the faithful preacher’s fight manifests in the temptation to add a dash of the sensational in his presentation of the gospel. To compromise his commitment to proclaiming Christ crucified by making it more fashionable. To jettison his engagement with the Infinite by settling on entertaining and enticing his congregants.

In The Gospel-Driven Church, and its predecessor, The Prodigal Church, Jared C. Wilson spends considerable time examining what he calls the “attractional church.” This moniker, Wilson argues, is more articulate than its other derivatives, for instance, the “emergent church” or the “seeker-sensitive church.” Identifying a particular church body as “attractional” brings a certain plight to the fore, namely, the matter of to what the church (and its leaders) are actually winning their churchgoers. “What you win people with is what you win them to,” Wilson affirms. “The best motives in the world cannot sanctify unbiblical methods.”1 With that, Wilson presses into dismantling the latent pragmatism within attractional churches that jeopardizes and impedes the message of grace.

There is a sense in which the rift between the “attractional” and “traditional” church models is, indeed, a contemporary conundrum. The torrid acceptance and ubiquity of social media coupled with the pervasive use of commercial jargon and metrics within the ecclesiastical setting has certainly aggravated the tension between what ought and ought not constitute the “true church.” But we are fooling ourselves if we think the schism between ecclesiological models is somehow a uniquely modern dilemma. In fact, in the 1912 work, The Preacher: His Life and Work, pastor and lecturer John Henry Jowett relays a bevy of incisive remarks against the notion of sensationalizing the church’s message. His words could be lifted from their historical milieu and inserted into a modern polemic without missing a beat. Jowett declares:

We are told that there is a tragic lapse of interest in the Church.

Real quick, doesn’t that sound like the modern revelation of “religious nones”? At times I think we sensationalize our times as if we are living in the most crucial moment in the history of Christianity — as if the establishment of the kingdom is riding on our shoulders. Thus, the influx of “religious nones” corroborate the notion that folks are leaving the church in droves, indicative of the church’s past failures and future uncertainties. This observation from a churchman in the early 1900s affirms something altogether different than what we would expect, namely, there have always been departures from the church. The mission and mandate of the church, therefore, is not to compromise its message or pander to its deserters in order to “win” them to Jesus Christ. Rather, the mission and mandate of the church (and its pastors) is to fervently and faithfully preach the glorious mystery of the cross. (1 Tim. 3:14–16) Yes, notwithstanding how that message is perceived. “The church,” writes Wilson, “is not called to be successful by attaining certain numbers or meeting a preset standard of growth, but we are called to be faithful.”² Okay, back to Jowett:

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