During the latter part of the last century, many churches fell in love with church growth methodologies. The church growth movement adopted the organizational and marketing ideas used by businesses in post-World War II America. These included designing events based on the demographics of your community, providing comfortable meeting facilities, making certain that everything the church offered was polished, and evaluating customer experience to make church ministries more attractive. There were some positive aspects of this approach, but it fostered a “if we build it, they will come” mentality. This was an attractional approach. If this approach could be coupled with a discipleship process that connected people with the church and help them grow in their faith, a strong and vibrant church might develop. Unfortunately, the second part of the attractional concept did not happen in most cases. As Darrell Guder observes, “Ch...
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