68 quotes
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?
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
Our culture has confined our imaginations with an uninspiring vision of God. He's been reduced to a manageable deity of consumable proportions.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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 Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
The reduction of even sacred things into commodities explains why we exhibit so little reverence for God. In a consumer worldview he has no intrinsic value apart from his usefulness to us.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
Finding true silence requires more than quieting our surroundings. It also means quieting our souls. This is the real dilemma of living in a wordy world.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
Consumer Christianity seeks to construct programs to capture God's power and produce predetermined outcomes, rather than surrender to the mysterious movement of God's grace which, like the wind or fire, is beyond our control.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
In a consumer culture "incarnating Christ" no longer carries an expectation of Christians loving God and their neighbors; but rather the perpetual consumption of Christian merchandise.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)
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.
The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009)