, where instructions are given for how the players can run the “mission” play throughout the week. The evangelistic “play” will need to be carried out by our members in the community throughout the week. A large part of my responsibility on the weekend is to get them ready to do that.
That being said, we recognize that the weekend gathering still plays an important role in the evangelism process. Paul certainly thought that way about his church services — giving strong admonitions and detailed instructions to the Corinthians about how to make their weekend services intelligible and attractive to unbelievers (1 Cor. 14 — more on this in a moment).
For nearly half a century now, church leaders have debated the question of which approach is more effective: attractional or missional. (Just for clarity, by ‘attractional’ I mean ministries designed so that unbelievers will be drawn into them to hear the gospel; and by ‘missional’ I mean equipping Christians to carry the gospel (and its good works) to unbelievers outside the church.)
Let’s start with understanding the historical context of the debate and then take a look at the biblical basis for both. Then we’ll discuss how each might be applied.
The History of Missional
The word missional originates from a mid-twentieth-century missionary named Lesslie Newbigin. Serving among the Indian people in South Asia, Newbigin was frustrated with his converts, because most of them assumed that it was his job to spread the gospel, not theirs. Newbigin was bothered on two accounts: first, he believed Indian believers were developing an unhealthy dependence on foreigners; second, he believed Indian nationals could spread the gospel more effectively than foreigners. He saw in the book of Acts that “regular” Christians were at the forefront of gospel expansion, and he was convinced that empowerment of “ordinary” Indian believers was the key to expansion of the gospel in India, too.
After Newbigin retired and returned to England, he saw that his native English churches worked in the same unhealthy way. Western Christians viewed their paid professional clergy as the ones responsible for mission advancement. Newbigin argued that the key to gospel advance in any society lies in the hands of the laity, for the church, in its very essence, is “missional.” Every believer, he said, is an ordained, Spirit-anointed missionary.1
Toward the end of the last century, leaders such as Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer began to popularize Newbigin’s ideas, coining the terms attractional and missional to distinguish between an evangelism model that seeks to draw people to church events and one that seeks to equip ordinary members to carry the gospel outside the church in the power of the Spirit.2
As I hope you can tell, I am thoroughly convinced the missional mindset is the way forward for the church. But in our zeal to pursue this, we should not overlook the numerous ways the Bible prescribes attractional evangelism, too. So let’s take a moment to examine its biblical basis.
Attractional: “Come and See”
A great deal of the evangelism we see in the Bible could very easily be called “attractional.” God told Israel they were to be like a “city set on a hill,” a shining light the Gentiles would come toward (Ex. 19:5 – 6). As Gentile nations saw God’s glory radiating from his people, they would be attracted to Jerusalem to worship (Isa. 2:2).
Perhaps the best Old Testament example of this is the Queen of Sheba. During the reign of Solomon, she came to behold the glory of God in Israel’s midst because she had heard so much about it. After traveling for many miles, according to 1 Kings 10:5, “she was overwhelmed.” She exclaimed,
“The report I heard in my own country about your achievements and your wisdom is true. But I did not believe these things until I came and saw with my own eyes. Indeed, not even half was told me; in wisdom and wealth you have far exceeded the report I heard. How happy your people must be! How happy your officials, who continually stand before you and hear your wisdom! Praise be to the LORD your God, who has delighted in you and placed you on the throne of Israel. Because of the LORD’S eternal love for Israel. . . .” (1 Kings 10:6 – 9)
We shouldn’t assume that she was the only one to whom this ever happened. God had commanded the Jews, after all, to construct an outer court for the Gentiles in their temple, so that Gentiles (like the Queen of Sheba) could come and observe the Israelites in worship, learn about their covenant with God, and call out to God for themselves. God had said that the Jewish temple should be known as “a house of prayer for all nations” (Isa. 56:7).
In the New Testament the emphasis shifts to “go and tell,” but the concept of “come and see” is still decidedly present.3 For example, New Testament writers apply to the gathered church the metaphors God had used of Israel’s attractive power:
• Jesus told his followers they should be like a “city set on a hill,” doing their good works in public, and that others will see and glorify the Father in heaven (Matt. 5:14 – 16). The church is to conduct itself with such dignity and charity that our presence in any community is like a glorious light on a dark night, drawing those wandering in darkness. As they come close and observe its good works, they will “glorify your Father in heaven.”
