Well, once again, this is Jonathan Lehman and Mark Devere for an episode of Pastor Talk.

Nine Marks is an organization that exists to equip church leaders with a biblical vision and practical resources for building healthy churches.

You can learn more at 9Mark's.org.

And Mark, thanks for having this conversation with me.

Thanks, Jonathan.

What I want to present to you today is a conversation you and I had a week ago with another brother, pastor,

and he had a great question. Well, it started as an email,

and then it turned into a good conversation in person. I just kind of want to repeat some of that.

He writes in his email, our church is majority white, middle class, well educated, which he says

is a good reflection of the neighborhood the church is in. And it's right

next to a big, prominent university. And in the last few years, however, they've seen fruit of

their prayers and efforts to get more people involved in outreach to different kinds of people.

He says, especially refugees, African-American youth, folks stuck in long-term generational

poverty, and they've seen good fruit, they've seen people coming, and the church growing

in diversity and the gospel's work in that way. At the same time, he makes the point that some

people have a difficult time tracking with what's going on in their services, their songs, even their sermon, and that creates attention for him.

He says he's very much the product of his environment, his university environment.

He's a little more intellectually inclined in those ways.

And so now he's wondering, what do I do to,

he doesn't say, do I become something I'm not? But how hard does he work at reaching different

kinds of people, making the songs somehow different, making his preaching, somehow different, drawing from different illustrations

and so forth.

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