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unSeminary Podcast
Stop Saying the Attractional Church Is Dead
00:16:04
Let’s start with a confession. I’ve misdiagnosed “dead” more times than I care to admit…more than a coroner in a zombie movie marathon. I have this bad habit of declaring the demise of trends that are, in fact, quietly entering their prime.
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Stop saying the attractional church is dead. I am sick and tired of leaders using this great sound bite. Oh, the attractional church is dead in reels. Or on Instagram. Or maybe in a blog post. Remember blogging? People used to do that. They still do it, believe it or not. Rich Burch here from the Unseminary podcast solo episode. Today I want to reframe one of your assumptions and I want to invite you to an upcoming event. But really what I want to convince you is that the attractional church is not dead. It is alive and doing all kinds of amazing good things at churches all across the country. But first, let's start with confession. I have misdiagnosed things being dead in the past time and time again. In fact, when I started this podcast in 2013, I thought I was like, way late to the whole podcasting thing. Like, I was like, man, I've listened to podcasts for a long time now. There's no way. Little did I know that the kind of golden era of podcasting was still to come. Joe Rogan was still on Fear Factor. Didn't have his podcast at the time. Podcasting is just accelerating, becoming even more. It was far from dead in 2013 when we started over 800 episodes ago. Or QR codes. I remember my friend Kenny, he was a big booster of the QR code when it first came out. And I was like, listen, this thing is terrible. No one's gonna pull out their phone and scan that. You know, I was so confident of that. Fast forward to 2020. And the QR code came back with a vengeance. Every restaurant menu, conference, check in, and even church connect cards, man, we use the QR COD now more than ever before. Or what about YouTube? So when I started doing video podcasts a bunch of years ago, and that in fact, actually eight years ago, I stopped doing it because I thought, no one's ever gonna watch these things. No one's ever gonna sit down for 30 minutes and watch us talk to each other. Little did I know that, like today, YouTube is the most listened platform for podcasts. Listen, it's easy. Even books. Listen. I'm a huge Kindle fan. I started reading Kindle when they first came out. I think that's incre technology, but still. And I was like, yeah, Kindles are going to overtake digital. Books are going to overtake print. It just is so much easier. It's cheaper, it's fantastic tool. But still, to this day, print way outsells books year after or ebooks year after year after year. There's something about the paper, the texture, the smell, the ability to trade it with and share it. Print books just are not going anywhere. And that is partly the reason why I roll my eyes when someone confidently says attractional church is dead. I've heard it at conferen. I've read it in books. I've seen it on clickbait reels. People don't want polish anymore. The attractional church doesn't work. We've moved beyond that. No, no, friends, we have not. It's been absorbed into the normal. Churches and churches that win in 2025 are the ones that understand that invitation as culture, not as campaign. And pair this with great next steps to community and discipleship are winning. But friends, I want to tell you about an event that's coming up that I want you to miss. It is on Tuesday, November 12, 12pm Eastern, 9am Pacific. I am running a workshop specifically for churches between 500 and 1,000 in attendance that feel like their growth is stalled. I want to invite you to this live workshop. It's called Church Growth Launchpad. It's designed to help you reignite momentum and rebuild your church's invite culture. You'll discover five key systems that we've seen that growing churches use to get unstuck and start reaching more people. People again, just in time for Christmas, just in time for 2026. You're going to want to be there. You've already got the people. You've got the passion. You've got the program. This workshop will show you how to align them so that your church can lift off in this next season of growth. Again, it is churchgrowthlaunchpad.com drop by there. That's coming up November 12th, Tuesday. It's not Tuesday. It's on November 12th. That's a Wednesday at 12pm Eastern, 9am for our friends on the Pacific Coast. Well, let's talk. Let's get back to talking about the attractional church. So what used to be attractional, I believe is now just simply back is now just baseline. It's just normal church. Once upon a time, these were edgy moves. There were things that were not done before we went to, like music that actually people loved. It's not a stunt, but contextualized worship lowers the barriers for guests. We see this time and again teaching that connects to everyday lives. There used to be a time where religious leaders, they really didn't connect to everyday life. People wanted or they didn't actually want this. But some church leaders talked in a way that didn't make Sense to real life. Now it's just table stakes felt need series that are biblically clear, have concrete application that move from Sunday information to Tuesday application. That's just normal. Even our buildings, our lobbies have been designed with outsiders in