Note: The following is adapted from my notes from our last Sunday Evening Service when we introduced a new series: "Gen-X Ecclesiology." The goal of the series is to look at some of the major movements in the American Evangelical church over the past 50 years. The first night, we talked about the rise of the "attractional model," or the "seeker-sensitive movement" and how part of the outgrowth of that movement was the megachurch.
These notes haven't been sufficiently edited but I thought it was better to put out something "okay" than "nothing at all."
As we think about the attractional model, the most prominent spokesperson of that model remains Rick Warren. Over the years, people have asked me about my opinion of Rick Warren and I've tried to be fair. I believe he's a brother in Christ but seriously mistaken in some areas. I think one example shows not only why I have concerns about his ministry but is a great example of one of the primary problems with the attractional model.
Last year, as Warren argued against the expulsion of his church from the SBC because of their position on female pastors, he pointed to his accomplishments as evidence of the "rightness" of his position. He mentioned that he had baptized 56,631 new believers and sent nearly 27,000 missionaries overseas. He also noted that he had trained 1.1 million pastors, more than all the SBC seminaries put together.
None of those statistics have anything to do with whether or not there is biblical justification for women pastors. To be fair, he later attempted to address the biblical arguments for women pastors, but his first instinct was an appeal to pragmatics: this must be right because of the good things that are being accomplished by our church.
The History of the Seeker-Sensitive Church and the Rise of the Megachurch
There are three terms that are related but not identical. The attractional model refers to a philosophy of how to do church. The seeker-sensitive movement is an example of that attractional model that really took off in the 1970s and 80s. The megachurch was the fruit of these church philosophies.
There have been large churches before the seeker-sensitive movement. For example, some point to Charles Spurgeon as an early example of an evangelical megachurch. Spurgeon became pastor of a church in 1853 and in 1861 oversaw the constructing of the The Metropolitan Tabernacle, which could allow 6,000 to hear the Word preached. The building housed a SS, preacher's college, conferences, orphanage, poor house.
Institutional Church Movement of the 19th and 20th Century, according to David Eagle in "Historicizing the Megachurch," was an early precursor to the megachurches of today. The movement saw the need for a church to not just be in use on a Sunday morning but throughout the week. And so you had these larger buildings that could house other events during the week like debates or theatre productions or social programs.
The attractional model in its contemporary sense appeared as a part of what we call the seeker-sensitive movement in the 70s and 80s. And as religious historians talk about the megachurch and seeker sensitive movement, they understandably sometimes conflate them and use the terms interchangeably.
In 1975, Bill Hybels started Willow Creek in Palentine, Illinois. Five years later, on Easter Sunday, Rick Warren moved a bible study from the living room of his condo to a local high school gymnasium and Saddleback was born. Before launching the church, he surveyed his neighborhood in Orange County, California in Saddleback Valley and asked people why they didn't come to church. People responded that they didn't find services interesting or they were turned off by all the requests for money.
The argument made by Hybels and Warren went like this: Seekers don't find Christianity appealing because they don't think the Bible is relevant. Therefore, changes to the church service should be made to attract unbelievers, in areas such as music, creative packaging, and the preaching.
Eagle writes:
The megachurch burst into the American consciousness in the 1980s. Megachurches differed from their predecessors by offering their participants a single organization to meet their spiritual, emotional, educational, and recreational needs. In 1989, the vanguard of the megachurch movement, 37 year-old Bill Hybels, said, "We're on the verge of making kingdom history . . . doing things a new way for a whole new generation." A 33 year-old Rick Warren, pastor of the then 5,000 member (now 20,000+ member) Saddleback Community Church echoed similar sentiments:
There's a trend all across America moving away from the small neighborhood churches to larger regional-type churches. It's the same phenomenon with malls replacing the mom and pop stores on the corner. People will drive past all kinds of little shopping centers to go to a major mall, where there are lots of of services and where they meet their needs. The same is true in churches today in that people drive past dozens of little churches to go to a larger church which offers more services and special programs. . . [we'll come back to this]
Writing in Christianity Today, Lyle Schaller, a prominent evangelical spokesman for the megachurch movement, proclaimed, "The emergence of the 'mega-church' is the most important development of modern Christian history. You can be sentimental about the small congregation, like the small corner grocery store or small drugstore, but they simply can't meet the expectations that people carry with them today." This echoes the well-known marketing consultant Peter Drucker's claim that megachurches "are surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years."
