Attractional AND Incarnational

Orginally published on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 at 1:00 PM
by Devin Hudson

There is a huge debate right now among younger church leaders on whether the calling of the church is to be attractional (“come to us”) or incarnational (“go to them”). The Church Growth Movement of recent decades produced mega-churches around the country that were built primarily on attractional methods of ministry. Many of the leaders within the emerging church movement of recent years have reacted to that model and suggested that the primary mission of the church is primarily incarnational. As I read both sides of this discussion, I find myself agreeing with certain aspects of both perspectives. As a church planter, this dialogue is crucial in how your church will grow and develop. Will you seek to reach your community through attractional means or through incarnational living? At Grace Point Church, we decided as a church plant in an extremely unchurched, post-Christian culture (Las Vegas) that our answer had to be both/and and not either/or. Let me explain...

First, we must understand that every church in Western culture is attractional at some level. Every church does things to try and make people welcome and comfortable. Churches provide nurseries for small children. Churches put air conditioning and heat in their buildings to keep people cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Churches put seats in their buildings where people can sit. Churches print worship guides or bulletins and in most cases they are printed in a font that you can read. Churches provide parking lots and signs and restrooms and greeters and hymnbooks and screens. Every church I have ever visited has been “attractional” at some level—they do things to attract and keep people.

So arguments against any form of attractional ministry are moot at a certain level because every church is attractional. At the same time, some churches have become so attractional that they seem to have lost the missional elements necessary for a balanced ministry. Some churches become so consumed with getting people in their seats on the weekend that they have forgotten or overlooked the fact the church is actually people, people who will leave our buildings after an hour or so and take the church into the streets and marketplaces and schools of their community. If I am only worried about what happens for an hour or so on Sunday morning then I am missing the bigger picture of what it means to be the church in the community seven days a week.

When we launched Grace Point Church, we were starting basically from ground zero. Here’s what we realized quickly: when you parachute into a community and launch from scratch, you MUST be attractional at some level in order to gather people. This seems like such common sense to me but I think it is missing from some of the discussion taking place in church planting theory. If I do not attract people to explore who we are, I will not have anyone to teach to be incarnational. If I do not attract people to attend our church, it will be difficult to maintain the momentum and credibility within a community to make a lasting missional impact.

We knew from our earliest days that we would have to be attractional in the initial days to even get people to check us out. As a pastor in an unchurched culture, you are only going to build a limited amount of relationships with nonbelievers who will actually be interested in what you have to say and what you are doing. Relational evangelism is many times a long and tedious process in our culture. We have people at Grace Point who have yet to cross the line of faith and yet they have been on this spiritual journey for months. They are learning, discovering, searching, investigating, showing up about once every three weeks, and trying to understand what it means to be a Christ-follower. But the process before they actually become a Christ-follower may take months or even years. For this reason, we must seek to create an environment that will engage our community. We must attract them to a weekend gathering or we simply would not have enough people to exist.

One night at one of our launch team gatherings, I said in passing that we must work hard to get as many “butts in the seats” as possible in our early days to gain momentum and credibility. From that statement, we adopted what we call the “BITS" principle (butts in the seats). Here me when I say: we do not practice the BITS principle because we are consumed with numbers or are trying to trump every other church plant in our area. We are consumed with the BITS principle because we recognize the necessity of getting people to our church in the initial days in order to establish our church in the community. As your church grows and develops, your marketing strategy will change, but in the initial days, you must do everything you can to get your name out to the community.

On the other side of this coin is the missional balance. We are a church that is extremely concerned with incarnational living and ministry. We have a strong conviction that God has called us to be missionaries in this culture. We value serving our community. We value doing authentic, real-life ministry to the people in our community. We believe in helping restore the shalom to a community. We value instilling in the DNA of our believers a heart for serving people and being Jesus in our community. I speak regularly about the necessity of missional living. It is one of the primary focal points of our entire ministry. We are all about the missional/incarnational side of ministry.

What I am saying here is that the attractional/incarnational discussion does not have to be an either/or issue. For us, we work hard to make it both/and. We work hard to get people to our weekend worship gatherings. We work hard to make sure that what we do on Sunday is done with excellence. We work hard to create an environment that will engage the heart and mind of the people who attend. We want those who attend, regardless of where they are on their spiritual journey, to want to remain on the journey. We want them to come back the next Sunday. And better yet, we want them to want to bring their unchurched friends and family with them. We are attractional.

And yet when people attend Grace Point they understand our passion to make a difference in our community. They are constantly confronted with opportunities to serve in our community and to be salt and light in our area. We are incarnational.

I am often asked if Grace Point Church is a “seeker-sensitive” church or an “emerging” church or a multitude of other labels theorists love to put on churches. I simply say that we are a church consumed with getting the gospel to people. That means that we are going to be aware of nonbelievers in our midst (which is often 40-50% of our attendees on an average Sunday). We are going to treat them with respect and we are going to create an environment where they realize the gospel is real and relevant to their everyday life. At the same time, we are going to pour into the people who attend Grace Point the mentality that Christ-followers are called to be missional.

I don’t consider the elements of our weekend gatherings as anything other than what they are: an environment that is going to promote the gospel and engage the heart and mind of the people in our community. For us, we are in an area where about 5% of the people attend church. Add to that statistic the reality that over 95% of the people who live here are transplants from somewhere else and have virtually NO connections in the community and you are left with the reality that if you are not attractional, you will not reach the vast amount of people who move to Las Vegas every month. Yet also consider the reality that if we do not teach our people to be incarnational, if we do not teach them to be missional at home, and work, and at school, and in the marketplace, if we do not teach them to be Jesus to their friends, neighbors, and co-workers, then we will not impact a city with the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Attractional? Certainly.  Incarnational? Absolutely.

Devin Hudson is Lead Pastor of Grace Point Church in Las Vegas, NV.  His blog can be found at graceisthepoint.blogspot.com.

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