Church Planting tidbits

I love all the chatter in the blog world about missional churches and attractional churches.  A good healthy debate is always fun.  My opinion is it takes both to reach different types of people.  But what would happen if a missional church and an attractional church came together and started having kids (planting churches).  I had a conversation with Ron Klabunde a couple of weeks ago that birthed this idea.

1.  Small groups would become house churches.  Small groups would become more than just home group bible studies.  They would evolve into missional communities.  These missional communities would live the Christian life together and would focus spreading the gospel of Christ by serving their neighbors and living their faith out loud where they live.  Missional church gatherings would be the core experience of the church rather than large group corporate worship on Sundays.

2.  There would still be large group worship on Sundays.  The attractional DNA would kick in to recognize that the best way to engage non-Christians is through the Sunday morning worship experience.  This large group gathering would be a non-threatening place to bring your friends to church.  After all its a bit awkward to invite your non-Christian friends to your home church.  Seems a little cultish to culture at large.  Those who called the church home would come to serve on Sunday.  The target audience of the Sunday corporate gathering would be pre-Christians and those not yet connected to a missional community.  Thus as the church grows, it is completely feasible to be a church of 2000 connected in missional communities with only 200-300 in attendance at weekend services.  It would also be likely that once a month or so the entire church would gather for a large corporate gathering of all the believers where the focus of the service was on Christians.

3.  Less building and staff would be needed to run this church, thus allowing the church to unleash more people and money on serving community needs, planting more churches and worldwide missions.

I walked away from this conversation thinking that maybe missional and attractional churches should stop debate each other and start birthing churches together.  I could get really excited about that.  How about you?