Several historians agree that megachurches lack precedent. Take Patrick Allitt. He sees them as an innovation of post-WWII America. "America's new megachurches," he argues ". . . were designed to provide an entire way of life, including schools, gymnasiums, dining halls, study groups settings, therapy sessions, aerobics classes, bowling alleys, and sometimes even Christian-themed shopping." "Megachurch," Martin Marty says simply, "is . . . an invention of the Age of Greed."
As more and more churches adopted the seeker-sensitive movement paradigm, you had more megachurches.
In 2015, if you had a church of over 1,000, you were in the top 1 percent of Protestant congregations. A megachurch is usually over 1,500 or 2,000 depending on what source you're using. Again, Eagle writes:
They [Thumma and Travis] estimate that in 1970, 50 churches with an attendance of more than 1,500 people existed in the United States but by 2005, that number had grown to more than 1,200. [Latest numbers from Hartford: 1,642 megachurches. 810 in the south, 405 in the west, 309 in the Midwest, 118 in the northeast. California has the most megachurches.] In Thumma and Travis's words, "while megachurches are not an entirely new phenomenon . . . the rapid proliferation of these churches since the 1970s . . . is a distinctive social phenomenon."
That change obviously drastically affected how people viewed what "church" is. The megachurch produced multi-site and multiple services during this time. While multiservice churches existed prior to the 1970s, this is when they started becoming commonplace. By 2016, about 1/3 of churches offered multiple services. Jonathan Leeman in One Assembly notes that "in 1990 ten churches nationwide were multisite; in 2019 over five thousand were . . . There are as many megachurches today in the greater Nashville area as there were in the entire country in 1960."
Philosophy of the Attraction Model
As Jared Wilson observes in his book The Gospel-Driven Church, though the phrase "seeker-sensitive church" is waning, the underlying philosophy remains enduring. Wilson uses the phrase "attractional church" in his book: "I (and many others) use the term attractional to refer to a way of doing church ministry whose primary purpose is to make Christianity appealing." There are three things the attractional model is built on that Wilson focuses on: consumerism, pragmatism, and legalism.
1. Consumerism
"In considering its reach, the attractional church is essentially asking: Who is our customer? What does our customer want?"
"An attractional church conducts worship and ministry according to the desires and values of potential consumers. This typically leads to the dominant ethos of pragmatism throughout the church. If a church determines its target audience prefers old-fashioned music, then that's what they feature in order to attract those people."
David Wells addressing the consumerism in evangelicalism in his article, "The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church." He says that what shapes what we do as a church - what ministries to offer, what to do on a Sunday morning, is:
. . . a marketing ethos. In one sense, this should not be surprising at all. Americans are nothing if not consumers, consumers of images, of relationships, and of things . . . We have 7% of the world's population but we consume 33% of the goods and services . . . Our whole society has been transformed into a consumer's heaven and we are nothing if not a nation of buyers, thoroughly at home in, and thoroughly a part of, the life of commerce. We move in and out of it much like fish do through water. It is in this commerce that we live and move and have our being. So the Church's willingness to adapt to the marketing model for thinking about itself really is not remarkable.
