By Merriam-Webster’s definition, it is something that is practical and especially socially applicable. In other words, it is about being practical to a community’s culture.

Creating a relevant ministry requires that you understand the what, the who, and the how of your situation.
o What are you trying to do or say? (What is your calling?)
o Who are you trying to reach?
o How can you best reach them?

There are two types of relevance.
One is simple; the other is complex. Jesus had both, and the church needs to have both too.

1. Christlike Relevance

o Christlike relevance is established by ministering to the timeless needs of people.
o Rick Warren of Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, CA) says, “There will always be people who need to be loved or who feel guilty, resentful, or lonely. People will always need purpose, meaning, and a cause to live for.”
o Mark 16:15 (NLT) says, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone.”
o What: preach the gospel (timeless message)
o Who: everyone (timeless needs)
o How: like Christ (timeless methods)
o Wayne Cordeiro of New Hope Christian Fellowship (Honolulu, HI) says “Do everything ‘heart first.’”
o The best way to improve your Christlike relevance is to follow Joshua 1:8 and speak and study God’s Word daily.

2. Cultural Relevance

o Cultural relevance is established by understanding culture and speaking its language.
o Jesus understood the culture of His time and used it to illustrate spiritual truths in His parables. If you want to better understand Christ’s parables, study the Jewish culture of His day.
o Reggie Joiner of the reThink Group says, “Relevance is simply using what is cultural to say what is timeless. In other words, the best skill that you can develop in your ministry is understanding how to become a student, how to manipulate, how to use the culture that is around you so that you can say what is timeless.”
o Paul shares his pursuit of cultural relevance in 1 Corinthians 9:20-23 (CEV): “When I am with the Jews, I live like a Jew to win Jews. They are ruled by the Law of Moses, and I am not. But I live by the Law to win them. And when I am with people who are not ruled by the Law, I forget about the Law to win them. Of course, I never really forget about the law of God. In fact, I am ruled by the law of Christ. When I am with people whose faith is weak, I live as they do to win them. I do everything I can to win everyone I possibly can. I do all this for the good news, because I want to share in its blessings.”
o Kenneth N. Taylor translates verse 21 as, “When with the heathen I agree with them as much as I can except of course that I must always do what is right as a Christian.”
o In cultural relevance, the who’s culture determines the how.
o What are you trying to do or say? (What is your calling?)
o Who are you trying to reach? (What is their culture?)
o How can you best reach them?
o The better you understand someone’s culture, the better you will know how to effectively reach them.
o The best way to improve your cultural relevance is to become a student of culture.

TOWER OF BABEL & CULTURE

2 Cultural Lessons of the Tower of Babel

Genesis 11:1-9 (CEV)
At first everyone spoke the same language, but after some of them moved from the east and settled in Babylonia, they said: Let’s build a city with a tower that reaches to the sky! We’ll use hard bricks and tar instead of stone and mortar. We’ll become famous, and we won’t be scattered all over the world.

But when the LORD came down to look at the city and the tower, He said: “These people are working together because they all speak the same language. This is just the beginning. Soon they will be able to do anything they want. Come on! Let’s go down and confuse them by making them speak different languages–then they won’t be able to understand each other.”

So the people had to stop building the city, because the LORD confused their language and scattered them all over the earth. That’s how the city of Babel got its name.

1. Loss of Cultural Relevance

o What they were trying to say was still relevant (they wanted to build a city), but how they were trying to say it was not because they did not understand each other’s new culture.
o Some churches are like this. They have a relevant message, but they don’t know how to communicate it because they don’t understand the cultural language.

2. Evolution of Culture

o The more cultures that exist, the more difficult it is to be culturally relevant.
o Genesis 11:1 (Amplified) says, “the whole earth was of one language and of one accent and mode of expression.”
o The Bible: An American Translation says that they were of “few words.”
o More languages = more cultures
o Scattered people = the space needed to grow each culture independently of the other cultures
o God took them from being a unified culture of few words to being scattered cultures with many words.

WHAT IS CULTURE?

11 Areas that Shape Our Culture

Each one helps shape the other. Culture is a fluid.

1. Geodemographics (age, race, and gender segmented by geography)

o Globally
o Language is typically a result of one’s race, family heritage, and particularly geography. Russia speaks Russian. France speaks French.
o Shaking one’s head from left to right means “no” in the USA and “yes” in Albania. Nodding one’s head up in down means “no” in Albania and “yes” in the USA. (source)
o Death and mourning are associated with black in the USA, with white in China and India, and with purple in Brazil. (source & source)
o Research shows that people from strongly sunlit countries prefer warm, bright colors while people from countries with less intense sunlight prefer cooler, less intensely saturated colors. (source)
o In The Culture Code, Clotaire Rapaille tells the story of Lego’s success in Germany and mediocre results in the USA during Lego’s early days. German children were raised in a culture of “perfected bureaucracy,” and therefore, they loved Lego’s innovative instructions and wanted more sets that offered new challenges. American children expressed much more of an independent creativity and only needed one box of Legos to satisfy their needs. (source)
o Regionally
o The Hispanic population in the United States is estimated to triple by 2050. (source)
o African-Americans are moving from Northern cities to the South.
o Whites are now a minority in nearly 1 in 10 U.S. counties. (source)
o Locally
o Young people ages 20-34 are leaving big cities for the suburbs in search of cheaper housing. (source)
o Photo Link: Local cultural divide of Sao Paulo, Brazil
o About the Tulsa geodemographic maps:
o I designed the maps using Adobe Illustrator
o The data used primarily came fom the U.S. Census Bureau and Percept.
o Free Resources: Claritas’s “You Are Where You Live”, Neighboroo, U.S. Census Bureau, & Yahoo!’s Neighborhood Profiles Search.

