(Waiting for the conference to start ... Skye is up first.)
(Worship from Orchard Valley peeps ... Really like this church, the atmosphere is great.)
(Skye's website is
www.skyejethani.com)
(Also, check out Skye's book here:
bit.ly)
(Ben Arment is introducing Skye ... Ben's a really great dude. BenArment.com)
(Land of a Thousand Coffees is telling about their story.)
(Here's their website:
www.landof1000hills.com)
(The concepts in Skye's book have ticked off a lot of people, helped a lot of people, etc.)
(And Skye is up... We're being silent before God ... Shhh....)
(As a reminder, all of my comments will be in parentheses and the speakers will be everything else unless noted)
You can help the people you're communicating to see a different world
You can help them to see the reality of the Kingdom that they've never seen
You have a choice when you preach to educate or illuminate
You can teach or you can preach.
People come to your church because they want to feel the transcendent... But too often it gets shrouded in a cloud of consumerism
I was taught to preach in the way to convey information ... Preaching as instruction or information.
Add the end of the day, I was taught, always preach practical.
Make sure no one leaves that sanctuary without knowing what to do.
The model of practical preaching is an utter failure. It just doesn't work.
You slave and slave over a message and by the end of the day on Sunday no one remembers what you were talking about.
The first problem with preaching for instruction is that it doesn't work ... People don't remember!
Teaching happens best in small communities where you can get to know people's stories
Practical preaching doesn't challenge people's pereception of reality!
People spend six days of the week marinating in the broth of consumerism ... Not the behavior, but the mentality. It is unavoidable.
A consumer worldview teaches us that we are at the center of the universe.
All things revolve around us, value is found in what they can do for me.
Consumerism is that the essence of life is unmet desires ... Real life is the pursuit of those desires.
Consumerism teaches that every problem I have their is a program that can save/help me.
What this does is that it teaches us that Jesus is nothing more than a desire-fulfiller.
We have made it our mission in life to convince people that Jesus is the fulfiller of our unmet needs.
We've made Jesus a means to an end rather than an end of his own.
"Jesus is all you need to fix just about anything." That is not Christianity.
We need to help people see that Christianity is the most irrelevant worldview, but it is the most beautiful.
People who are walking in darkness don't just need a cane, they need to see a great light!
They need to see another world, a different reality.
Instruction is incredibly important, that's not what I'm saying. The problem is when you give people the how-to's when they don't yet have a vision for why they should.
VIM - Vision, Intention, Means for spiritual development (via Dallas Willard)
When people don't have a vision for God's kingdom, they're not going to actually represent the means.
When you have the vision, the means tend to take care of themselves.
What you have is American Christians who have more access to more information than any Christians who have ever walked the earth, yet the moral excellence of Christian North Americans is declining.
The problem is not an information problem, it's that our people do not intend to follow Christ.
That's all the bad news. So what's the alternative?
How do we help our people see the other side?
When people recognize the beauty of the kingdom, they will stumble over each other just to get in!
That doesn't happen through information, it happens through inspiration!
