Non Segment Marketing

Advertisers are quite savvy at tuning their marketing to a specific audience. Aiming for a particular segment, they set their pitch accordingly in order to have greater effectiveness.

Although not really marketing, a number of Christians take a segmented approach to church related activities - seeing some parts of church life as 'for the Christians', and others as 'for those not in the church'. Curiously in the gospels there are several occasions where Jesus seems to take a broader or more fuzzy approach, where it is not really clear exactly who he is talking to (or aiming to talk to).

Look at and read forward from Luke 12:1. He began to speak first to his disciples, yet the large crowd was around. Where does the speech switch from speaking to the few devoted followers to the many? Just when you think you might have the answer verse 22 seems to reset things again.

Could it be that he worked with the smaller group but allowed others to listen in, being at peace with the fuzziness this implied? More of a non-segmented approach?

Now elsewhere Jesus clearly took his closest followers off, effectively on retreat, for special time just with them. As Christians we need that. But we should ask the question as to whether there are some activities that we do together which could in fact accommodate some by-standers, maybe at least those who we see as enquiring or searching with respect to the Christian faith.