I am presently teaching twice a week, using Philip Yancey’s book “The Jesus I Never Knew” as a starting point. There is so much good material in that book and many years ago it began the long process of deprogramming the Jesus my religious culture gave and set me on a course of discovery.
As I was preparing to teach this week, I came across this quote by Tim Keller:
“Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main our churches today do not have this effect.
The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing.
If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners doesn’t have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.
If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think.”
In “The Jesus I Never Knew” Yancey says something similar:
“In view of Jesus’ clear example, how is it that the church has now become a community of respectability, where the down-and-out no longer feel welcome? The middle-class church many of us know today bears little resemblance to the diverse group of social rejects described in the Gospels and the book of Acts.”
These are wonderful insights, but they remain only that unless we take action. “Attractional” is a buzzword we use when discussing church growth. Ironically, this strategy usually focuses on attracting the attractive.
We generally don’t like this strategy because it smells too much of consumerist pandering, but what if we made our churches more attractional, with one crucial difference: we would seek to attract the undesirables of our town and community.
And if we were actually successful in attracting these people, how would we handle the chaos? The unruly behavior? The smell? The smoke? The talk around town?
How can we be more like Jesus in attracting sinners?