• Peter, quoting from the book of Exodus, told his churches they are to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests, and a light in the midst of a dark world, living in such a way that others come to them and ask a reason for the hope within them (1 Peter 2:9 – 11; 3:15).
As in the days of Solomon, the “Queens of Sheba” today should hear about the work God is doing among his people, be drawn into our midst, and fall down to worship God for themselves. In 1 Corinthians 14:25, Paul talks about unbelievers doing this very thing: they come into a church service, “the secrets of their hearts are laid bare,” and they “fall down and worship God.” Doesn’t this sound almost exactly like what happened to the Queen of Sheba?
Lesslie Newbigin himself — chief among missional advocates — said that evangelism in Acts is essentially a group of people gathering to ask the believers, “Can you explain what is going on among you Christians?” and then someone standing to answer that question.4 However you spin it, that’s attractional. People see, wonder, attend, and inquire.
At every turn we see Jesus and the apostles attracting large crowds because of the way they lived out the gospel in front of the community, the signs they performed, the persuasiveness of their teaching, and how they worshiped God in Spirit and truth when they gathered (Acts 2:42 – 47). As the believers were teaching, unbelievers exclaimed things like, “Never man spoke as this man spoke” and they marveled at the authority with which both Jesus and his followers taught. In other words, it wasn’t only the way believers lived in the community that attracted unbelievers; it was how they conducted their worship services, too. Amazement led to attraction; attraction led to observation; observation led to conversion.
Recently, several small groups in our church got involved with a struggling local school. Over an entire summer they renovated teachers’ lounges, stocked the library, and collected supplies. Their project culminated in a morning breakfast for the teachers the day before school started. At the breakfast, one of the teachers stood up and said, “I’ve always known you Christians said you should love one another, but I’ve never really known what you meant by that until now.”
Several members of that school’s faculty have begun attending our church, and over the past few years I have baptized dozens of teachers. One said, “I wanted to know what made you all tick. And I didn’t understand the half of what I was missing.”
De-Cluttering the Court of the Gentiles
Not only should we live and worship in ways that draw people in, but we also should do everything we can to make our worship and message intelligible to them. Think about it: If God commanded Israel to create a “court for the Gentiles” so that Gentiles could easily observe the Israelites in worship, would he not also want us to do whatever we can to help unbelievers understand what is going on in our worship services?
In the Gospels, Jesus appears to get the most angry when he observes Jewish leaders cluttering up of the Court of the Gentiles with conveniences for the saved. Just before his death, he went to the temple and saw that the court had been overrun by peddlers selling sacrifices to be used in temple worship. Not only was Jesus angry over the sheer attempt to profiteer from the ministry; he was also angry that they had consumed the only space Gentiles had to encounter the God of Israel. Angrily, and with the backing of a whip, Jesus exclaimed, “My house was intended to be house of prayer for all nations, but you have turned it into a den of thieves” (Mark 11:17 my paraphrase).
Typically, when I hear pastors preach on Jesus’ words there, I hear them focus on the last part only — how angry Jesus was at those who were using the temple to make money. But don’t miss the first part of his statement: “My house was designated to be a house of prayer for the nations.” Jesus was angry not only at what they were doing, but also at what they were obscuring.5 They had transformed the only open-access point for the Gentiles into a catalogue of comforts and conveniences for the already saved. Having a place to change money and buy and sell sacrifices so close to the altar was very convenient for believers and served their needs well, but it kept outsiders from being able to see what was going on.
I’m sure some of the Jews objected to Jesus’ emphasis on the importance of the court: “But Jesus, this temple is not primarily for the Gentiles. The temple exists for already believing Jews to worship.” And technically, they were correct. The temple was primarily for the “already saved” to offer sacrifices. But God had also commanded them, as a part of their worship, to provide the lost Gentiles access to the beauties of worship, and when they didn’t, he became furious. They had transformed a portal for the outsider into a butler for the insider.
Why would we not assume Jesus feels the same way about a church today that makes no accommodations to make the gospel accessible to outsiders — in their preaching, music, language, practice of traditions, children’s programs, and even things like parking and signage? (I’ve been in many churches where, if you hadn’t grown up there, you could hardly find your way into the worship center. The obscurity even made me — a seasoned believer — feel uncomfortable! I’m sure unbelievers — already nervous about being in a church — do even more so!) By not thinking of the “observing outsiders” whom God is drawing to himself during our worship, are we not creating the same roadblocks for “Gentiles” as the Jews did in Jesus’ day?
