How to Make Your Church Relevant
Today, I’d like start a conversation around the one word that I've heard a lot of churches use, but often it's used as a kind of catch-all term, and if you read the title of this episode, you know that word is "relevant."
I'll bet that at some point in the last year, the word "relevant" has been thrown around in a meeting you've been a part of. Here's how it usually goes.
Someone says, "we need to make sure that what we're doing is relevant."
And someone else says, "Yes. Absolutely. We do need that!" People now see that everyone is thrilled that they're talking about being relevant, and they continue in their conversation. Except, there's one thing that didn't happen.
Nobody defined relevant.
And in meetings where you talk about being relevant but don't define it, you've only assured yourselves one thing: you're likely not going to be relevant. So let's start from the beginning.
Relevant is one of those terms with a precise definition but a very subjective practice.
Merriam-Webster defines Relevant as "having a significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand."
So the follow-up questions that make this definition come to life is: What is the matter at hand? What is the context in which we're trying to be relevant?
Now, before I get too much further, I want to overcome the one objection that I know some of you will have. I can hear someone somewhere saying, "but Mike, scripture is always relevant, Jesus is always relevant, we don't need to overthink this. When we talk about this stuff too much, we get away from what's important."
And so I would like you to know that I agree. I do believe that scripture is always relevant. But, that doesn't mean that you throw out any scripture at any moment without looking at the context. For example, let's have a little fun with this.
Often at a wedding, you'll hear 1 Corinthians 13 read. Weddings are all about the binding of two people who love each other—so hearing a scripture that talks about love being parent, kind and not envious makes a ton of sense.
That scripture is relevant to the moment. But what if, instead of a verse about love, someone started reading 2 Kings 2:23-25. If you haven't read that one in a while, let me give you a quick refresher.
23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" 24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
If you were sitting at a wedding, and someone got up and read that, what would the reaction be? I'd bet everyone would be looking around at each other, saying, "what in the world…what was that?! How did that have anything to do with what's going on.
And so, this is the point I'm trying to make when talking about being relevant. Relevance is influenced by context and perspective, and understanding the matter at hand. If a church wants to make impactful or relevant decisions, your team must have conversations about these things.
I see this most when groups start talking about younger generations or young families. Churches will say they want to make sure they are relevant for younger generations, but that's a pretty broad brush statement that doesn't get you too far. So let's play this out. Let's say your church wants to be more relevant to families in your neighbourhood. If that's the case, here are some questions that you should ask:
Who (ages) are we trying to reach
How are you defining your neighbourhood?
When people say "around the church," which streets are you talking about?
What are the demographics of the community?
How many young families live there? (find this out by going to stats Canada or asking us for a demographic report)
What are the needs of your community?
In what ways can you find yourself shoulder to shoulder with your neighbourhood?
How can you show your neighbours that you care about them in a way they'll notice?
Are there any felt needs you can fill?
If a church wants to be more relevant to families in the neighbourhood, relevance is based on what your community or neighbourhood needs. In this case, relevance is subjective, but everyone needs something a little different. Let me give you a practical example of how I've seen this work.
There's a church I know that is situated in a small town in Ontario. The church was looking for ways to serve its community, but instead of guessing what could be relevant, they went to their community to find the need.
Although they heard a few things, the one thing that came up the most was many young families in town struggled with daycare for their elementary school-aged children through the summer. The church heard that it would be a huge help if they could somehow provide daycare through the summer.
Now, this was a big ask, but it's what the community needed. It was a need that could make the church a little more relevant to their community – so they got to work.
Today, this church uses a combination of their programming experience, the Canada summer jobs grants, and their building to provide five weeks of extremely low-cost daycare (that they call day camps) during the summer. These camps have significantly impacted the community and have opened opportunities for many families who wouldn't have otherwise interacted with their church.
This church became relevant to their community because they sought out a gap, and they filled it. That's that relevance looks like. Throughout history, the moments when the church was most relevant was when it was meeting the needs of the community, and using those opportunities to build relationship ships and introduce people to Jesus.
So, what's the bottom line? How do you make your church more relevant?
You can start by asking these questions:
Who do we want to be relevant to?
What is their need?
What can we do about it?
Relevance doesn't happen by accident.
It's something that churches do on purpose. So the next time someone in one of your meetings says, "we need to be relevant," stop them and say, "what do you mean by that."
Don't allow people around your planning tables to make ambiguous statements because when they do, your church will slide into the most significant barrier to you being relevant in your community - and here it is.
Most Common Pitfall that Prevents you from being Relevant is coming up with your own ideas.
When churches start talking about becoming relevant, they often begin throwing things at the wall because they don't have many ideas.
Coffee Shop. Youth Group. Drop-in Center. Better Advertising. More Dinners.
And always, always, a change in music.
And I'm here to say – stop doing that.
Don't try to look at culture or your neighbourhood from the outside and guess at what it needs. Get into your community and find out.
I'll piggyback on music for a second only because it always comes up. I'm not going to go too deep into this, but here's my take.
Church music, no matter the genre, isn't relevant to people who aren't church people.
Let me say that again because I think you need to hear it.
Church music, no matter the genre, isn't relevant to people who aren't church people.
That doesn't mean that people might not find your music relevant one day. It means that it's not right now.
That doesn't mean your music is terrible, and it doesn't mean it's not important. But for folks that don't know Jesus, it's just not relevant at all. It's not what they're looking for.
It's not where their needs are.
And it's certainly not a relationship-building make-or-break issue.
More often, it's going to occur through the meeting of a need in your community in the name of Jesus. Relevance is having a significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand. And I don't know many people who aren't Christians that say, "what I need is for that church over there to have better music."
So – the biggest pitfall when having conversations about relevance is: guessing.
Stop guessing.
If you want to get out into the community in a relevant way, then figure out what it needs and get into it – and please, please, don't guess.
If you're in a meeting where you think someone might be assuming, then call them on it, and steer the conversation back towards answering the question that needs to be asked.
"What is a relevant way we can reach out to our community in the name of Jesus Christ?"
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