Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Clearly Seeing Clearly...

An airport in Berlin, Germany posted a job opening recently for air traffic controllers. One of the job's requirements: applicants must have 20/20 vision. That seems like a reasonable requirement for someone in that line of work.

Interestingly, those offering the position also wanted applicants to know that the application for the job was available in braille.

Clearly, somewhere along the line, the method of communicating, the history, how they have done it before--got in the way of the message and the job. You'd think someone would have caught this oxymoronic discrepancy.

Here's what I'm pondering....

Churches spend a great deal of time and resources delivering a message. We know what we want to say, how we want to say it, what technologies and tools we will use to drive home our point.

But what happens when our delivery methods become outdated? What do we do when the questions we are answering are not the questions people are asking?

The challenge is to ask the right questions to the right people at the right time in the right way. Churches must test their delivery methods to make sure they pass through a filter of relevance to the lives of those who will be the recipients of the message.