So how must Jesus feel when a church refuses even to consider what it needs to change to reach the community and the next generation? It seems to me that a lot of churches never even consider change because they care more about their own preferences than they do making the gospel accessible to the outside world. They care more about holding on to their traditions than they do reaching their own grandchildren.
Dare we defend someone’s refusal to change with the excuse, “Well, church services are primarily for the saved to worship God, not to reach unbelievers”? Based on Jesus’ response to the Jewish moneychangers, I wouldn’t suggest it.
One evidence of God’s Spirit at work in a church is when seasoned members begin to put their preferences aside to reach the next generation. About a month after I became pastor at the Summit Church, we found a set of handbells in a storage closet. We thought that if we sold them, we could have some money to buy some newer musical equipment — specifically, we wanted to get a couple of electric guitars.
A few weeks later a sweet lady — who had been a member at our church since the 1960s — approached me, telling me she had heard about our plans and asking what we would do with the money. We hadn’t told anyone what our plans were, and when she asked me that, my heart stopped. This lady loved worship, but she was more of the “organs, bells, and horns” persuasion than the “drums, guitars, and rhythm loop” one.
I stuttered out, “We plan to buy electric guitars.” She said, “My mother, who died a few years ago, donated the money to purchase those handbells [which I had not known]. Why was no one going to check with me about this?”
Silence. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. I made vows and promises to God.
After a couple of long, awkward seconds, I said to her, “Well, don’t you think your mom in heaven would be glad to see us using instruments that would help us reach this next generation — including her grandkids and their friends?”
She thought about that for a second, and then said, “Well, yes . . . I suppose my mom would be happy with that.” She requested that we not sell the handbells but donate them to another church, which we gladly did. Yet she did not resist seeing them go, and she did not leave our church when we shifted our worship style to a more contemporary one. Today, over 2,000 college students attend our church each weekend. Because of the selflessness of this woman and many others, our church is reaching a whole new generation.
Any gospel-loving believer should long to see the Court of the Gentiles overflowing with seekers, and Scripture promises us that a Spirit-filled ministry will capture the attention of them for miles around! I feel that we can safely say that both the OId and New Testaments heartily commend a type of attractional ministry, and we would be foolish to neglect it.
Please understand that when I say that, I am not advocating that laser light shows and loud music become the centerpieces of our worship. That’s not what attracted people to Jesus and the apostles’ ministries in the first century. Paul said that the power that is able to convert sinners comes not from wise and persuasive words (or laser shows and zip line tricks), but from a presentation of Christ and him crucified (1 Cor. 2:2 – 4). What Christ preached clearly on the cross is the greatest attractional power available to the church.
The world may be entertained by our musical, theatrical, or oratorical skills, but they will never be converted by them. The only power that amazes the soul, the only wonder that silences the skeptic, the only vision that drives out our idols is the glory of the Christ revealed through preaching. When he is lifted up, he said, and only then, will he draw all men to himself (John 12:32).
Many churches today, lacking confidence in God’s promise, substitute the gathering power of entertainment for the transforming power of the cross. As Vance Havner used to say, “The deader your gospel, the flashier your package.” Smoke and subwoofers can never do what one glimpse of Christ crucified can do.
As we seek to draw people to our churches, we should be very cautious not to develop a strategy dependent on “wise and persuasive words,” funny stories, or great music. There is nothing wrong with these things in themselves, and employing them can be good stewardship. Our trust, however, must remain in the power of Christ crucified and that alone. Worship need not always be spectacular, but it must be supernatural. If not, it is worthless. And if we are not careful, our lust for the sensational can keep us from reliance on the supernatural.
Furthermore, don’t mistake audience participation in the entertainment for spiritual transformation. Entertainment can engage a crowd; only the power of the Spirit can transform them. And when the buzz of entertainment wears off, believers transformed by the gospel will still be turning the world upside down.
Having said that, we make no apologies for doing everything we can to attract unbelievers to our services and make the gospel accessible to them. I try very hard to be interesting, writing every sermon with unbelievers in mind, choosing words and examples that make sense to them. I address unbelievers directly multiple times in every sermon. I try to be engaging. Our worship teams choose music styles that engage our culture; they are really talented.
