Attractional Methods of Evangelism Part 1

I often tell people it used to be that one could start a church just by going to a place and making an announcement to the good people of a community that a church will be starting in two weeks and two hundred people would show up on the first Sunday. This was during a time when there were fewer churches, Christianity still enjoyed home court advantage, and persons had a greater denominational loyalty.

Then the world began to change and that method did not work any longer so we started to say to people "we're here now, y'all come!" We did this through attractional evangelism methods: newspaper ads, radio ads, postcard mailers, knocking on doors etc. And while there is still a place for attractional methods, there is a sense that this method is working less and less these days because people's lives are so cluttered, the church enjoys less and less of a home court advantage, and the church is just one part of life competing against people's other parts of life. It used to be church and school were the only things people had and we are of course so much more mobile now and information is shared at the speed of light there are many options for persons to experience community, belonging, and fulfillment apart from the church as short lived as such things are apart from Jesus Christ.

Now, a new form of doing evangelism is emerging that is more out in the field so to speak whereby we do not ask people to go to church we take church to them. The big fancy word for this is incarnational evangelism. I will do a series of posts on incranational evangelism in the future. This week I want to write about attractional evangelism which still has a place I believe.

I think we get the biblical basis for attractional evangelism from the Great Commission whereby Jesus told us to go and make disciples. To make disciples it is usually the case you must first introduce the message of Christ. One way to do that is to invite them to worship where Christ is introduced to people and worshipped. Jesus called this "fishing for people" when he called his first disciples.

Some people object to attractional evangelism because it is seen as advertising and that in their minds is ungodly and taps into the rampant consumerism so present in the culture. While I understand this objection I think that we have to use whatever means possible within the bounds of the Gospel to introduce people to Christ because this is a life or death issue.

In the coming days I hope to write about how we need to try many different methods to see what works in our mission field, the times when people are most open to attractional methods of evangelism, how attractional evangelism helps create a culture of invitation in the church and then share some ideas. Stay tuned.