We all like shiny things. And we are all highly suggestible. If this were not true, companies would not continue paying millions of dollars year after year to advertise for us. For some, showing a slick new product in an athlete's capable hands is enough to get them to sign up for the product. Me? Put a monkey in your commercial, and I'm sold. I'm pretty easy that way.
At some point in evangelicalism's sordid history, the purveyors of ministry caught on to these infallible truths about human nature – we are easily convinced by appealing enticements – and Voila! Thus began church marketing.
Those of us more cynical may call it a religious bait and switch, but some enterprising revivalist soul figured out you can attract more flies with honey than vinegar and the machine designed for enticing conversions switched on. When I was a teenager, in the heyday of student ministry culture, the staples of enticement ministry were pizza, concerts, and athlete testimonies. I don't know exactly what they are these days, but I suspect pizza and music still reign supreme with perhaps video games replacing athletes.
Enticement ministry goes hand in hand with the attractional mode of worship, because the idea is to get as many people through the doors of the church as possible. The motive behind this is pure – we want people to hear about Jesus.
The results, however, and the means devised to achieve them, are not so pure. Aside from the fact that the data shows that as megachurches increase, the number of Christians in America as decreased, the practical result of the attractional church's reliance on enticement ministry is that Jesus becomes less important than the enticement. Jesus is suddenly the timeshare you try to sell somebody after you've lured them to Florida with the promise of sunshine and pina coladas. All of a sudden, Jesus is Amway. He's a pill hidden in a chocolate. Or something.
Bait. And. Switch. I have another phrase for this approach. I call it The Trojan Horse Gospel. Or, to be nicer, The Implied Gospel. I am now at the final contrast highlighted in the following chart elucidating the differences between the Attractional and Missional churches, and we have now reached the bottom line. The attractional paradigm relies on an implied gospel, a gospel that is implicit in whatever else the church is doing or that is the destination of whatever path the church's programs and preaching are taking.
Tim Keller says the gospel is not the ABC's of the Christian life, it is the A-Z, and when we set up our church's programs and preaching to promote steps, tips, behaviors, and inspirations, with the gospel as the afterthought and not the main and pervasive point, we deny this valuable truth.
I have touched on this crucial divide in a previous piece on "the gospel imperative," so I don't wish to be redundant, but the gospel is of first importance and cannot be stated often enough.
This week I read a blog post by the pastor of an attractional church that recently completed a three-week series on the gospel. They saw many "decisions" made, and his conclusion was that "the gospel works." Indeed it does. And I commend him for acknowledging and promoting this. Yet it belies the curious fact that "the gospel" was a special series for this church, something they got around to eventually. They worked up to it. They reserved it for a special occasion. Shouldn't every series' major thrust be the gospel, even if the ostensible topic is something like relationships or whatever else?
There is a danger of taking the attractional aversion too far. There is nothing wrong with being attractive. Certainly there's nothing wrong with a church exhibiting quality in everything they do, from music to facilities to anything else. But the gospel is never implied in the preaching of the apostles' in Scripture, and neither should it be implied in the teaching of the Church.
Instead, the missional church – or at least, the stream of it my community swims in – puts the gospel at the forefront of its teaching and ministry. The gospel is explicit. It is in the advertising. It is in the air. And no matter what we're doing – be it eating the Lord's Supper together or feeding the hungry together – the gospel of the grace of God in Jesus Christ for sinners is the acknowledged and proclaimed reason.
The comfort and enticement of the unchurched is not our reason for being. The glory of God and the good of the gospel is. And the brutal truth is that the intentional glory of God and the unflinching presentation of the gospel is frequently uncomfortable for the unchurched. Heck, it is frequently uncomfortable for the churched!
But it is not man we are trying to please, but God. The slippery slope way too many attractional churches slide down, raffle ticket for a free Wii in hand, is the courtship of man's approval. The gradual, implicit gospel reveals two staggering truths:
a) We distrust the unabashed message of the gospel to do its work, denying that "the gospel is the power of salvation to all who believe." b) We believe Jesus and the good news are dissatisfying.
Enter enticements.
Jared Wilson is the pastor and co-founder of Element, a missional Christian community in
Nashville, Tennessee, and an award-winning writer whose articles, essays, and
short stories have appeared in numerous publications.
Jared's first book, The Unvarnished Jesus, releases Fall 2009 from Kregel.
A graduate of Middle Tennessee State University, he lives outside
Nashville with his wife and two daughters.
Encounter Jared's passion for the ongoing reformation of the evangelical church
almost daily at www.gospeldrivenchurch.com.
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