Skye Jethani Quotes

69 Sourced Quotes

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.

Skye Jethani
Whether by trials of circumstance or by disciplines of choice, we cannot escape our calling to suffer with Christ.

Skye Jethani
Wanting to obey Christ but lacking his imagination, we reinterpret the mission of the church through the only framework comprehendible to us—the one we've inherited from our consumer culture.

Skye Jethani
Consumerism is the dominant worldview of North Americans. As such, it is competing with the kingdom of heaven for the hearts and imaginations of God's people.

Skye Jethani
Ironically, it is often our zeal to protect our faith that leads to its loss.

Skye Jethani
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?

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
The spiritual life must find its origin in silence.

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
The influence of consumerism has led us to confuse institutions for people, means for the mission, and programs for the Spirit's power.

Skye Jethani
Approaching Christianity as a brand explains why the majority of people who identify themselves as Christians live no differently than other Americans yet spend enormous amounts of money on Christian products.

Skye Jethani
Our longing to pass through the gates of eternity will not be satisfied by any external experience, but by the dwelling of God within.

Skye Jethani
We are more than our base desires, and our lives are not sustained by gratifying them.

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
The "trials of ordinary existence" are the divine curricula for spiritual maturity.

Skye Jethani
Divine agnosticism, the sort I'm advocating, affirms the existence of God but then acknowledges our human inability to fully grasp his infinite nature.

Skye Jethani
What might we learn about God and ourselves if our Bible study group gathered outside to stare at the stars in silence?

Skye Jethani
When we expect transformation to occur through external experiences, we are opting for an inferior model of spiritual formation.

Skye Jethani
Job learned the wisdom of silence before God, but it appears many Christians have abandoned this value in our wordy world.

Skye Jethani
We have all swallowed the cultural punch that believes institutions are both the means and the end of God's mission in the world.

Skye Jethani
Connected yet alienated - that is the paradox of our global digital culture. We have access to so many things, yet we are increasingly incapable of seeing those things, or ourselves, in any meaningful context.

Skye Jethani
If we are to effectively make disciples of Jesus Christ and teach them to obey everything he commanded, we cannot neglect the imagination.

Skye Jethani
Sociologists can no longer differentiate the lives of Christians from non-Christians, or the behavior of churches from corporations. We have abandoned the vision that Christianity is an alternative way.

Skye Jethani
By conducting a media fast - turning off the television, radio, and computer - we stop the influx of poison that keeps us buying and desiring more.

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
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.

Skye Jethani
Has the contemporary church been so captivated by the images and methods of the consumer culture that it has forfeited its sacred vocation to be a countercultural agent of God's kingdom in the world?

Skye Jethani
Have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different - a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content?

Skye Jethani
The transformation of our desires happens like all spiritual transformation - by following in the steps of Jesus. In a word, I believe the answer is suffering.

Skye Jethani