mind. Our church facilities used to be really insider focused but way finding hospitality kids environments that kids actually want to be a part of. All of those things and more are a part of the attractional movement. It's not flash, it's hospitality. You don't get extra credit for this stuff anymore for clean bathrooms, clean signage, songs that don't sound like they came from 1998. That bar has been is just what we all do. Call it attractional if you like. I just call it normal prevailing church. Listen, follow the data and stop following the hot takes. Don't get sucked in by the hot takes. Big days still work. Easter and Christmas remain the largest attendance Sundays in most churches. In fact we've really seen churches double down on Invite a church, sorry, invite a friend Sundays is now embraced by nearly half or one in five churches. That's up from a decade ago. These Sundays work invitation remains the front door of your church. 80 more than 80% of the people who come to your church for the first time come because a friend invited them. In a recent survey it was found that the biggest channel for people to get connected to your church by a long shot are people inviting your friends. It always has been and I'm convinced it always will. Being growing churches train equip and motivate their people to invite their friends. Research on large fast growing congregations shows a straight line relationship to the faster the growth, the more their people invite that is just true. The stronger their pathways for incorporation. So they're not just inviting, they're moving people to groups, teams, classes, that sort of thing. Attractional momentum plus discipleship together create a powerful connection for churches like yours. And ultimately, ultimately multiplication correlates with evangelism. Churches that are multi site that are church planting churches report higher conversion rates than those of churches that don't do that. More campuses mean more front doors means fresh invite strategy. It's not attractional. It's not just attractional. It's also transformational. It's not just attractional. It's that plus biblical literacy that roots people in the truth of Jesus and his teaching. It's attractional plus gospel centered teaching that changes hearts and launches new lives. It's attractional plus active work of the Holy Spirit providing an accessible encounter with God together. That's what makes prevailing churches both magnetic in the attractional sense and mature. If you check out the blog post the show notes, I've given you a bunch of examples from churches all across the country that are leading what I like to call the new attractional movement. In fact, at that webinar that we've got coming up, the workshop that's coming up on Wednesday, November 12th at 12pm Eastern, 9am for our friends on the Pacific coast at churchgrowthlaunchpad.com we're going to be unpacking the strategy of some of those churches that really help them build an invite culture that lasts. But what actually died? Something did change. Something has changed over the last number of years. Well, what died was that you can run. You used to be able to run a slick weekend and call it discipleship. The vibe era is over and frankly that's Good news. In 2007, Willow Creek are we still allowed to mention them? Are they like, are they still canceled that we can't talk about them? They dropped a study called Reveal, where are you? It was a data driven autopsy of its own ministry model. A part of what bugs me when people say attractional church is dead is this study has been out there since 2007, going on almost two decades ago. And they revealed that you cannot just do slick weekends and call that discipleship. Crowds aren't the same as life change. They didn't scrap weekend experiences. They didn't find that you should get rid of all of those things. What they did was added coaching, personal discipleship, next step systems. They didn't kill attractional church, they deepened it. Now, almost two decades after this study, the lesson still stands. The problem wasn't being attractional, it was being only attractional. The weekend is still the front door for your church, but now the smartest churches obsess equally over what comes next. Attractional did not die, it just grew up. There's a clear pathway that we see time and again in prevailing churches. 1. A warm invite to friends and family. That's where it starts. That's where the impact of your church starts, is by with your invite culture. 2. An excellent weekend that includes clear gospel presentation, real people, real stories, music that engages. 3. Fast follow up people when they're new here. Guests are being followed up within hours. Personal touches within days. Number four Concrete next steps get on a team. Here's how you get into a group. Not a million options. Here are the one or maybe two things that you should do and then five Multiplication Invite others. Launch new campuses. Tell the story and repeat. These are the five Steps we see time and again. But it starts with a robust invite culture. What you're doing is normalizing invitation and then engineer integration. You see, when friends come because someone invites them, they are much more likely to then get plugged in to the church long term because they already have relational connections. Okay, so here are five ways that you can normalize the invitation. How can we do that? Number one, make invitation a year round