In chapter one of The Divine Commodity Skye Jethani begins
with what seems to be a foundational problem with the consumerist mindset that
pervades our churches and culture – the lack of imagination. Beginning with the
tale of Walt Disney’s dream of Epcot and the lack of vision and imagination in
his successors to make his dream a reality and then looking to how the rise of
the Christian goods and services industry as manifest in the account of the
Christian Booksellers Association meetings seems to inversely mirror the
decline of the North American church; Jethani demonstrates how good business
sense and faithful adherence to the principles of consumerism are poor
substitutes for imagination.
Our deficiency is not motivation or money, but imagination. Our ability to live Christianly and be the church corporately has failed because we do not believe it is possible. Like Disney’s successors we simply cannot imagine how to carry out the fantastical mission of our leader. 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. (p.18)
He goes onto demonstrate how in place of genuine
Spirit-empowered imagination we have substituted worldly ideas, whether in
creating a vast industry of Christian kitsch that rivals the Chinese black
market (18) or in running our churches as if they were just another commodity
driven enterprise by molding them with wise worldly business principles. We
look to what has already been done in the world by the real innovators and try
to recreate their success in our contexts. Sometimes without critically
evaluating whether their version of success should matter to a community of
faith at all.
Jethani maintains that imagination (like so many other
things) was a victim of enlightenment philosophy. As we became more and more dependent
on knowledge as the primary means of communicating truth we replaced
imagination with facts. In the Christian world we began to (unconsciously)
reduce God to a set of suppositions and ideas; we constructed elaborate
systematic theologies and moved to educate more than inculcate. We downplayed
(if not denigrated) the value of experience in the Christian faith and sought
to contain and explain God through our many doctrines and statements about him.
The intent was noble, but the results were not encouraging. “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.” So he goes
on to recount how a number of churches and ministries in the latter half of the
1900s began to shift their focus once again; no longer would they be concerned
with teaching people ideas, theologies, philosophies and doctrines about God –
instead they would teach people skills.
We see this shift in the movement away from expositional
and theological preaching in many evangelical churches toward a more pragmatic
style of communication. Sermons started to sound like many of the secular
how-to seminars and self-help seminars that started to gain popularity at the
same time: “5 Principles of Parenting; 7
Habits of a Happy Marriage; 3 Biblical Blessings for Businessmen.” And we
feel the sting of the transition every time someone in a church complains that
our young people aren’t learning doctrine, or that our culture doesn’t have any
biblical literacy – we have moved away from knowledge transmission to skill
development but have still not seen any significant change in people. (25)
The problem with basing our spiritual formation on either
knowledge or on skill development is that they neglect that means of formation
that Jesus was most frequently involved in. According to Jethani:
The Gospel writers show Jesus very infrequently teaching skills, and only periodically conveying didactic knowledge. Instead the Gospels are dominated by Jesus telling stories and weaving parables. He used these verbal Trojan horses to sneak radical truths past his listeners’ defenses and into the chamber where their imaginations slumbered. And as they began to awaken, Jesus’ stories illuminated a new vision of the world. They disentangled reality for his listeners, and his disciples slowly perceived the kingdom of God that Jesus saw all around him. It was a kingdom that defied the conventionality of his day. A kingdom where rebellious criminals are embraced by God like a loving father; where the poor and the weak are welcomed to God’s table; where the servant is honored and the powerful are brought low. It was a radical vision not everyone could accept. Some were too enslaved by the cultural conventions, too entangled in realism for their imaginations to be awakened. These people heard Jesus tell stories about trees, fields, treasures, or seeds — but nothing more. They could hear, but not understand. They could see, but could not perceive. (p.26)
In the end, the problem with a neglect of the Christian
imagination is that it enslaves us to what we can see, hear, touch, taste and
understand. A lack of Christian imagination makes us slaves to our senses and
our senses are bombarded by the things and ways of the dominant culture in
which we live. And for we North Americans that culture is consumerism. To make
his point Jethani tells the story of the Japanese Kakure, or Crypto-Christians.
These were Christians who were evangelized by missionaries before the
missionaries were expelled from the empire in 1641 and forced to take their
faith into hiding. Forced to outwardly appear to be Buddhists or Shintoists by
law these Christians began to assimilate the worldview of their culture into
their practice of Christianity. They began to confuse the faith they were
protecting with the faith they were pretending and over time and generations
the two worldviews merged into something wholly other. When European
missionaries were allowed back into the country in the nineteenth century what
they found among the remnant of the “Christians” in Japan was anything but
Christianity. It was a wholly different animal.
The tale of the Japanese Kakure is a cautionary tale for
the North American church. It teaches us that we can’t put all our energy into
trying to be like the world without actually becoming like the world. When the
Christian church aspires to nothing more than being a Christian version of a
successful secular industry we won’t even be that. We will become like that
which we worship – and whether we will admit it or not, we worship a worldly
definition of success.
In our cultural quest for survival, driven by our fear of irrelevance, have evangelicals become Crypto-Christians? 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? Like the Kakure of Japan, are we holding so tightly to our faith that we cannot sense it has already slipped between our fingers? 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? Is Walter Brueggemann correct: “The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act”? (p.29)
This week as you reflect on the ideas the author puts
forward in chapter one I want you to try and answer the following questions:
1.
In what ways have you seen the Church in your
life act truly countercultural and what was the response to its action when it
did?
2.
Most complaints I hear from Christians about our
transition to skill development in our process of spiritual formation are
grounded in a plea to return to the good old days of knowledge transmission –
but Jethani argues that those good old days weren’t so good either. Are we
missing the point in our critiques of contemporary church models?
3.
What are you doing/planning to do to cultivate a
Spirit-empowered Christian imagination in your life?
Until next time,
Chris
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