Stop Making Church More Like the World. Build this instead…

Written By Joel McMaster

For the last sixty years, a significant thread of Western church strategy has been built on a single premise: if we lower the cultural barriers to Christianity, more people will become Christians.

The logic runs something like this. People are used to excellence. They go to Westfield and find a clean car park, professional presentation and a seamless consumer experience. If they turn up to church and find the opposite, they'll leave. So make it excellent. Make it accessible. Make it feel like the world they already inhabit, just with better values and a gospel message at the end.

This is the attractional church model. And it has shaped an enormous amount of what churches in Sydney — and across the Western world — have been doing since the 1970s.

Where the Attractional Model Came From

The foundation of the attractional church model is the homogeneous unit principle, developed by Donald McGavran and popularised through the church growth movement of the 1970s and beyond. McGavran's observation was simple and sociologically plausible: people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers. If you want to reach people, meet them where they are. Minimise the cultural distance between the church and the world.

Willow Creek was built on this foundation. The seeker-sensitive service, the professional music, the clean car park, the carefully designed experience for people who had never been to church. All of it was an attempt to remove the cultural friction between the unchurched and the gospel.

There's something genuinely thoughtful in that impulse. Contextualisation is a real missionary discipline. Meeting people where they are is part of what it means to communicate well. Nobody argues for making church deliberately ugly or inaccessible.

But scholars like Skip Bell and Karina Koremsky have raised serious questions about whether the HUP and the attractional model have actually served the church well. Bell asks whether the model is truly fostering costly discipleship, believers carrying their crosses as missionaries in their communities, or whether it risks diluting the gospel by orienting the church around consumer preferences. Koremsky argues that the HUP borrowed uncritically from behavioural psychology and marketing, making churches more pragmatic, more consumeristic and more hedonistic in the process.

The worry is that churches have adopted the attractional model so thoroughly and so uncritically that it has become the default assumption of church posture and governance, an invisible framework through which every decision gets made, even when it hasn’t been consciously chosen.

The Yellow Submarine

Soul Revival has been working on doing something different for the last 30 years. It can be illustrated by the Beatles song of 1967: a vision of a relational, adaptive community travelling together beneath the surface of everyday life. In its original context it was a symbol of the hippie subculture's attempt to find new ways of living within a formal society. We’ve borrowed and adapted the metaphor to describe what an intergenerational church community can be: journeying together beneath the surface of daily life, absorbing significant cultural pressures, remaining fruitful to the gospel.

The key word is countercultural. Not countercultural in the sense of being deliberately odd or difficult, but countercultural in the sense of not being shaped by the world's assumptions about how communities should be organised. The attractional model organises church around the preferences of potential consumers. The Yellow Submarine Shock Absorber organises church around the values and desires of the gospel.

And here's what's interesting: in the current moment, the Yellow Submarine is countercultural in two directions at once. It's countercultural to the broader secular culture. But it's also countercultural to a lot of the ways churches in Sydney are currently operating. Choosing to build a church around intergenerational community — where young people and adults are genuinely doing life together — is still unusual enough to raise eyebrows.

The attractional model's instinct was to separate generations into their preferred cultural expressions: traditional service for older people, contemporary service for families, youth service in the evening. Soul Revival went the other direction: what if all our services were actually intergenerational? What if the generations came together rather than being sorted?

How It Actually Works

The Yellow Submarine isn't just a metaphor. It has a structure. And the structure is worth understanding because it's one of the more practical things in this episode.

As an Anglican church, Soul Revival sits within a formal institutional framework: a rector who is accountable to the Archbishop, wardens responsible for finances and facilities, a parish council elected by the congregation, safe ministry requirements, Synod representation, and all the accountability structures that come with a four-hundred-year-old institution. This formal structure is genuinely valuable, it provides accountability, safety, theological oversight and the accumulated wisdom of a tradition that has learned from centuries of mistakes.

But alongside those formal structures, Soul Revival has built a set of organic structures designed to complement them.

The Soul Revival Council executive meets monthly. It brings together the elected parish council representatives, the pastoral staff and the ministry team leaders, around thirty people in total. This means those responsible for finances and facilities are in the same room as the people responsible for ministry and having the same conversations at the same time. The classic model of church governance, where the minister tells the parish council what the staff think, and tells the staff what the parish council think, and nobody actually knows what anyone else actually said is lessened.

Once a term, the full council meets. This is a gathering of up to seventy people: local gathering coordinators, ministry team leaders, pastoral staff and elected representatives. It's a broad cross-section of the whole church and where younger voices and newer voices are heard alongside the established leadership. It's unwieldy by some standards, but it's essential, not just for efficiency, but for representation.

There's also a Commitments meeting for all committed Christians who want to come before or stay back after a service and have their say. This is not just leaders, it’s for everyone. And there's an annual planning day where the whole community asks: what should we keep doing? What should we stop? What should we start?

The goal of all of this is to make sure that the formal, top-down institutional structures of the Anglican Church are working together with the bottom-up organic voices of the local community, and that the young people, the new people and the people who don't normally have power are genuinely included in shaping the direction of the church.

The funniest moment at the recent AGM was when Joel interviewed his ten-year-old daughter about her experience of church. She said it was boring. A ten-year-old girl, a Christian, a member of the church of today rather than the church of tomorrow — and she told the AGM honestly what she thought. That's the Yellow Submarine in action. Not perfect. Still aspirational. But genuinely intentional.

The Blitz and the Fuel Crisis

With a fuel crisis brewing at the moment, due to the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, there's an anxiety about what's coming.

Stu shares about his grandparents who endured The Blitz during the Second World War. His nan found a dozen eggs in the middle of a bombed-out street and took them home, and then shared them with the neighbours. People waited at bus stops whose buses would never come, and strangers stopped and gave them a lift to work. One house grew tomatoes, another grew potatoes, and everyone shared.

In the 1990s, a study found that people in that decade were more stressed than those who lived through the Blitz. The researchers attributed it to the tyranny of consumer choice: too many soft drinks, too many options, too much purchaser guilt. Wartime simplicity, paradoxically, reduced a certain kind of anxiety by removing a certain kind of choice.

What the Blitz stories describe, the organic structures of mutual support that emerge when formal structures are overwhelmed, looks a lot more like the gospel than what Stu saw during COVID when many started hoarding toilet paper. The fuel stockpiling right now. The prepper culture with its bug-out strategies and its advice on how not to share your resources when your neighbours come asking.

The Christian response to economic pressure is not to protect yourself and your resources from everyone else. It is to trust in the Lord's provision, to share what you have, to look for who needs help and to be the person who brings the tomatoes when your neighbour has the potatoes.

That's not naive. It's not a strategy for every situation. But it is a posture. And it's the posture that the Yellow Submarine, the organic structures, the intergenerational community — all of it — is trying to form.

Joel McMaster
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The Yellow Submarine