The Attraction Fallacy

There is a conversation that happens in churches across the country, and it usually happens in a deacon’s meeting, a leadership team huddle, or a quiet phone call between a pastor and a friend. It goes something like this: “We need to grow. We need families. We need young people. And we cannot attract them because we do not have the programs. And we cannot run the programs because we do not have the people. And the people we do have are tired, but we need to grow. We need families…”

That is the loop. I want to name it clearly so you can see it for what it is. I call it the Attraction Fallacy (I’m sure someone smarter than me already has another name for it), because the premise itself is broken. The premise says that growth comes from programs and programs come from capacity, so a church without capacity cannot grow. It sounds reasonable. It is also, quietly, a theological problem.

Before I say anything else, hear me. If you are leading a church that is caught in this loop, whether you are the pastor, a deacon, an elder, a trustee, or a layperson holding things together while the pulpit sits empty, I am not writing to add weight to your shoulders. You are already carrying plenty. But I do want to offer a different way of seeing, because this way of seeing is what keeps the loop spinning.

Hear This: The loop is real. The diagnosis is wrong.

The exhaustion is real. The thin volunteer rosters are real. The pastor who is preaching, counseling, visiting, administrating, and mowing the church lawn on Saturday is real. I have met that pastor. I have had breakfast with that pastor. I have prayed with the lay leader who is teaching a Sunday school class, running the sound board, and chairing the finance committee, all in the same morning. None of that is imagined.

But here is where the diagnosis goes sideways. The loop assumes that if we just had the programs, people would come, and then we would have the workers to run more programs, and the whole thing would start turning in the right direction. That assumption has rarely been tested honestly against the evidence of the last thirty years of North American church life. Many churches in this loop have tried programs. They have tried the new curriculum, the revamped children’s ministry, the outreach event, and the banner on the corner. And when the program did not deliver the promised growth, the takeaway was usually not that the strategy was wrong. The takeaway was that they needed a better program, or more volunteers, or more money. The loop stayed intact, and the exhaustion deepened.

The Attraction Fallacy loop is not a capacity problem at all; it is a formation problem wearing a capacity costume.

Luke 10 and the widow’s mite are not accidents.

When Jesus sends out the seventy-two in Luke 10, He does not send them with a program. He sends them with almost nothing. No purse, no bag, no sandals. Greet no one on the road. Go into houses. Speak peace. Heal the sick. Announce that the Kingdom has come near. There is no strategic plan here in the way we mean strategic plans. There are people sent by the authority of Christ, on mission, expecting God to work through their availability rather than their abundance.

This matters because it reframes the capacity argument. Jesus did not wait until His disciples had enough resources. He sent them with what they had, which was almost nothing, and what He had given them, which was His authority and His presence. The fruit of that sending trip was not a bigger program. It was Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit that the Father had revealed His kingdom to the lowly, not the well-resourced.

Then there is the widow in Luke 21. She puts in two small copper coins, and Jesus tells His disciples that she has put in more than all the wealthy givers combined. He is not making a cute devotional point. He is teaching the disciples how the Kingdom measures faithfulness. The widow did not wait until she had enough to matter. She gave what she had, and the Lord Himself called it greater.

The lesson here is not that small churches should stay small. The lesson is that the Kingdom does not operate on capacity logic. It operates on faithfulness logic. What you have, offered to Christ, is enough for Him to work with.

A careful reading of both passages, holding the text for what it actually says rather than forcing it to say what we wish it said, leads to the same conclusion. The church in the Attraction Fallacy loop is often a church that has stopped believing Luke 10 and Luke 21 apply to it. It has quietly adopted the belief that the Kingdom requires a minimum program threshold before God will bless it. That belief is not biblical. It is cultural, and it is crushing.

Programs are not the engine. Formation is.

A growing church, biblically speaking, is not primarily a programmed church. It is a formed church. People who have been formed by the Word, by prayer, by the ordinances, by one another, and by mission become people who carry the gospel into their lives without needing a program to do it for them. Programs can serve as a form of formation, but they are not a substitute for it. When a church runs out of capacity for programs but has never done the deeper work of forming disciples who live on mission in their ordinary lives, the programs were never going to save it anyway. They were going to delay the reckoning.

This is the part that bites, so hear it pastorally. If your church cannot run the programs it thinks it needs, the honest question is not how to find more volunteers. The honest question is whether the programs would actually produce disciples if you had them. Most of us, if we are truthful, have to admit that a lot of church programming has produced attenders rather than disciples, and attenders do not sustain a church. Disciples do.

How to activate this on Monday morning.

