Skye JethaniCritiques

Como está seu relacionamento com Deus? Este livro tem apenas um propósito: colocar em perspectiva a forma como você se relaciona com Ele. E, a partir desse ponto, te guiar até o caminho certo para uma relação saudável com o Criador. Você já se perguntou se serve a Deus por medo de ir para o inferno? Quem sabe, você acredita que ser fiel no dízimo proporcionará uma vida financeira próspera? Ou então que Deus espera de você grandes obras? Ou, ainda, que basta orar e pedir com fé, e seus desejos serão atendidos como num passe de mágica? A sociedade pós-cristã foi rápida em enquadrar Deus numa série de rótulos em resposta aos inúmeros fiéis que chegam todos os dias à igreja em busca de uma solução ― de preferência, rápida e indolor. Em Vida com Deus, Skye Jethani analisa como é e como deveria ser nossa relação com o Criador. Este livro não será uma mensagem fácil e nem trará respostas simples. Mas aquele que tiver coragem e fé sincera colherá os frutos de uma vida com Deus.

This book was an unexpected find for me at a used bookstore that has turned into what I feel is the most important book I have read in a while.

In the book, different postures of approaching and relating to God are covered:

• Life Under God
• Life Over God
• Life From God
• Life For God
• Life With God

I could relate often to each one in some aspects. For example, the “life from God” posture very much reminded me of my years stuck in false teaching such as seeking for one’s own fulfillment or gifts from God as the prosperity gospel wrongly promotes. Likewise, a passion to somehow live an extraordinary life for God fulfilling His mission that is rooted in fear can leave us finding our worth in what we do versus being His.

Ultimately, the posture of “life with God” is the one that we as believers are called to in doing life with Him through communion with Him. Appendix 1 was a huge help in finishing the book with some practical application.

My favorite section was when the book covered the topic of prayer specifically regarding communication to God versus communion with God (pp. 112-114).

Above all, I highly recommend this book to be moved to the top of your TBR! It is truly an eye-opener and I took so many notes!

I thought this a little slow to get started, but excellent in perspective. Well-written and persuasive; the author looks at both secular and traditional Christian views on the 'new earth' as described in Scripture. He then points out that none is really coherent - that the new earth will be a transformation of all that's best about what we have now.

The consequence of this belief - and I felt that his explanation made a lot of sense - is that we should value all work towards order (in the broadest sense), beauty and abundance.

I found it overall encouraging, positive and thought-provoking. Perhaps a little repetitive in the final pages, and a tad heavy-going in places, but I would recommend it to anyone interested in this topic.

Longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2023/05/futureville-by-skye-jethani.html½

A book of brief devotional concepts relating to the teachings of Christ. Would be good for a Bible study or Sunday School class.

I love devotionals, and this one is super unique. It’s sort of a problem and solution guide concerning the church using Scripture as a foundation. This is an easy to read, easy to follow, easy to practice model. The chapters are quick reads but (most) hold a deep importance.

There are obviously problems in the church, and this book helps us see the cracks and gives solutions to how we can and should repair them. What If Jesus Was Serious About the Church is a community building and highly inspiring book. It brings a lot of things to the surface that you can’t unsee.

Disclosure: #CoverLoverBookReview received a complimentary copy of this book.

The Barna group recently did an extensive survey and found that the youth are leaving the church. What has previously happened is that they then come back when they get married and have children, however, that trend doesn’t seem to be happening. Nothing we didn’t previously know! But they identified several reasons why. One of which is that their experience of Christianity is shallow and another is that the churches seem overprotective.

This book may well present something of a solution for these issues.

Skye Jethani, editor of Leadership Journal, in this book makes an interesting observation: he sees all religions are based on the idea that the world is a dangerous place. Because it is a dangerous place, this leads to fear. We want to protect ourselves, so this means some sort of control. However, control leads to conflict and so more danger. This may explain why churches want to protect. All religion, Jethani claims is some sort of control based on fear.

In different ways we try and control God. This leads to four postures. In the first half of the book Jethani explains these four postures. Each of the postures contain an element of truth but are parasitic on the truth of the Gospel. But many are passing them off as gospel, which may be why the experience of Christianity for many is shallow.

The first posture is life under God. The best way to maintain control is to try and control the God who created the world. This posture looks to rituals and morality to do that. If we do the right things then God will cooperate. If we obey, God will bless.
It’s the drop the virgin in the volcano approach to religion. We adhere to the rules and rituals, but God won’t cooperate. Christianity then doesn’t seem to work.

