The Uncomfortable Truth About Secular Mission (That No One Wants To Talk About)

I love secular mission. Its my biggest ministry passion. And over the years, I have spoken with many church administrators and pastors who feel the same way. They see the writing on the wall. The need to engage a new, post-church audience. And they are willing to invest in new methods with the hopes that we will find something that works.

But there’s a glaring issue that many of these conversations and models overlook. Something we seem less willing to talk about. But unless we talk about it, we will never have the capacity to root the gospel in emerging unchurched culture.

Here’s the issue: We keep treating secular mission like a branding problem. Swap the preacher, tighten the jeans, sprinkle in buzzwords, and the world will suddenly care. But the problem isn’t the outfit or the optics. It’s the operating system.

It’s not an update. It’s a rebuild.

When I lived in Perth I had a barber who was pretty secular. He had been to a Catholic church as a child, but that ended when he was around 10. Now in his 30’s his only other church experience was with an ex-girlfriend who was Pentecostal. And what he told me was really confronting: as weird as he found all the “speaking in tongues” stuff, nothing was as weird to him as coming to a building to hear a guy talk each weekend. He couldn’t fathom why anyone would settle for a faith expression that revolved mostly around this transactional exchange. In the end, it wasn’t the bizzare traditions of the Charismatic culture that put him off. It was the transactional nature of a conventional church gathering.

And here’s the thing — you can update traditional evangelism all you want. Change the room design, use a young preacher with tattoos, upgrade the language from churchy to culturally sensible — and it wont make much of a difference. Because this optimized model of evangelism is still transactional at its core. One person speaks. Everyone else receives. The goal is transfer of information and assent to a package. That is not an exchange of ideas; it is indoctrination by design. And many secular seekers just don’t connect with this approach.

Secular mission requires something less fancy, less hypey, and far less marketable. It asks the church to empower ordinary people to live real relationships with real neighbors and to cultivate the skills to share faith in that context. It asks us to plant missional communities built for long-form discipleship and leadership formation, not one-off decisions. The centerpiece isn’t a platform or a podium; it’s a table. The heroes aren’t headliners; they’re hosts. The primary question isn’t “How do we make them listen?” but “How do we make space to listen to them?”

It won’t look good on paper—at least not the papers we’re used to.

The traditional model works like a sales funnel. You cast wide, optimize the pitch, count responses, and publish the graph. It’s mass-market appeal, and on the surface it will always look better: bigger nights, cleaner dashboards, easier stories to sell at the next committee meeting. You can quantify it neatly because the metric is simple—attendance and decisions.

The missional model refuses to flatter us that way. It doesn’t move at the speed of a campaign; it moves at the speed of trust. It is messy, local, slow, and human. You can track touchpoints and stories, but you cannot cram formation into quarterly reports. On the front end it is underwhelming. On the back end it is transformative.

Here’s the trade-off we don’t say out loud: the traditional model tends to produce more members, not more missionaries. In fear-driven versions, it often produces members who strain the life of the community—combative, conspiracy-prone, allergic to nuance. The missional model may start small and stay quiet, but it produces people who can actually carry the gospel into workplaces, neighborhoods, and networks.

But make no mistake about it — if you are looking for some new evangelistic blueprint that will outperform the metrics of traditional evangelism, you won’t find it in missional secular mission. Its not just the model that changes. What success looks like that changes as well.

The elephant in the room: labels vs. relationships.

The traditional model excels at membership because it attracts people who are primed to adopt labels and align with institutions. That’s not evil; it’s just selection bias. The missional model attracts people who are hungry for relationships but not labels. They don’t want to join a denomination. They want Jesus. They want truth that heals. They want community and connection. That makes the missional model a tough sell inside institutions that think in brand equity and dues-paying members. Where’s the ROI if they won’t sign the card?

We have to decide what game we’re playing. Are we growing a denominational brand or a kingdom community? It doesn’t have to be a false choice, but we must put the order right.

My take: make baptism about kingdom, not denomination. Let it mark death to the old and rising into the way of Jesus, full stop. Then, as new believers are discipled into responsibility and leadership, invite them into membership as a covenant of accountability, resourcing, and shared mission. Membership becomes a path into service rather than a requirement for baptism into the family of Christ. Belonging comes first because that’s how humans work. Covenant follows because leadership requires clarity and trust.

Will this result in higher baptismal numbers and more tithe dollars in the church? Probably not. But if producing more card carrying members is your prime goal, forget about secular mission.

The reveal we avoid.

We avoid saying these things because they don’t photograph well. They require patience in an anxious age and courage in a metrics-obsessed culture. They force us to admit that some of what we’ve called “success” was simply the wrong magnet doing its job. But this is the uncomfortable truth about secular mission: you cannot harvest what you never planted. If you sow transaction, you reap attendance. If you sow relationship, you reap disciples.

I’m not suggesting the traditional approach has to be discarded. Cross-culture and pre-modern mission still benefit greatly from this approach. What I am suggesting is we can continue to engage traditional approaches while also investing in a new approach designed for the secular mission field. And this involves empowering ordinary people to build tables, not stages. To tell better stories. To measure what actually forms a human. To make baptism about the kingdom and membership about the call to serve. And to prioritize rooting the gospel in our cities over growing our denominational brand.

If we do this, we might have fewer members, but more influence… fewer spectators but more servants. It won’t look sensational on paper. But it will look like lives that can carry the weight of love and become the living embodiment of Ellen White’s vision, that “the final message of mercy to be given to the world is a revelation of God’s character of love.”

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Image Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUKHlJvfq4s