We pay a lot of attention to guest services and try to eliminate anything that might unnecessarily confuse or alienate outsiders, including outdated furniture. We constantly try to walk through our facilities with “fresh eyes,” asking what things might confuse those unfamiliar with our church or the faith. We think this is part of becoming “all things to all people so that by all possible means possible I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22) and one of the ways we can keep our “Court of the Gentiles” clear.
Furthermore, we capitalize on those times of year when unbelievers are more willing to go to church, such as Easter, Christmas Eve, weddings, and funerals, and we preach the gospel in especially simple, culturally compelling terms on those occasions.
I devour books written by pastors and church leaders who understand how unbelievers think, even when I disagree with some of their applications. “Eat the fish and spit out the bones,” I often tell our staff.6 We want to learn anything and everything from anyone that will help us reach unbelievers. We evaluate everything by Scripture, of course — but the Son of Man came to seek and save the lost, and that’s what we want to be about, too. If you can help us do that, we’re all ears.
I’m going to spend less time building a case for a missional approach to ministry, primarily because the majority of this book is about that. But let’s at least examine a couple of places in the Bible where we see a missional approach expressly advocated.
Even in the Old Testament (where God’s strategy is “come and see”), we see numerous examples of God sending his people outside its borders to preach salvation among the Gentiles. Several of the Old Testament prophetic books had sections written to Gentiles (and sometimes, as with Obadiah and Nahum, that preaching makes up the whole book!). And most of us are familiar with the story of that bitter prophet, Jonah, who did everything he could to circumvent God’s command to go and preach mercy to the Gentile nation of Nineveh.
When the children of Israel were sent into exile because of their disobedience, prophets such as Daniel and Jeremiah perceived a redemptive purpose in their exile — that God wanted to use the scattered Israelites to testify to the Gentiles about the grace of God. Thus, the prophet Jeremiah tells his generation of exiles to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city [of Babylon]” and “pray to the LORD for it” (Jer. 29:7). Daniel uses his position in the Babylonian government to testify to Nebuchadnezzar that God, and God alone, can save (Dan. 2:28; 3:14 – 17). The writer of 2 Kings tells us how a young Israelite slave girl persuaded the mighty Assyrian general Naaman that God alone has power to heal and cleanse (2 Kings 5:1 – 4).
The apostle Peter takes this idea of believers living in exile and presents it as the primary identity of the church today. We live here as exiles, he says, commissioned to “declare the praises of him who called [us] out of darkness into his wonderful light.” He urges us, therefore, to “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 2:9; 3:15). We are to pray for and bless our cities. In Peter’s epistle you see the “go and tell” and “come and see” approaches unite — as we go into the world, living out the gospel, unbelievers are drawn into our community to ask us a reason for why we live as we do.
And, of course, we have the Great Commission, where Jesus says as plainly as possible that believers are to “go into all the world” and to be his witnesses. We are to do what Jonah initially refused to do — to go and live among hostile people and declare God’s salvation to them with gladness.
For Peter, this command to go was not a special assignment for a handful of specialized missionaries, either. Peter explains that all of God’s people are ambassadors, prophets anointed with the Spirit of God. In his inaugural sermon, Peter made the astounding declaration that the Spirit had been poured out on all flesh and that even our “sons and daughters” would prophesy (Acts 2:17). To a Jewish audience, that was a staggering promise — “prophet,” to them, meant someone like “Ezekiel,” who got a book of the Bible named after him. With the coming of the Spirit, however, that kind of anointing is now available to all believers. What had been reserved for Jewish heroes in the Old Testament was now standard fare for all believers. This does not mean, of course, that we write Scripture the way some of the Old Testament prophets did, but that we preach with the same power and authority that they did.
Jesus would go so far as to say that the least believer in the New Testament is greater than the greatest Old Testament prophet because they know the truth about the resurrection and have the Holy Spirit permanently fused to their souls, ready to speak through them whenever they yield themselves to be his mouthpiece (Matt. 11:11). The “least” believer reading these words right now has access to greater power than even John the Baptist had!