The second posture is life over God. In this posture we don’t need to follow divine commands, rituals or morality, we don’t even need God we can get control through science, through laws and principles. The more extreme version of this posture is atheism – we can take God out of the picture. A god-version is deism, god is a clockmaker – he’s set the world up so now it runs according to laws.

For Christians who adopt this posture the principles in the Bible, rather than science, can give us control and help us find success. What happens is that we then have a relationship not with the God of the Bible but with the Bible as god.

Life from God is the third posture. This is perhaps the most popular today, it sees the issue as unmet desires and pleasures. It’s a consumerist gospel, a gospel that’s all about me. God is there to give us our needs and desires, to give us what we want.

We’ve made God into a divine butler or a divine cosmic therapist.

What happens to Christians who adopt this posture when God doesn’t meet our desires? They walk away form the shallow alternative to the gospel, mistakenly thinking that they have tried the real thing.

The fourth posture reverses this approach – rather than life from God it’s life for God. It puts mission or transformation at the centre. God doesn’t exist for us; we exist to serve God. We need to figure out what God’s purpose is for us and do more for God. The more we do for God the better we feel about ourselves.

Jethani points out have produced an activist generation – we want to end world poverty, we want to reach the lost, we want to go out on the streets to heal, we want to see people saved, we want to see culture transformed. But why are we doing it? We are driven not out of compassion but out of a search for significance.

This is a brilliant analysis of false gospels often promulgated as the Gospel. It is no longer people’s experience of Christianity is so shallow – they have been inoculated against the truth.

The second part of the book looks at the posture of the Gospel: life with God.
In all the other postures we use God to achieve some end: it may be success, wealth or it may be significance. But once we get a revelation of who Jesus is – we no longer want to use God. He isn’t the means to an end – he is the end, He’s the beginning and the end, the all and in all.

I found the first half of the book fascinating and insightful – the second less so, it’s hard to write about how we can get a revelation of God, it’s something that’s ‘caught rather than taught’. This is an important book. It may well change your view of God and the Gospel.

Futureville explores a Christ-centered vision of calling and vocation rooted in the Garden of Eden.

With provides a challenging and helpful perspective on the ways we relate to God. This is an excellent read for anyone who considers themselves a follower of Jesus, but is looking to breathe new life into their understanding of what it means to walk with Christ.

Jethani's critiques of Church, Inc (the church shaped by business practices rather than biblical priorities) are sharp and penetrating. Immeasurable ventures to remind us that the work of God cannot be captured by metrics. The nature of biblical ministry can often be inefficient, messy, and hard to measure. As a pastor, Jethani challenges the ambitions, platforming, and celebrity culture that has become so prevalent in the church. What I love, though, is that he doesn't speak with venom, but with love.

Written in short, stand alone chapters, Immeasurable is a needed check for anyone in ministry, considering ministry, or overseeing ministry!

The Barna group recently did an extensive survey and found that the youth are leaving the church. What has previously happened is that they then come back when they get married and have children, however, that trend doesn’t seem to be happening. Nothing we didn’t previously know! But they identified several reasons why. One of which is that their experience of Christianity is shallow and another is that the churches seem overprotective.

This book may well present something of a solution for these issues.

Skye Jethani, editor of Leadership Journal, in this book makes an interesting observation: he sees all religions are based on the idea that the world is a dangerous place. Because it is a dangerous place, this leads to fear. We want to protect ourselves, so this means some sort of control. However, control leads to conflict and so more danger. This may explain why churches want to protect. All religion, Jethani claims is some sort of control based on fear.

In different ways we try and control God. This leads to four postures. In the first half of the book Jethani explains these four postures. Each of the postures contain an element of truth but are parasitic on the truth of the Gospel. But many are passing them off as gospel, which may be why the experience of Christianity for many is shallow.

The first posture is life under God. The best way to maintain control is to try and control the God who created the world. This posture looks to rituals and morality to do that. If we do the right things then God will cooperate. If we obey, God will bless.
It’s the drop the virgin in the volcano approach to religion. We adhere to the rules and rituals, but God won’t cooperate. Christianity then doesn’t seem to work.

The second posture is life over God. In this posture we don’t need to follow divine commands, rituals or morality, we don’t even need God we can get control through science, through laws and principles. The more extreme version of this posture is atheism – we can take God out of the picture. A god-version is deism, god is a clockmaker – he’s set the world up so now it runs according to laws.