It is not that theological beliefs are denied, but that they have little cash value. They don't matter. I likened the situation to that of a child who is in a home but who is ignored. It is not that the child has been abducted; the child is there. The child is in the home, but has no legitimate place in the family. And, again, research which I have had conducted strongly points to the fact that where this kind of theological character is crumbling, there the centrality of God is disappearing . . . In the broader culture we learn that 91% of people say that God is very important to them but 66% go on to say that they do not believe in moral absolute truth. "
There are two implications of the consumerism of the attractional church model: First, the primary purpose of the Sunday morning is evangelistic not discipleship. Second, members of a church are consumers not disciples. We'll come back to this, but even in a church that would reject the attraction model, consumerism still creeps in.
2. Pragmatism
It isn't wrong to be practical. "But," says Wilson, "when we assume certain tangible or visible results from our application and obedience, we have turned from practicality to pragmatism."
There are several implications of the pragmatism of the attractional church model: First, the primary question shaping ministry is not "what is biblical?" but "what works?" Second, it becomes important to produce an experience. Third, preaching moves from discipleship of believers to meeting felt needs of unbelievers. Fourth, deep theological teaching vanishing from the church. Finally, the structure of the church changes without careful thought. The church becomes faced with questions like: Should we do small groups? Multiple services? Go multi-site? Increase paid staff? And we base our answers based on whether or not we think those ministries will "work," not whether or not they're biblical. It may not be wrong, for instance, to increase the number of paid staff, but the reason we do so can't simply be that we think it will draw more people.
3. Legalism
Wilson makes an interesting point about legalism and the attractional model:
We've moved from holiness to legalism. The great irony in this is that the most attractional churches pride themselves on not being legalistic. For some pastors, the reason for adopting an an attractional approach to ministry was to reject the legalism of their upbringing. The generation that gave us the church-growth movement was, in large part, reacting to the negative fundamentalism that dominated American church for many years. This "traditional" way of doing church was characterized by an unhealthy focus on prohibitions, which came at the expense of the gospel of grace."
When the gospel is peripheral, occasional, or incidental to our mission and our preaching, we cannot trust that the gospel is truly drawing and shaping those who respond. Pragmatic methodology is legalistic because legalism is what happens when you disconnect the Christian's "do" from Christ's "done" in the gospel."
There are two implications of the legalism of the attractional church model: First, the metrics for success become man-made. Second, those who chose a methodology that potentially attracts fewer consumers are viewed as doing something morally wrong.
Evaluative Thoughts
There are some strengths that have come from the Seeker-Sensitive Movement and Megachurches. These churches have traditionally been conservative on social issues. The movement helped churches reject the negative aspects of fundamentalism, characterized by a fear of culture and shutting oneself off from the world. The movement also helped the church engage in caring for the physical needs of people in our community, a hallmark of faithfully biblical churches. Finally, it helped the church be willing to change some aspects of the church that were extra-biblical and an unnecessary obstacle to unbelievers.
Unfortunately, there are significant weaknesses. First, the attractional model altered our concept of what the church is, something we still haven't fully grappled with. Is church an assembly of brothers and sisters coming together to sing, read, preach, pray and see the Word? Or is worship like a concert I attend where I expect to be inspired?
Second, we individualized the worship of the church . . . no longer corporate. It's a place we go to get experiences. Third, it created an environment in which bad shepherds thrive. The main preacher becomes the "brand" of the church and there is an instinctive desire to protect him. Fourth, it minimized the importance of doctrine.
Finally, the attractional model failed to achieve the goals of the attractional church model. Numerous studies bear this out. For instance, according to a survey of megachurches conducted by the Hartford Institute:
* 68% of attendees have been there less than five years, compared to 40% of non-megachurch attendees. But that doesn't mean there are more unbelievers because only 2% of attendees at megachurches said they were not a committed follower of Jesus Christ before they began attending the church. Furthermore, only 6% of attendees said they had never attended services prior to coming to the current megachurch.
I'm grateful for how God used even methodologies I strongly disagree with to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Clearly he has used the attractional model. But a far better model is to first look at what God's word says that the church is to be and do. For me as a pastor, Paul's words are clear. My task, even if difficult at times, is thankfully simple:
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. As for you, always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry (1 Tim. 4:1-5).
- Pastor Daniel