In the New Testament, the balance of ministry shifts away decidedly from specialized leaders to ordinary people. Paul, in fact, said that God’s primary purpose for church leaders is equipping of the saints for the work of ministry. The saints, he said, do the work of the ministry; pastors and leaders are only there to equip! As I said earlier, I tell our church, tongue only slightly in cheek, that according to Paul, when I became a pastor I left the ministry. That means I should not be the first one from whom their neighbors hear the gospel, nor should I be the first one to visit one of our members during a time of suffering. The congregation’s job is not merely to invite unbelievers to hear me preach, but to be the primary means by which God testifies to their friends.
Get this: Of the 40 miracles recorded in Acts, 39 happen outside the church walls. That’s 97.5 percent! You can safely conclude from this that the main place God wants to manifest his power is outside the church. Think about how foreign this is to most church members’ thinking! Ask most church-going Christians to describe a time when they saw or felt the power of God, and they will point to a moment in the sermon or the musical crescendo during the choir special. (And we should be thankful for Spirit-filled church services!) But most of what God wants to do in our society happens outside the church, facilitated by the hands of ordinary people. The one place you seem to be unable to find the apostles much in Acts is . . . well . . . in church! Like Jesus, his disciples went “outside the camp,” taking the power of the gospel into the lost wilderness of the world (Heb. 13:12 – 13). To know Jesus is to be sent.
Physician Thomas Hale, commenting on the work of Lesslie Newbigin, captures the essence of the missional approach:
No one can say: “Since I’m not called to be a missionary, I do not have to evangelize my friends and neighbors.” There is no difference, in spiritual terms, between a missionary witnessing in his hometown and a missionary witnessing in Katmandu, Nepal. We are all called to go — even if it is only to the next room, or the next block.7
You are either a missionary or a mission field. There is no third option.
Run the Play!
Imagine watching an American football game on TV where after the quarterback calls the play in the huddle, the team applauds him, pats him on the back, and then runs back to the bench to have Gatorade and snacks. After a few minutes, they hustle back out onto the field, huddle back up, and tell the quarterback to call another play. This time a few tell him he’s the best play-caller they’ve ever heard and that they plan to bring their friends back to hear him call the next play. Then back to the bench for more snacks. A few podcast his play and listen to it again while they munch on energy bars. A few minutes later, back out to listen to another play. This happens for the duration of the first quarter. At some point you yell in exasperation, “Fellas! . . . The point is not listening to the quarterback call the play; the point is to run the play.”
As the pastor, my role at our weekend gathering is to call “the play” for the church. I love it when our congregation takes notes on the play, when they re-podcast the play later in the week, and when they share that play with their friends and bring them back to hear me call another one next week. But my real joy comes when they run the play. The only point of me calling the play is for them to run it.
No matter how good pastors get at calling the plays, if we don’t get people to start running the plays, we’re going to forfeit the game. As I noted at the beginning, with each succeeding generation in the West our “Sunday services” become less and less effective at bringing in the lost. If believers do not learn to carry the gospel outside the church, no one is going to hear us. We might as well be screaming in a closet. To return to my British friend, Steve Timmis:
We can no longer assume that if people want to find God or discover meaning or cope with a personal crisis, they will go to church. They may attend any number of religious bodies or sects. Or they may go to a therapist. Or read a self-help book. Merely opening our doors each Sunday is no longer sufficient. Offering a good product is not enough. . . . What is clear is that great swathes of America will not be reached through Sunday morning services.8
For those of us in the Western church, I think we are at a crucial decision point. I love seeing big audiences gathered to hear the gospel, but if we want to reach the next generation, we are going to have to equip our people to reach them outside the church.
Balancing Depth and Width
Most leaders, when you press them, will acknowledge that evangelism has both attractional and missional dimensions. The rub comes in determining how much time and attention you devote to either. Resources are limited, so the dollars you spend developing the weekend experience are likely dollars you can’t spend on developing discipleship and equipping ministries, and vice versa.
So what’s the right allocation of time and resources? Unfortunately, I can’t give you a percentage. What I can do is warn you that it’s easy to veer toward extremes and neglect one or the other. It’s easy then to label yourself and villainize those who balance it differently. For example, you can start to pride yourself on your weekend attendance, using that as your sole metric of success and devote little to no attention to ministries that don’t directly result in more rears in seats, more coin in the offering, or more bodies in the baptismal.