For Christians who adopt this posture the principles in the Bible, rather than science, can give us control and help us find success. What happens is that we then have a relationship not with the God of the Bible but with the Bible as god.

Life from God is the third posture. This is perhaps the most popular today, it sees the issue as unmet desires and pleasures. It’s a consumerist gospel, a gospel that’s all about me. God is there to give us our needs and desires, to give us what we want.

We’ve made God into a divine butler or a divine cosmic therapist.

What happens to Christians who adopt this posture when God doesn’t meet our desires? They walk away form the shallow alternative to the gospel, mistakenly thinking that they have tried the real thing.

The fourth posture reverses this approach – rather than life from God it’s life for God. It puts mission or transformation at the centre. God doesn’t exist for us; we exist to serve God. We need to figure out what God’s purpose is for us and do more for God. The more we do for God the better we feel about ourselves.

Jethani points out have produced an activist generation – we want to end world poverty, we want to reach the lost, we want to go out on the streets to heal, we want to see people saved, we want to see culture transformed. But why are we doing it? We are driven not out of compassion but out of a search for significance.

This is a brilliant analysis of false gospels often promulgated as the Gospel. It is no longer people’s experience of Christianity is so shallow – they have been inoculated against the truth.

The second part of the book looks at the posture of the Gospel: life with God.
In all the other postures we use God to achieve some end: it may be success, wealth or it may be significance. But once we get a revelation of who Jesus is – we no longer want to use God. He isn’t the means to an end – he is the end, He’s the beginning and the end, the all and in all.

I found the first half of the book fascinating and insightful – the second less so, it’s hard to write about how we can get a revelation of God, it’s something that’s ‘caught rather than taught’. This is an important book. It may well change your view of God and the Gospel.

BEAUTIFUL CHURCH

For sometime I’ve dreamt about a different kind of church. I’ve had my moments of wanting to walk away from her and try it my own way. I didn’t. I continued to dream of a church that lived and loved like Jesus and brought restoration to the broken. Even now as I search for a pastorate, I long for and dream for the beautiful and for it to show up in and out of the church. Skye Jethani in his book Futureville not only challenges the individual but the church as well to plan for a better today by reimagining tomorrow. Tomorrow is our hope and our purpose is to share glimpses of the beauty in the “ordinary brokenness” of our worlds.

It didn’t take long for me to want to read more when Jethani began sharing how many fail to see the church as relevant to their lives. After several years of working with and teaching young people, I have found that many of them are ready to walk away. We were all created in the image of God and desire meaning and significance, but the problem is how we (or the church) look at the future and our place in the world today.

He spends much of the book giving a well laid out timeline as to how the church’s focus has changed. At one time, the focus emphasized evolving to a better tomorrow through acts of social justice and making a difference in the world. He also portrays the church’s obsession on evacuating – the end times and separation from this world. Both are shown not as evils but rather how both should be working together for good. Left alone they miss the proper future focus.

His book culminates with the possibility that the church should embrace everyone’s story and place in the world – an encompassing vision and mission beyond social justice or clergy calling. The church is called to celebrate and encourage each other’s gifts and “garden patches.”

My favorite illustration in the book shares part of Nelson Mandela’s prison or wilderness chaos story. Mandela could see the beauty of home from his prison cell but could not reach it. Instead of giving up hope, he brought beauty to the prison by cultivating a small patch of ground into a beautiful garden. This act of incarnation rather than evolution or evacuation is how beauty came to his chaotic world.

The church with a proper future focus will then celebrate personal value and every man and woman and the part they play in our world today. Jethani shares that “our faith affirms the God-given value of every person.” He devotes one chapter (probably one of my favorites) to the churches need to affirm the calling of the artist. He suggests that “perhaps Jesus would say, ‘Why do you bother them? They are doing beautiful things for me.’”

This book was a needed reminder to every reader that the church can be a beautiful place if she sets her sights on affirming everyone’s place in their world. The beauty of the church is her diversity and remembering that “everyone’s story matters.” I highly recommend this book, especially for those pastors who do want to make a difference rather than garner praise or a paycheck.

Thomas Nelson provided me a free copy of this book in exchange for this review which I freely give.