2. Family
3. Education
4. Economics
5. Arts (art, music, theater, and film)

o 44% of parents in the UK sing pop songs and TV theme tunes to their small children instead of nursery rhymes. (source)

6. Social Class
7. Politics
8. Moral Issues
9. Religion
10. War & Trauma
11. Technology

o The Medici Effect states that ”breakthrough insights are at the intersection of ideas, concepts, and cultures.”

Technology is creating cultural intersections.

o Communication influences culture more than any other area of technology.

1. It controls how fast culture is spread.
2. It controls how much culture is spread

o It is a self-feeding cycle that is continually gaining momentum. Culture leads to breakthrough insights which lead to technological advances that enable us to spread culture at an even faster rate. All along the way, information is being created as well as new cultures and subcultures.
o Speed of Communication
o In Ancient Greece, a courier named Phidippides could run 155 miles in two days. (source)
o The Pony Express could travel 1,966 miles from Missouri to California in 10 days. (source)
o I can send an email around the world in a few seconds.
o Speed of Invention
o 1450 Gutenberg’s printing press
o 1832 Telegraphs
o 1876 telephones
o 1906 radio broadcasts
o 1925 television
o 1977 home computers
o 1979 cell phones
o 1985 fax machines
o 1992 text messaging
o 1994 the Internet
o 1999 RSS
o 2004 podcasting
o Speed of Information
o Currently, the amount of new technical information is doubling every two years, and by 2010, it is expected to double every 72 hours. (source)
o The world generated 161 billion gigabytes of digital information in 2006, which is equivalent to 3 million times the information in all the books ever written. (source)
o Since 1776, 22 million book titles have been published (source), and a new book is published every 30 seconds. (source)
o Some estimate a week’s worth of The New York Times to contain more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. (source)
o There are now 540,000 words in the English language which is 5 times as many during Shakespeare’s time. (source)
o The number of text messages transmitted each day exceeds the world’s population. (source)

CREATING A RELEVANT INTERNET MINISTRY

o 57% of Protestant churches now have a website. (source)
o 27% of Protestant church ministers use online efforts such as blogs or websites for evangelism. (source)
The Potential
o 81% of all U.S. households have at least one computer.
53% of all U.S. households have broadband high-speed Internet which account for 72% of all home Internet subscriptions. (source)
o In May 2007, 75% of Internet users watched online video for an average of 158 minutes per user. (source)
o The U.S. podcast audience is predicted to grow from 800,000 people in 2004 to 56.8 million people in 2010. (source)
o USA’s daily newspaper subscriptions have dropped from 63.3 million in 1984 to 43.7 million in 2006 because readers are migrating to the Internet for news. (source)
o Arthur Sulzberger, owner of The New York Times, says “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either. The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.” (source)
Websites should reflect the nature of their visitors.
1. General Usage
o While shopping online, men like to surf from site to site, but women like to go directly to a website, buy, and be done. (source)
o The average half-life of a news item is only 36 hours. (source)
o Deliver content at the right timing.
2. Niche Usage (by age for example)
o Children
o Over 70% of 4 year olds in the U.S. have used a computer. (source)
o 83% of children under the age of 6 average 2 hours per day using some form of screen media. (source)
o Teenagers
o 87% of teens aged 12-17 use the Internet.
o 51% of teens go online daily.
o Among teen Internet users, 89% use email, and 26% look for religious or spiritual information online. (source)
o Over a third of teens under the age of 18 use product reviews and comparison shopping sites. (source) If they are using the Internet to scrutinize if something is worth their money, they will also likely use it to see if your youth ministry is worth their time.
o 44% of teens read a blog at least once each week. (source)
o 28.9% of teens say that not having Internet access outside of school would “ruin their day.” (source)
o College Students
o Spend 15 hours online each week. (source)
o The average 21-year-old has already spent over 2 years worth of time watching television, over 1 year worth of playing video games, and over 1 year worth talking on the phone. (source)
o Adults
o 65% of Americans spend more time with their computer than with their spouse. (source)
o Senior Citizens
o About 1 in 5 Americans will be 65 years old or older by 2025. (source) Websites will need larger type.

MINISTRY & CULTURE

Identify the what, the who, and the how of your ministry. Look at the broad, collective scope of all the cultures that you are called too. And look at the focused scope of each subculture that you church reaches.
Your ministry’s overall culture should serve as an umbrella to all the cultures that you are called to reach.
People want to hear a message that is focused at them. A message tailored specifically to you is more effective than one designed for the entire nation.

Cultural relevance is like a rifle not a shotgun. It may not hit as much but it delivers a more precise, efficient, and focused impact. A shotgun takes less skill to use and hits more but its impact is less.
Because culture changes, how you reach people will have to change too. Charles Stanley of First Baptist Church (Atlanta, GA) says, “If you do not allow God to change the way people do church, you will miss out on what God wants to do.

From Kent Shaffer and Churchrelevance.com

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