Episode Details

Let’s start with a confession.

I’ve misdiagnosed “dead” more times than I care to admit…more than a coroner in a zombie movie marathon.

I have this bad habit of declaring the demise of trends that are, in fact, quietly entering their prime. I thought podcasts were “saturated” back in 2013 when I started the unSeminary podcast. Everyone and their cousin had one, and I thought I was arriving at the party too late. Yet, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Podcasting didn’t plateau… it exploded. It became mainstream. The biggest names in media…people who swore audio was finished…now build entire empires around long-form podcast conversations. Joe Rogan, The Daily, SmartLess…they didn’t just succeed; they defined a new era of attention. What I thought was a crowded space was actually an emerging medium.

Then, there were QR codes. I mocked those little pixel boxes like a pro. I remember my friend Kenny using them years ago, and I laughed out loud. “No one’s going to pull out their phone to scan that,” I told him, dripping with confidence. Fast-forward to 2020, when every restaurant menu, conference check-in, and even church connect card required a QR code. They went from “gimmick” to “infrastructure” overnight. What I once dismissed as clunky, and dead became the universal bridge between the physical and digital worlds.

And YouTube…don’t get me started. I was doing video podcasts and then 8 years ago I stopped because…I thought it was dead. I used to think YouTube was for cat videos and makeup tutorials, not serious long-form content. I said, “No one wants to watch a 30-minute video conversation on YouTube.” Yes,I said that. Out loud. Turns out, millions of people do. YouTube has become the world’s most dominant podcast player and arguably the most powerful storytelling platform of our time. The lines between podcast, video, and TV are gone. YouTube isn’t a side project anymore…it’s the main stage.

Even books fooled me. I was convinced the Kindle was going to kill print. I believed we would all be reading on glass screens by now, that bookstores would become nostalgic museum pieces. Yet, print continues to outsell e-books. Year after year. There’s something about paper, the texture, the smell, the way you can hand a book to someone, that we’re just not ready to give up. The “dead” medium has more life than ever.

And that’s why I roll my eyes when someone confidently declares that the “attractional church” is dead.

I’ve heard it at conferences, read it in think pieces, seen it in hot-take clickbait reels: “People don’t want polished anymore.” “The attractional model doesn’t work.” “We’ve moved beyond that.”

No, we haven’t.

Attractional church isn’t dead; it was absorbed into “normal church” …and the churches that win in 2025 are the ones that treat invitation as culture, not campaign, and pair it with clear next steps into community and discipleship.

Things don’t die; they normalize. They get woven into the fabric. So it is with the attractional church.