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.
Properly understood, the church is not an institution. It is the community of Jesus' followers on earth - men, women, an children filled with God's Spirit, living in communion with him, one another, and the world.
We need to see beyond our culture; we need to peer through the bars of commodification and alienation and catch a glimpse of a God far larger than our circumstances.
Divine agnosticism, the sort I'm advocating, affirms the existence of God but then acknowledges our human inability to fully grasp his infinite nature.
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.
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 longing to pass through the gates of eternity will not be satisfied by any external experience, but by the dwelling of God within.
How might our perception of God be changed if we turned off the radio station for a few minutes and walked in a thunderstorm?
Ironically, it is often our zeal to protect our faith that leads to its loss.
Scripture and tradition tell us that formation into the likeness of Christ, also known as spiritual maturity, is not achieved by always getting what we want.
Silence can shatter the trivialized deity that has occupied our imaginations and provide God the canvas to begin a new work in our souls.
To believe that employing consumer methods in the church will produce spiritually mature Christians is delusional thinking akin to expecting a dog to hatch from a chicken's egg.
Maybe God is waiting for us to be silent long enough so he may begin painting a new picture in our imaginations, to begin transforming our image of a manageable deity into one that can truly inspire.
When we expect transformation to occur through external experiences, we are opting for an inferior model of spiritual formation.
Jesus says God isn't like a gumball machine; he's more like the wind: unpredictable, uncontrollable, no more containable than wind in a bottle.
The spiritual life must find its origin in silence.
Job learned the wisdom of silence before God, but it appears many Christians have abandoned this value in our wordy world.
Jesus isn't interested in negotiating. He knows that death, the surrendering of our immediate desires, is how we can take hold of an even greater joy.
The dilemma posed by consumerism is not the endless manufacturing of desires, but the temptation to settle for desires far below what we were created for.
Self-denial, the surrendering of immediate desires, is a prerequisite of the Christian life. This is noticeably absent in the gospel of Consumer Christianity.
Learning to see the world as it truly is - saturated with the presence and love of God - should be the essence of Christian discipleship, or what many call spiritual formation.