relevant.

Happy Seek Me to Live Wednesday to you.  Let's see if we can make up a bit for a missed post last week.

We talk a lot about relevancy in our area of ministry.  In fact, it's one of our values as a Programming and Production ministry: we seek to be relevant.  Here's what that means:

We want what we do on the weekends to matter the most to those whom we're trying to reach.

Digest that statement for a bit.

Seriously.  Take some time to think about that before you continue reading.

Okay.

Let's take a little different track before we continue to talk about relevancy as it relates to artistic ministry.  Instead, let's first look at Jesus' life.  Here's a question that I've been pondering recently:

What was the most relevant thing Jesus ever did?

You'd be tempted to say the obvious: "die on the cross..." right?  I mean, what could matter more to those whom Jesus was trying to reach than his death on the cross?

Well... I don't know that there's necessarily a "right" answer here.  But if you asked me, I think that the obvious answer may not be the "right" one.

Here's what I think. Of all the amazing, miraculous, life-giving, Spirit-inspired, God-directed things that Jesus did, I think that the most relevant was this:

Incarnate.

Incarnate.  It's the word that describes what Jesus did when he came down from heaven, took on the form of a human being, and became one of us.  As relevant as his message was to us, as much as his cross mattered to us, neither of these things would have been possible if Jesus did not first come to us.

The most relevant thing that Jesus ever did (at least, from my perspective) - the thing that mattered most to the people that he was trying to reach - was to come toward us.  It was to live among us as one of us.  Without sin, without a sinful nature, with perfect obedience, of course... but one of us nonetheless.

Back to artistic ministry.

As artists in God's church here in northeast Iowa, the most relevant thing you can do is this: to go towards those lost Iowans we're trying to reach.  To develop relationships with them.  To live among them.  Without sin.  With God's love in your heart, his message on your lips, and his service directing your hands, for sure.  But with them.  Knowing them.  Understanding them.  Feeling what they feel.  Listening to what they say. Seeing the world through their eyes.

Why?

So that you can be all the more sure of how to reach them in a way that really matters to them - not to whatever idea you have in your head of who these people are or what others are saying about them.  So that we don't fall into some sort of debate about preferences, or hypotheticals, or whatever.  So that we don't spend more energy talking about how to artistically reach lost Iowans than we do actually living with lost Iowans.

Be sure that what you're doing matters to them, not because you think you know how to reach them, but because you know them.  Be sure that what you're doing matters to them because you can see that what God is using what you're doing to draw them closer to him.

Everything else is just...

Irrelevant.