If you lead in a church caught in the Attraction Fallacy, here is where you can actually start this week. These are not theoretical. They are designed for a pastor or lay leader who will take 90 minutes to think, and for a small group of people willing to think with them.

First, stop starting new things. For the next ninety days, do not launch anything. No new program, no new campaign, no new initiative. This is not passivity. It is a disciplined pause that creates space for honest evaluation. Most struggling churches do not have a starting problem. They have a stopping problem. Give your people a season to breathe.

Second, name what is actually producing fruit. Gather three or four trusted leaders around a table, and ask one question. Where in our church life are people actually growing as followers of Jesus? Not where is attendance stable. Where is there visible formation? That is your seed. Protect it.

Third, subtract before you add. For every activity on your calendar, ask whether it is forming disciples, caring for saints, or reaching the lost in a way that is an onramp for relational disciple making, not merely sending resources (canned goods, clothes, toothbrushes) to a bunch of third-party organizations to make yourself feel better and calling it reaching the lost. If it is not doing one of those three, it is overhead. Many churches need to end programs with dignity, thanking the faithful saints who served them, so that the remaining energy can be invested where the Spirit is actually moving.

Fourth, teach Luke 10 and Luke 21 to your leadership team. Do not preach at them. Study together. Let the text do the work. Ask what it means that Jesus sent the seventy-two with nothing and still expected fruit. Ask what it means that the widow’s two coins were counted as greater than the wealthy givers’ abundance. Let your leaders wrestle with the text before you ask them to wrestle with strategy.

Fifth, identify three relationships, not three programs. Ask every leader on your team to name three people in their actual life, neighbors, coworkers, family members, who are not walking with Christ. Pray for those fifteen or twenty people by name for ninety days. This is the oldest church growth strategy in the book, and it does not require volunteers you do not have.

Obstacles and honest alternatives.

Someone reading this is already pushing back, and rightly so. Let me name a few obstacles and offer alternatives.

You may be thinking that without programs, families will not consider your church. That is a real concern. The alternative is not no programs ever. The alternative is programs that flow out of formation rather than programs that substitute for it. A church of fifty formed disciples will produce more authentic ministry than a church of one hundred fifty program consumers, and it will do so sustainably.

You may be thinking that your community expects a certain level of programming, and without it, you will be overlooked. That may be true in some communities. But the churches that are actually growing in hard places right now are rarely the ones with the most programming. They are the ones with the most credible witness, because their people love their neighbors, care for the hurting, and speak openly about Jesus in their daily lives (and I don’t mean they simply drop a tract on the table that looks like a $100 bill with a $3 tip inside and call it evangelism). Formation produces witness. Programs alone rarely do.

You may be thinking that your church is too small or too old to do what I am describing. Read Luke 21 again. The widow was not too small. She was precisely the kind of person Jesus used to teach His disciples what the Kingdom actually values. Your smallness is not your disqualification. It may be your calling card.

You may be in a church without a pastor right now, and everything I have written may feel like more weight when you are already holding the pulpit supply calendar, the committee rosters, and the bills. Hear this carefully. The absence of a pastor is not the absence of Christ. The Head of the Church is still present, still at work, still able to form disciples through His Word and His Spirit. A pastor-less season is not a season to survive. It is a season to be formed.

Recap: the loop is not the verdict.

The Attraction Fallacy tells you that your church cannot grow because you lack the programs and the personnel to run them. The gospel tells you something different. The gospel says that the Kingdom has never run on capacity. It has always run on availability, walking by faith into the season God has for you to be a conduit of His goodness and mercy to a watching world by delivering, in word and deed, the transformative power of the gospel to the world in which you currently exist.

Jesus sent seventy-two with nothing and brought back a report of joy. A widow gave two coins and was commended above the wealthy. Your church, with whatever you have left, is not too little for the Lord to use. But it may be too busy with the wrong things to notice what He is already doing. The way out of the loop is not a better program. It is a return to formation.

Quick Start: five questions for your leadership team.

1. Where are we actually seeing formation in our people right now, and how do we protect it?
2. What are we doing out of tradition, guilt, or habit that is no longer producing disciples, and are we willing to end it with dignity?
3. If we took the next ninety days to start nothing new, what might we discover about what God is already doing in our midst?
4. Have we quietly adopted the belief that we need a certain capacity before God will bless us, and what Scripture would correct that belief?
5. Who are the three people each of us is praying for by name, and how are we building those relationships in the ordinary rhythms of our week?

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This article was originally published on The Strategic Outsider, the Substack of Chris Reinolds, Mission Strategist for the Northeast Florida Baptist Family of Churches.