On the other hand, you can self-righteously eschew the attractional approach and condescendingly criticize all the large ministries in your city, saying things like, “Well, of course that big church draws in a lot of people. But people never stay there. Eventually they make their way back to us.” You then feel justified in putting little to no effort and energy into guest services, weekend environments, or accessibility of the message, because largeness equals a sell-out.
Both those who neglect the missional and those who neglect the attractional are unfaithful to God. God intended both for his church, and what he has joined together, we must not separate.
Charles Spurgeon said,
It will be seen that those who never exhort sinners are seldom winners of souls to any great extent, but they maintain their churches by converts from other systems. I have even heard them say, ‘Oh, yes, the Methodists and Revivalists [or, in our day, “the megachurch, church-growth” guys] are beating the hedges, but we shall catch many of the birds.’ If I harboured such a mean thought I would be ashamed to express it. A system which cannot touch the outside world, but must leave arousing and converting work to others (whom it judges to be unsound) writes its own condemnation. . . . I would sooner bring one sinner to Jesus Christ than unpack all the mysteries of the divine Word, for salvation is the thing we are to live for.”9
Faithful churches, in other words, seek to grow deep and wide. Pursuing width without depth creates audiences instead of churches; but pursuing depth without width fails to take the urgency of the Great Commission seriously. In fact, churches that only seek to grow wide, and not deep, are probably not nearly as wide as they think, because heaven counts disciples, not congregants or confessions of faith. And churches that attempt to grow deep with no concern for growing wide are probably not as deep as they think, either, because depth in the gospel always leads to a yearning for, and usually an effectiveness in, evangelism.
It sounds so spiritual to say something like, “We should only worry about the depth of our ministries, and let God worry about the width.” But disregarding the width of your ministry is blatantly unfaithful to the Great Commission. Wasn’t Jesus so concerned about the “width” of his flock that he left the ninety-nine to go after one more? Do we think he is no longer concerned with that today? How can we not care about how widely God extends the gospel through us?
Again, Spurgeon — a man not known for shallow, seeker-sensitive preaching — said,
It is true that a fisherman may fish and never catch any fish, but, if so, he is not much of a fisherman. And so, if there were no souls saved when I preached, perhaps I might find some way of satisfying my conscience, but I don’t know what it is yet.
If my hearers are not converted, I feel like I have wasted my time; I have lost the exercise of brain and heart. I feel as if I lost my hope and lost my life, unless I find for my Lord some of his blood-bought ones.10
Faithful pastors, if they are not seeing people saved in their ministries, look to heaven and ask God why he is not giving the harvest that he promised. There certainly can be seasons when we see little to no tangible fruit through our ministries (I’ve had a number of them — including a two-year stint where I only saw two people come to Christ), but those seasons are not normal, and we should never be okay with them.
Faithful churches seek to reach as many people as possible, as fast as possible, because that’s what good fishermen and compassionate shepherds care about. If we are not concerned about this, can we really call ourselves disciples of the One who said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19 ESV)?
Furthermore, it seems to me that a lot of missional ministry advocates have overstated the case against attractional ministry. I agree with them that our culture has changed and that people don’t flock to citywide revival services the way they did in the 1950s. But dare we underestimate the drawing, converting power of a Spirit-filled preacher of the gospel? When a preacher of God’s Word “lifts up” the beauties of Christ, should we really be surprised when the community throngs to hear him? Missional advocates love to emphasize the church going (as they should), but they overlook the fact that Jesus and the apostles had a whole lot of people coming to them as well.
I know several gospel preachers thriving in some very difficult places — some of the most unchurched, de-churched, post-Christian places in the Western world. Old Testament Nineveh was a foreign, “unchurched” culture hostile to God when Jonah went in, preaching, and the whole city came out to hear him. The land of Ireland was entirely pagan when Patrick went in, preaching, in the fifth century, and throngs of people flocked to hear him. In the revivals in Buddhist Korea of the early twentieth century — in which 50,000 people came to Christ during the first year, including 90 percent of the student body of a local college — preaching to large groups featured prominently.
Dare we assume such preaching has lost its power? Jesus’ promise that he would draw people to himself when he was lifted up did not come with an expiration date. And when God starts drawing sinners to your church, you will likely need to find a large venue in which to gather them. That might feel attractional, but it’s also biblical.
The bottom line? Faithful ministries pursue both width and depth, because neither is really possible without the other. Depth in the gospel leads to width in the mission.