In Futureville, Skye Jethani investigates the consequences of imaging the future for life today. Drawing from parent's new hope gotten at the New York World's Fair in 1939, crashed by next year's World War II and the loss of a 6 years old son, there's a tension between the bright future and the crimson present. Many Christians in the past century have been taught that the end was near, Rapture the escape from the late, great planet Earth (the famous book by Hal Lindsey). When that didn't happen, a self-centered, inward American Church and failure to reach out were consequences.Where church size mattered, everything else was of minor importance.
Then what to make of this world? Is there a place for Christians in politics, art, social activities, development work? Shouldn't we all be busy 24/7 in church? Jethani strongly rejects the idea of the overt bias to church ministries and neglecting neighbours, neighbourhood, work, arts and politics. Without the need for a Kingdom Now or theocracy, we are in this world, but not of this world. However we are not supposed to be the back pocket of church leaders, only interested in our money, time and what we do in church.
The author repaints the picture of God, bringing order in chaos, interested in planting gardens en cities, new creations of a different quality, not replacing His creation. Tomorrow's world according to the Bible isn't teaching escapism or everlasting playing harps on clouds. It's restoring and strengthening your place in this world with the commandment of love and the commission to go out and tell the gospel, that Jesus Christ died for our sins, conquered death and raised again, still recognizable for his friends and preparing a room in his big, big house, where the doors are always open for all people.
Futureville is a smart, inspiring call to cultivate the order, beauty, and abundance that reflects the heart and vision of God for our world.

In the economy of God's kingdom, there is not a single thought, feeling, or moment that is lost. Nothing is unseen or unrecorded. God is our witness!

Access to sex and pornography combined with the value of instant gratification has created a perfect smut storm that is causing chaos for churches, kids marriages, and communities. Unfortunately many Christian attempts to combat this wave may be doing more harm than good. Rather than cultivating the spiritual fruit of self-control, some churches are doubling down on the culture's value of instant gratification with 30 Day Sex Challenge campaigns or by touting research saying churchgoers have better sex. Adding to the problem is the use of marketing and outreach strategies by churches that also apeal to self-interest and abandon the gospel call to self-denial

When efficiency becomes a primary value, we're tempted to become utilitarian. Rather than seeing people as inherently valueable, we rank them by their usefulness. We tap them for money, volunteer energy, or influence

To reach a new generation, we must affirm not just God's general callings but people's specific callings. With this recalibration of the doctrine of vocation, many came to view their labor differently, not as menial labor to be endured but as a God-ordained calling.

The problem with mountaintop experiences, as Moses discovered, is that the transformation does not last. In a few days or maybe as early as lunchtime, the glory begins to fade. The event we were certain would change our lives forever, turns out to be another fleeting spiritual high. And to hide the lack of lasting transformation, we mask our lives behind a veil, a facade of piety or busyness, until we can ascend the mountain again and be recharged. The pursuit of transformation by consuming external experiences creates worship junkies who 'try' to leap from one mountaintop to another, one spiritual high to another, in search of a glory that will not fade. The problem is not our gatherings, but what we expect from them.

How churches are pioneering new ways to use facilities for the gospel. Are we creatively using our sacred space and making it missional?

Space communicates. The facilities we gather in, and not just the words preached with them, speak about the God we worship. The challenge is using spaces that reinforce the values we are seeking to form in our people. . . . 'Lets' utilize our facilities more intentionally for God's mission

We have an enemy that is active and cunning. Rather than arguing about whether this enemy resides in a personal demonic presence or the corrosive power of the world's system, we should be asking God to help us see the terrible effects of this enemy among our people.

Interesting but not all that compelling.

We are using the wrong prepositions when we think of God, author Skye Jethani tells us in this new book, With. We are trying to live life under God, over God, from God, or for God, but God does not desire any of this. God wants us to be with Him.

Jethani outlines the errors in our thinking that send us off on the wrong path, desperately trying to live under or over or from or for. He shows all the destructive ways we end up living by trying to have a relationship with God using the wrong preposition. Then he shows ways that we can live fully with God, in a rich life with faith, hope, and love.

I ask, rather than people choosing the wrong preposition, whether Jethani is choosing the wrong conjunction. He seems to believe God wants us to choose to live under Him or over Him or from Him or for Him or with Him. Isn’t it possible that we live under Him and over Him and from Him and for Him and with Him? (Though, perhaps, I am imagining that God would not really want us ever living over Him….)

He includes a useful appendix that reveals ways to live with God. There is also an appendix with discussion questions for group work using the book.

Virtual Community can not be a community at all. What happens on line is connection, not community

Consumerism addicts us to immediate gratification and perpetual youth, but the cross lifts us to a more satisfying joy. Consumerism tempts us to settle for desires far below what we were created for.

I won this in a GOODREADS giveaway!