sport. Don't just do this like a couple times a year. Don't just wait till Christmas, don't just wait till Easter every weekend. We need to be anchoring the year with invite moments and invite encouragement all year long. We need to do this through as many different channels as we possibly can. Again, come to the workshop on November 12th. We'll talk you through how to do that. Number two design for first timers without dumbing it down. Design for first timers without dumbing it down. Like so think about your wayfinding and welcome like walk through your experience. Can you see it as if you are a brand new person? Parking through the doors to kids, check in to seating. Take the mystery out of every single step in your guest's experience. Plan your message assuming that there are people in the room who do not follow Jesus. It only takes a couple extra sentences when you reference hey, this morning we're going to open the book of John and John was a Greco Roman biography written by one of the followers of Jesus based on what he saw and evidence of people around him. Today this is what we're doing is looking at that original text. Show the bridge. Help people understand. Number three, build a two week journey from coming as a new HERE guest all the way through to fully engaged. What would the fastest two week engagement pathway look like for someone? They get a text on day one. Day two they get a personal invite. Maybe from campus pastor, not from a do not reply email, but from someone actually. Day five before the next weekend they're invited to a new HERE meetup after any service. Day 12 we're giving them really easy steps to join a team. Think through this. If someone was going to go through the ideal experience in a short period of time, what would that be? Number four, Tie big weekends to tangible next steps. Baptism scheduled within the next two weeks. Have a recall after this Christmas Alpha starting in the new year. If you find yourself here for the first time and you've got questions about following Jesus, you should join our Alpha course. It's designed for people who are frankly not convinced about what it means to follow Jesus and it's a place for you to bring your questions or group launches after an invite series. Think these things through to tie big weekends to tangible next steps. And then finally, number five, multiply front doors. Think about more services, more locations, more campuses, more venues. How can we create more space to make it easier for people to invite their friends? I know you. I know some people are listening in and you've come this far, which I really appreciate, you coming this far and you're like, no, no, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Young people don't want this. This is just not true. If it's warm, authentic and powerful. Both Gen Z and Millennial are showing up more frequently, frankly, than us old Gen Xers and older. They are looking for this. We want to give them responsibility to serve, to lead, to create, to take this ball and go with them. Or people might say, oh no, no. Attractional churches are shallow. I've had this voiced against me so many times. And listen, that's true. If you stop at the lobby, the fastest growing churches are more, not less obsessed, are more. Listen to me. Not less obsessed with small groups and integration. They're more biblically grounded than churches that are shrinking and in decline. Crowd isn't the end, it's an on ramp. Or they're saying, listen, it's just entertainment. Creativity is hospitality. It lowers defensives, it opens ears. It earns you a hearing of the gospel. That hasn't changed. Sure, our method has contextualized. The people that are coming in are changing and so we should be doing something different. The fruit decisions, baptisms, transformed lives keep showing up where invitation and follow up are tightly coupled. Listen, do not confuse needed reforms with funerals. We've all have a tendency to say that things are over. I said podcasts were done. I said QR codes were a Gimmick. I said YouTube wouldn't work for a long time. And I was wrong on all of those. And let me posit this. If you think that the attractional church is dead, you're wrong on that. Paul counsels to a young outnumbered movement in a pluralistic world was brief. Does that sound like us today? Walk in wisdom towards outsiders, making the most the best use of your time. Wisdom towards outsiders looks like lowering barriers, speaking plainly, making the way to God visible and viable. It's not a fad, it's faithfulness. So please friends, stop saying attractional church is dead. What's dead is laziness. What's dead is gimmicks. What's dead is vibe with no pathway Friends, I want to see you at this workshop on November 12, 12:00pm Eastern 9:00am for our friends on the Pacific Coast. If you are a church between 500 and 1000, I want to see you and your leadership team there. Churchgrowthlaunchpad.com it's designed to help you reignite momentum by rebuilding your church's invite culture. You'll discover five key systems that growing churches use to get unstuck and start reaching people again just in time for Christmas and New Year's. You've already got the people, you've already got the passions, You've already got the programs. This workshop will help you align those you can lift off in this next season and see your church do amazing things. I would love to see you there. Thanks so much. Stop saying attractional Church is dead.