Skye Jethani
Skye Jethani is an American author, speaker, and the managing editor of Leadership journal, a magazine and online resource published by Christianity Today International.
Consumerism has created a culture that values style over substance, image over reality, and perception over performance.
Paralleling the corporate shift away from manufacturing goods to manufacturing brands, Christianity in North America has drifted from a faith of substance to a faith of perception.
Divine agnosticism, the sort I'm advocating, affirms the existence of God but then acknowledges our human inability to fully grasp his infinite nature.
By yielding its imagination to the forms around it, has the church, like ancient Israel, lost the ability to be an alternative people of God?
Our spiritual imaginations have fallen asleep on the comfortable mattress of the consumer culture, and before any remedy for the church can be prescribed our dormant imaginations must be stirred from their slumber.
It is recognizing God's eternality that liberates our minds from their consumer inclination to reduce him to a commodity.
Since the Enlightenment's coronation of knowledge, generations of Christians had brains full of biblical knowledge and doctrine, but their lives showed little evidence of the transformation Jesus called forth in his Sermon on the Mount.
We must learn to exist in a consumer empire but not forfeit our souls at its altar.
We have all swallowed the cultural punch that believes institutions are both the means and the end of God's mission in the world.
Consumer Christianity, while promising to strengthen our souls with an entertaining faith, has left us malnourished with an anemic view of God, faith, church, and mission.
In a culture that insists on making God small, we can counteract the trend by focusing our imaginations on what is big.
Ministries that focus on manufacturing spiritual experiences may actually be retarding spiritual growth by making people experience-dependent.
Rather than pursuing our calling to present a vision of a world filled with God's power and love, the contemporary church merely presents the world as a two-dimensional facsimile of the consumer culture, albeit with a Jesus fish imprint.
We do not desire too much, but too little.
The "trials of ordinary existence" are the divine curricula for spiritual maturity.
In a commodity culture we have been conditioned to believe nothing carries intrinsic value. Instead, value is found only in a thing's usefulness to us, and tragically this belief has been applied to people as well.
Disciplines teach us to overcome the temptation to gratify our immediate desires so that we may attain a higher one.
Advertising has formed us to give our affection not only to the products we consume, but also to the personified corporations that supply them.
Our culture has confined our imaginations with an uninspiring vision of God. He's been reduced to a manageable deity of consumable proportions.
Modern people may express outrage at the horrors of the African slave trade or the Holocaust, but in truth the commodification of human beings that made those atrocities possible is more prevalent today than ever before.