Preaching and the Externally-Focused Church: An Interview with Rick Rusaw...Continued from page 1

Preaching: Did this book grow out of a sermon series?

Rusaw: Yeah, I would say it did. We used it as a sermon series to help our own folks here at LifeBridge move along down this path of being externally focused. Yes, the sermon series was a big part of it for us.

Preaching: Let’s talk about the whole concept of an externally-focused church. What do you mean by that and what are the implications of that in a local church?

Rusaw: A lot of churches talk about serving in their community. There are two things that Jesus said He would come to do: to save the lost and serve the least. We talk about those things a lot and yet I find that when we look at a lot of our programming, a lot of what we do, it ends up being about other things. Things that take care of us, things that need to happen ? and some of those can be good things, they’re not necessarily bad things. I mean, you know, there are the opportunities that come with that; having Jogging for Jesus, Bowling for Blessings, and Crocheting for Christ!

It’s an amazing thing. The Christian community, over the last 20 to 40 years, has pulled out of the community. We didn’t like what was going on in the schools, so we started our own schools. We didn’t like what was happening in the business community, so we started our own business organizations. We have a Christian version of everything. We have Christian books, Christian music and Christian TV and we have Christian underwear. We’ve got all of it and in ways, I don’t think we intended or planned on, we have pulled ourselves out of the community.

Even churches who are vibrant and healthy and reaching out ? I think LifeBridge might have been in that boat where we were growing and we were reaching people but we caught ourselves still saying, “Hey, if you need us, here we are. Our doors are open. We will have as many open doors as we can. We want to speak the truth in love.” But now we’ve been really shifting and saying: OK, how is it that we show up and create a voice, have an opportunity to speak into the fabric of our community?

Dave Stone and I are good friends and just this past weekend I was there and spoke for him. You know, if Dave says to me, “Hey, sometimes what you do or say yada yada comes off, you sound stupid with that.” I may not like that. It might make me mad. I might disagree with Dave. but the truth is he has earned the right to speak into my life that way. We have been friends for a long time and he has laughed with me, cried with me and journeyed with me and so I have to listen to him.

And I catch the church kind of standing on the bank shouting at the water and they can’t hear us anymore. Researchers say that in the ‘80’s if you lived in a metro area, you received about a 1,000 marketing messages a day: billboards, newspaper ads, bus signs. Today, in that same metro area, it’s over 10,000 marketing messages a day. So we are great at filtering stuff out. My line is: how does a church get, as Christians how do we get close enough so they can hear us? How can we be close enough so that they can hear us whisper? And I think you have to get in the stream to do that .