Well, if you’re Tim Stevens, executive pastor at Grainger Community Church, you rejoice that there must be those in that group that are new believers or unbelievers.
When I first saw the stats of Grainger’s Reveal survey on Tim’s blog post it kind of threw me. Grainger is well-known for being a relevant church at the forefront of cutting edge stuff. They must be baptizing and discipling tons of people. Well, I’m sure they are, but in a church of 5,000 people on any given Sunday to know that they are attracting a lot of people to explore their faith is pretty great.
It just shows that different methods are being used to reach people and that God will be glorified through it all. People come to know Christ in different ways and their paths to the truth come about in various stages. One can’t expect that someone that wants to know the Lord personally may automatically believe the Bible to be fully true and without error or contradiction. For me though, I believe that engaging people in a missional environment where they have the chance to see lives changed through the power of the Holy Spirit will lead people to want to believe passionately that the Bible is relevant and truthful as they see things unfold in front of their eyes that mirror things they read in the gospel.
Whether missional or attractional, churches will still struggle with balancing what to do for both the believer and non-believer and it is open dialog such as what Tim Stevens is doing that will help us all obtain the goal of one day seeing the kingdom of heaven on earth.
Related posts:
- We may only get one chance
- Do you know missional? Would you like to?
- Asian church vs. multi-cultural church, part 1
- How to rate the success of a missional church?
- Church Envy…Is it Godly?
Tags: attractional church, Bible, missional church, tim stevens
