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One of the contrasts that the missional church is making is the difference between relevance and influence. I\u2019ve read blogs and heard people talk about the disdain they have for people trying to be relevant. And yet that\u2019s the very thing Jesus attempted to be, relevant. Relevance isn\u2019t a bad thing; it\u2019s a good thing. It\u2019s a God thing.<\/p>\n
As a matter of fact there is no influence without relevance<\/span>. How can you influence anyone if you don\u2019t speak their language, understand their needs, their hurts, their aspirations and desires? How do you connect the gospel to real-time dilemmas without seeking to speak relevantly and act relevantly? Influence isn\u2019t given in a vacuum. It\u2019s earned over time with relevant thought and relevant actions.<\/p>\n Sunday morning influence should proceed to marketplace influence.<\/span> And if it doesn\u2019t, it isn\u2019t the cutting off of the Sunday morning activity that we should be doing, but re-thinking what we do on Sunday morning that isn\u2019t transformational.<\/p>\n Maybe that\u2019s our greatest challenge \u2013 to be relevant and influential at the same time; to make our gathering communities relevant to other mainstream activities; open them up to as many people as possible; be willing to be open to people who aren\u2019t like us, don\u2019t believe like us, don\u2019t dress like us, or vote like us; people who may scare us, but people who should be made to feel welcome in our gathering communities.<\/p>\n Again, it\u2019s not either relevance or influence; it\u2019s both.<\/span> One can\u2019t exist without the other. In the next and last part of this conversation, I\u2019m going to tell you about a key question. And how you answer it will make all the difference.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the contrasts that the missional church is making is the difference between relevance and influence. I\u2019ve read blogs and heard people talk about the disdain they have for people trying to be relevant. And yet that\u2019s the very thing Jesus attempted to be, relevant. Relevance isn\u2019t a bad thing; it\u2019s a good thing. … Continue reading “How the Missional and Emerging Churches are Making the Same Old Mistakes All Over Again: Part 4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"series":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidfoster.tv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}