context NOT relevance, or perhaps it’s BOTH

About a month ago, Jarrod and I got the opportunity to spend some time in NYC with an organization called the International Arts Movement.

“IAM gathers artists and creative catalysts to wrestle with the deep questions of art, faith and humanity in order to inspire the creative community to engage the culture that is and create the world that ought to be.”

The purpose for the visit was to do research for our final class at MHGS - Contextual Research.  The class is a contextual research project that has asked us to identify organizations that we believe have transformed well within their respective contexts and then to simply listen to their stories. Nearly 25 students have spent the summer traveling across the country and making phone calls as we gather our research.  The hope for the research is that we might be able to identify some common themes of organizations that transform well and then see if there might be a way to actually teach this way of thinking and leading.

I am in the middle of finalizing our research and have found a ton of quotes I want to share.  As I go through it all in the next day or so, I will post some of the quotes I find most interesting.

Ultimately what we are finding is that the idea of relevance is much more faddish than we might want to believe…especially in the Christian sub-culture.

We desperately want to be relevant.  The only problem with relevance as a rule is that it is usually done without considering context.  Just because the new Coldplay song is relevant does not an appropriate worship-opener make.  If your context is not considered as you seek to be relevant, you may find yourself becoming so relevant to the culture that you’ve become irrelevant to your context.

Image via IAM founder, Makoto Fujimura