In a couple of weeks Carey Nieuwhof will land in Australia to share with Australian church leaders the latest thinking in all things ‘church leadership’ and one of his big statements made recently on the Exponential Australia podcast is that the ‘attractional church is dead.’ Hey if you’re gonna draw a crowd then just say something punchy!
That oughta do it 🙂
Carey is a highly respected author and podcaster so his perspective on things is always going to be influential. Suggesting the attractional church is dead, he argues, is articulating something many church leaders and pastors know is already happening. He states ‘the way we approach church changes from generation to generation, and we are currently in a season of significant change.’
He describes the attractional struggle well – bigger and better each week is hard to sustain for a short time let alone many years. Motorbikes on stage, monster giveaways, pumped up advertising and more smoke machine haze has a shelf life. He cites Craig Groeschel (a high profile large church pastor) who says one of the things they are focusing on is ‘de-cooling’ the church. A verbatim quote: ‘I don’t wanna be cool any more. I want to be authentic.‘ FWIW I think that’s a tragic quote… (Also FWIW I have been in large churches where authenticity is clearly evident and in smaller churches who are really just trying harder to increase their cool factor.)
The implication of course is that these two things – cool and authenticity – do not always play well together – in fact they rarely do. When you chase ‘cool’, you white ant authenticity, because a whole heap of people have to pretend in order to be sufficiently cool. Nieuwhof is not suggesting you will be unable to find attractional churches around the place, or that people will stop investing in them, but rather that the impetus for churches to form in that way is in decline.
How does a church move to authenticity – and how do we avoid authenticity now being the ‘new cool’? Firstly – authenticity is not a function of size – so smaller isn’t always better. Rather I would suggest that it strongly correlates to the type of leadership a church experiences. Glossy, never fail, bigger and better, influencer leaders are having less appeal. Drab, uninteresting and underachieving leaders are equally uninspiring. But raw, authentic leaders who go ‘all in’ to lead the people in discipleship are a winner. ‘Player-coach’ leaders who speak from the heart and are willing to be genuinely vulnerable (as opposed to a ‘scripted vulnerability moment’) have a much better chance of connecting and imparting this value than pastors who simply polish the machine and rev it harder.
I feel like I’ve been banging this drum for a while now – maybe since 2003 even… when I wrote the post that catalysed some fantastic debates (most of the comments sadly got lost when I transferred my hosting). If you read it be sure to also read the disclaimer – it is intentionally, polemic ie. it is very provocative and argumentative – and I wrote it 18 years ago when I wanted to kickstart some serious debate. It did the job… But I did write it a long time ago and while I still fully subscribe to the theology behind it, I am less concerned for the methodology.
When I reflect on my own experience as a success driven youth pastor at Lesmurdie, we saw rapid exponential type growth in our youth services as we sought each week to be bolder, more creative, off the wall and even zany. The young people came, and some had genuine faith experiences in that season. But the weight we carried as leaders was quite ridiculous at times. After splitting our youth service into two, with a 5.30 service and a 7pm we ran hard for about 6 months trying to make this new phase work, but all we succeeded in was exhausting ourselves as leaders. In a team meeting one day, Geoff was brave enough to suggest that we may want to consider going back to one service… It was a white flag of defeat – and in these environments it’s not often you see anyone concedes defeat – but Geoff blinked first and as soon as he said it the entire team let out a sigh of relief and it was unanimously agreed right there and then to revert back to our old one service approach that had worked. Ironically when we did that, the momentum had gone, the ‘balloon’ was deflating fast, and people were starting to wander off to greener pastures – to other churches that were putting on a bigger show and where they could feel the buzz again.
So what do you do if you are a church that has been all about attracting people in? What if that is not the answer you hoped it was?
Firstly you breathe deeply and relax. The heat is off to produce a mega-event again this Sunday. Simple is ok. Sloppy is different. Lazy is never commendable. But for smaller churches light on for resources this takes the heat right off.
Then you ask ‘what are we doing again?’ (Answer = Forming people into Christlikeness in community) Once you’re clear on the ‘what’, then the ‘how’ is up for grabs. How you engage music, prayer, scripture, food, confession, generosity and whatever other elements constitute a genuine gathering of Chrisitan people is not set in concrete. You could follow the lectionary… You could give the musos a much needed rest and gather around a meal. You could do this every week for a while… You could engage people in reflective experiences rather than giving them a 25 minute message. I could go on, but you get the idea. Drop the script.
So is the attractional church dead? I honestly don’t know. I’m interested to hear the ‘thought leaders’ cast their ideas around, but I sense too many people have too much invested in the model for it to decline quickly. As Upton Sinclair once said; ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding.’
Anyway – the die has been cast and I look forward to the conversation unfolding.
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