Relevant Network

I final­ly received the first install­ment of my sub­scrip­tion to Rel­e­vant Net­work this morn­ing (I say final­ly because I expect­ed it last week).

Any­way, I had won­dered what I would get with my sub­scrip­tion, and now I know. I thought I’d pass it on in case your min­istry is con­sid­er­ing join­ing the net­work.

I got a mag­a­zine called Rel­e­vant Leader. It looks okay–it’s a guide to the resources in the kit (reviews, inter­views with artists, etc) along with a hand­ful of extra arti­cles thrown in.

I got 5 copies of the most recent issue of Rel­e­vant Mag­a­zine. That was nice, but for some rea­son the mag­a­zine has always under­whelmed me. I’ve always felt that they try too hard. But then again, I tend to get annoyed at most things I’m sup­posed to find cool (like pop­u­lar music and tele­vi­sion pro­grams), so that’s a clue that Rel­e­vant is hit­ting its demo­graph­ic (for the record, I’m a NPR junkie. If there’s ever any­thing else on in the car it’s prob­a­bly because Paula is dri­ving).

I got 7 books (Red Moon Ris­ing, The 250: Evan­ge­lism Ideas for Your Cam­pus, Enjoy­ing God, Enter the Wor­ship Cir­cle, Soul Sur­vivor, What’s So Amaz­ing About Grace — Visu­al Edi­tion, and The Air I Breathe).

I got 2 study guides (one for Red Moon Ris­ing and the oth­er for Soul Sur­vivor).

And I got 5 CDs (Anony­mous: Accel­er­ate in Slow Motion, Enter The Wor­ship Cir­cle: The Third Cir­cle, Des­per­a­tion, Antho­ny Skin­ner: For­ev­er and a Day, and Tele­cast: The Beau­ty of Sim­plic­i­ty).

Not a bad deal. Not bad at all. I was wor­ried I would be dis­mayed with my pur­chase, but I was actu­al­ly quite sat­is­fied.

I had hoped for some video clips (like the kind of stuff High­way Video puts out), but that was­n’t to be. Per­haps in future install­ments.

UPDATE: After a lit­tle more reflec­tion, I real­ized that I was sur­prised at how few of the resources were actu­al­ly min­istry resources. Most were per­son­al growth resources.

As I men­tioned before, I was most anx­ious to receive tools (such as video clips) that would be use­ful in con­duct­ing wor­ship ser­vices or plan­ning out­reach­es or craft­ing ser­mons. Videos from Nooma, for exam­ple, would be real­ly help­ful. Two or three ser­mons on CD would be extreme­ly use­ful. A bible study or two would be well-received.

I guess I’d pre­fer to see 50%+ of the resources be min­istry tools and the minor­i­ty be per­son­al growth mate­ri­als.

Just some thoughts.

Over­all, it’s a great invest­ment. The books and CDs I received were worth far more than I’m pay­ing for the sub­scrip­tion.