Contemplate a total surrender of meaningless activities and church busyness.

What would the church look like if we stopped counting people, stopped soliciting new donors, and stopped staffing or funding ministry programs that only serve our members?

Distracted churches come in many varieties: Missionary Church, Maintenance (Survivor) Church, Seeker-Sensitive Church (Weekend Church), Consumer Church, Church Growth Church, and Activist Church. Most churches are a combination of these characteristic types. Critical to understanding distracted churches is being able to definitely describe where your church is and to strategize ways to lead the church to practically demonstrate its first love of connecting people to God.

Missionary church

This type of church is noted for sending a lot of missionaries to foreign countries, raising funds for missionaries, holding missions conferences and, when they are in town, featuring missionaries prominently in worship services. 

Because of rapidly-changing Western culture, however, many churches are experiencing outreach ministries that are as cross-cultural as traditional missions.

Maintenance church

If a pastor expends the most energy emphasizing the need for more workers to begin and sustain church programs, it can easily be interpreted as an organization primarily concerned about providing benefits. Thus, the pastor is the recruiter and members are clubbers.

Reggie McNeal describes such churches as having a "club" mentality. They are churches who have made themselves their purpose. Their priorities include maintaining established programs and practices, in large part because they are established, and keeping people coming to the church in order to maintain the programs. The church building (enlarging and maintaining it) is often a key goal or priority.

This model easily surrenders to legalism and making a "Little Big Horn" stand against the different look and change in the religious landscape. Many Christians who are loyal to this model see their faith and way of "doing" church as the only way. Tolerance of examining one’s faith is seen as compromise of their interpretation of the Bible. Either/or answers are viewed as the right answers. In their view of church behavior, command and control are central issues. Discernment of scriptures always runs consistent with church polity and doctrine. To them it would be reprehensible to question the way the church does things or gets things done. In their eyes, there is no middle ground to those who see their mission in life as preserving the church against the attacks of the world. The huge problem with this mentality is that the church is certainly not a perfect world in itself.

Seeker church

Over the last 10 years especially, the burden of evangelism has shifted church services into a means of promoting the gospel. The seeker model of ministry puts the major focus or emphasis of mission on what happens at a church during its weekend services. The objective for many worship teams is to provide experience via music, ambiance and theatre. In many churches, this model has proven successful in terms of increased attendance and assimilating people in the church service who were previously unchurched. However, one of the dangers of this approach has been a shift of responsibility to the programmatic aspect of the church service and an emphasis on invitational outreach. Less emphasis is placed on each individual follower of Jesus to live a life of discipleship that models the love and care that can attract unchurched people to the gospel. Another danger is the self-imposed pressure to out-perform and out-experience the last worship performance. Sadly, when this occurs, the worship of creating worship happens.

Consumer church

This church becomes a vendor of religious goods and services. People are attracted to the church to be fed and have their needs met. The major emphasis is to "go" or "come" to the church. Programs and ministries are more attractional than incarnational. This explains why the church talks less about spirituality and more about announcements, prayer requests, and the like. It is all about having what people want so they come to the church as a consumer, viewing the church as responsible for their own spiritual and personal growth. They become immature, undiscipled Christians.

Church-growth church

The church-growth movement is a mixture of things good, bad and in-between. In part a by-product of the secularization in America, the movement created obsessions with the exaltation of numbers and of technique. Church leaders have become fascinated with statistics, data and marketing concepts. Like the business world, the church is conscious of its target audience, periods of receptivity, trends, efficiency, quantifiability, productivity and, of course, the greater use of technology. However, sometimes when a church focuses on trying to grow, the larger mission suffers and the church can actually become less attractive.

Activist church

The church can ill afford to shift its message from one of redemption and hope for humanity to a message of political activism alone. Just think how terrible it would be if religious institutions carried labels of "red" and "blue" churches and the membership requirements included a litmus test concerning your political persuasion. Does morality come by changing the laws of the land and prescribed viewpoints? Or is the heart of an individual changed by the presence of Christ one person at a time?

Re-focusing on the first mission

Standing in contrast to these church types, missional churches are focused on the main purpose of the church to connect people to God. They transform the distracted church into a church focused on the vision of God for loving humanity as Christ did. It takes a lot of discipline and creativity to stop doing what distracts you from seeing with God’s missional eyes.

Have you identified the distraction you see in your church?

Excerpted with permission from "Finding the Missional Path," (Xulon, 2007) by Barry Winders, a missional coach for Ministry Indicators.