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.
We do not desire too much, but too little.
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.
Ministries that focus on manufacturing spiritual experiences may actually be retarding spiritual growth by making people experience-dependent.
Consumerism has created a culture that values style over substance, image over reality, and perception over performance.
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.
We have all swallowed the cultural punch that believes institutions are both the means and the end of God's mission in the world.
We must learn to exist in a consumer empire but not forfeit our souls at its altar.
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.
It is recognizing God's eternality that liberates our minds from their consumer inclination to reduce him to a commodity.
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.
In a culture that insists on making God small, we can counteract the trend by focusing our imaginations on what is big.
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.
When we expect transformation to occur through external experiences, we are opting for an inferior model of spiritual formation.
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.
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.
Silence can shatter the trivialized deity that has occupied our imaginations and provide God the canvas to begin a new work in our souls.
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.
Ironically, it is often our zeal to protect our faith that leads to its loss.
We've been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos.
Our longing to pass through the gates of eternity will not be satisfied by any external experience, but by the dwelling of God within.