Your church isn't that attractive anyway...
Jared Wilson on how "seeker"churches started out well-intentioned:
"There is something fundamentally wrong with the attractional church paradigm — biblically and therefore theologically — but these days I think there is a very real practical dysfunction in the “fog and lasers” and silly movie tie-ins and all the rest that people discipled within the system don’t even notice (any more). At its beginning, the attractional church (or “seeker church” or whatever you want to call it) was about getting people in the doors to then hear the gospel of Christ’s finished work. It was what we might call “the ol’ bait and switch.” Only, increasingly, the gospel of Christ’s finished work became relegated to the end of a sermon, then the end of a series, then saved just for special occasions, ultimately replaced by the shiny legalism of moralistic therapeutic deism and lost altogether."
Challenging truth. Do we need to be so slick if we never preach the gospel?
Wilson goes on: "And it’s because of this, that so many inside the system, shepherded under this system and joined to it, can’t distinguish between attractive and attractional, practical and pragmatic. When we lose the centrality of the gospel, we lose the ability to think straight."
Read the whole post here. And thinking deeply about how and why you do "church."
"There is something fundamentally wrong with the attractional church paradigm — biblically and therefore theologically — but these days I think there is a very real practical dysfunction in the “fog and lasers” and silly movie tie-ins and all the rest that people discipled within the system don’t even notice (any more). At its beginning, the attractional church (or “seeker church” or whatever you want to call it) was about getting people in the doors to then hear the gospel of Christ’s finished work. It was what we might call “the ol’ bait and switch.” Only, increasingly, the gospel of Christ’s finished work became relegated to the end of a sermon, then the end of a series, then saved just for special occasions, ultimately replaced by the shiny legalism of moralistic therapeutic deism and lost altogether."
Challenging truth. Do we need to be so slick if we never preach the gospel?
Wilson goes on: "And it’s because of this, that so many inside the system, shepherded under this system and joined to it, can’t distinguish between attractive and attractional, practical and pragmatic. When we lose the centrality of the gospel, we lose the ability to think straight."
Read the whole post here. And thinking deeply about how and why you do "church."
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