CNLP 762 | The Church Model That's Dead: Attractional Church and 3 Shifts Every Leader Must Know
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
Carey Nieuwhof
4.8 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 23 October 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Carey explores why the attractional church model no longer works, what's replacing it, the three shifts that made it ineffective, and what you and your church can do now to reach more people.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Art of Leadership Network. |
| 0:03.1 | Driving motorcycles on stages, sleeping on the church roof with your wife to promote a series on sex, |
| 0:09.5 | or raffling off cars or flat screen TVs at Easter. |
| 0:13.1 | Yeah, maybe that was a little bit much, okay? |
| 0:19.4 | Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. |
| 0:22.0 | Well, if you follow Church World carefully, you know that something is changing in the church. |
| 0:27.4 | And so what I want to do is I want to kick off this episode with a question. |
| 0:30.9 | Why isn't the Attractional Church approach working the way it used to anymore? |
| 0:36.1 | I mean, for a decade, right? Attractional Church |
| 0:39.6 | was how we did it. It's like we got to go out and reach the culture, use the culture to reach |
| 0:43.2 | the culture. And there have been some major shifts in ministry really over the last five years. |
| 0:48.0 | And in this episode, I want to share why one of the most significant changes is happening. |
| 0:55.3 | And that is simply this, why Attractional Church really doesn't connect, why it doesn't work with people anymore. I posted a |
| 1:01.3 | video on this to YouTube a few months ago. It generated such a big response. I wanted to go deeper |
| 1:06.9 | on it here in the podcast. So in this episode, I'm going to show you why Attractional Church |
| 1:11.7 | actually worked really well for a season, why a lot of the approach is kind of outdated right now. |
| 1:17.2 | And finally, I'll share with you perhaps how you should be approaching church instead. |
| 1:23.2 | Today's episode is brought to you by Spiritual Gifts Plus. So if you're like most pastors I talk to, |
| 1:28.8 | you're struggling to find volunteers and you're probably struggling even more to keep them. |
| 1:33.0 | Well, what if I told you one simple change this year could double your volunteer retention |
| 1:38.4 | and boost church volunteer satisfaction by 80%? You want to know what it is, right? |
| 1:43.5 | Well, here it is. Stop pitching |
... |
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