The following comes from a blog post by Mark Driscoll and is from his book Confessions of a Reformission Rev.: Hard Lessons from an Emerging Missional Church (great read). The contemporary church growth movement and its evangelical seeker churches are attraction-based, meaning that the church functions as a purveyor of religious goods and services. Therefore, the primary task of these churches is to bring people from the culture into the church to partake of programming that targets their felt needs.
Conversely, emerging and missional churches see the church's primary task as sending Christians out of the church and into the culture to serve as missionaries through relationships, rather than bringing lost people into the church to be served by programming. Pastors of emerging and missional churches routinely criticize the attraction-based model as caring only about bringing more people in to grow a bigger church. And pastors of attraction-based churches commonly defend themselves by stating that their churches are larger than most emerging and missional churches, which they say proves that attraction-based churches are more effectively making disciples as Jesus commanded.
The growing criticism between these camps is in large part unnecessary, because they are working for the same goal-the reaching of lost people for Jesus-but simply using different methods, methods that are complimentary, not contradictory. Consequently, churches must both bring people in and send people out and must therefore structure themselves to achieve both objectives. Additionally, we see both attractional and missional ministry methods in the life of Jesus Christ.
Jesus' incarnation is in itself missional. God the Father sent God the Son into culture on a mission to redeem the elect by the power of God the Ghost. After his resurrection, Jesus also sent his disciples into culture, on a mission to proclaim the success of his mission, and commissioned all Christians to likewise be missionaries to the cultures of the world (e.g., Matt. 28:18-20; John 20:21; Acts 1:7-8). Emerging and missional Christians have wonderfully rediscovered the significance of Jesus' incarnational example of being a missionary immersed in a culture.
But sadly, they are also prone to overlook the attractional nature of Jesus' earthly ministry. In addition to immersing himself in a culture for a mission, Jesus' ministry was also marked by the large crowds that were drawn to him because of his preaching and miracles. [. . .]
Therefore, the growing hostility between attractional-ministry pastors with larger churches and missional-ministry pastors with smaller churches need not occur. Instead, each needs to learn from the other; each has a vital piece of the truth gleaned from the life of Jesus. [. . .]
Simply, the goal of a church that is both missional and attractional is to continually follow Jesus' example so that more people are saved for God's mission and more influence is spread for God's kingdom, without rejecting one aspect of Jesus' ministry in favor of another.
