Skye Jethani

The Gospel, Millennials, Vocation, and How to Be a Real Christian

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I was ill late last week with an annoying head cold, so I decided to take Saturday off and heal.

Lately, I’ve been listening to the weekly Phil Vischer Podcast, which talks from a Christian perspective on issues facing American culture and Christianity. Vischer, best known as the creator of VeggieTales, offers the comic relief and pushes the conversation forward, but his co-hosts, Christian Taylor and Skye Jethani, offer the more serious insights.

Jethani, in particular, gets me thinking. I was familiar with his writings at “Out of Ur” (now called Parse) and have read them occasionally, but he comes across better in recordings than in print. Also intriguing to me: He graduated from a college in my area and now lives in Wheaton, Ill., and routinely interacts with students from my alma mater and examines those interactions.

Anyway…

Jethani is a pastor and current editor for Leadership Journal, which is a satellite magazine of Christianity Today intended for Christian leaders. I watched several videos featuring Jethani on Saturday and was blown away by how good they are, not only in their spiritual content but in their conciseness in teaching. Jethani gets to the point and makes it live.

Below are three video links from Jethani that I think everyone should watch. I can’t stress enough how excellent they are. And again, he gets right to the point.

Jethani wrote a book called With: Reimagining the Way You Relate to God, and in the following video, unpacks the main points in 19 minutes. This video was so good, I sat down with my 13-year-old son to watch it together. He was touched by it in a way I’ve never seen.

This second video, about 50 minutes long, is aimed more at church leaders and talks about how ministry models must change to better present Jesus to people who are dissatisfied with current church programming and intent. It’s dead on and reflects many of the themes I’ve discussed here.

Finally, in 45 minutes, Jethani cuts through all the noise and confusion and gets to the heart of life: What is the Gospel? (Unfortunately, this video link can’t be embedded, so you’ll have to go to YouTube to watch it.)

Skye Jethani—What is the Gospel?

I hope you have an opportunity to watch these videos. I think you’ll be remarkably blessed.

Lastly, I want to recommend an exceptional book that is not by Jethani but further expands his thoughts on vocation in the second video above:

The Other Six Days: Vocation, Work, and Ministry in Biblical Perspective by R. Paul Stevens.

It’s not only a fantastic look at how the modern Church has totally misunderstood genuine community but also how Christian ideals of community give meaning to people’s vocations, especially those careers that are NOT in “full-time Christian ministry.” This is one of the best Christian books I’ve read in the last five years. A little more academic, but it’s powerful nonetheless.

Have a blessed week.

Christianity, Evil, Control, and the End of Storytelling

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I’ve become a fan of The Phil Vischer Podcast/Videocast. The show talks popular culture and Christianity, and it’s almost always thoughtful, despite verging into moments of silliness. (This is the guy who started VeggieTales, remember.)

The following episode has so many interesting talking points on Evangelicalism, evil, tolerance, witchcraft, control, the world becoming post-Christian, and the end of storytelling, I didn’t even know where to start to unpack it. Once you get past the Pope sneaking out of the Vatican to give alms to the poor (ends around 7:17), the conversation shifts to the depiction of supernaturalism in films and what constitutes good and evil in a post-Christian world.

At around 22:38, Phil, Drew Dyke, and Skye Jethani begin discussing what happens when diversity attacks shared values and how this destroys the ability to tell a story. Phil quotes screenwriting guru Robert McKee noting that when a society has no shared common values you can’t tell a story because no one will agree with the framing mechanisms of rightness and wrongness needed to make a statement about a value depicted through story. Earlier, the trio decided that this has left us with only one agreed-upon value: Don’t oppress (or be mean to) other people. And in the end, this is all that is left of evil.

It’s a powerful discussion with startling ramifications for Christianity, both as Christians seek to share The Story of All Stories and as we confront genuine Evil as the Bible defines it.

The discussion then verges into talking about external evil and how stories are loath to discuss a greater evil that cannot be explained as just bad thoughts we might have for people who are different from us. We also see into how this comes down to control and why religious ideas with controlling godlike powers or controlling God Himself are anathema to the Christian worldview. And then Jethani mentions how some Christians are essentially practicing witchcraft.

If you want something to ponder this weekend, this provides a monster-sized load of fodder. Consider how certain groups in the U.S. are marginalizing Christian voices using revised storytelling. Ask how it is that Evangelicals try to control God. How are systems evil, including those systems we cherish as Americans first and Christians a distant second? And isn’t Atheism nothing more than a grab at control?

A lot of issues we American Christians don’t want to touch get talked about on this podcast/videocast, and not just this episode. Check it out.

(And for the Cincinnatians in the reading audience, yes, that’s a Skyline Chili mug in front of Skye Jethani, who is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford. The videocast is shot in the Wheaton, Illinois, area, home to my alma mater.)

Real Christian Life–And Why Americans Are Missing It

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Synchronicity is a funny thing.

Been wanting to write this post for a few days, but put it off. Then, on a “lark,” I listened to the podcast of Phil Vischer (of Veggie Tales fame). Having never heard the podcast before, I hoped it might nonetheless prove enlightening, especially since it talks about contemporary issues in the Church. And hey, so do I.  😉

Phil and cohosts Christian Taylor and Skye Jethani discussed a Hell House, the Christianized version of a haunted house, and how kits are now available to help churches use this “evangelistic tool.” Jethani notes that when we see the Gospel presented in Acts and Paul’s outline in 1 Corinthians 15, the apostles “fail” to mention hell or heaven, nor is sin discussed in the majority of presentations, yet what we preach today would focus on all three. Why is our presentation so unlike that of the apostles?

That in itself is a loaded question, but then Jethani hits my issue.

A speaker from Gospel for Asia came to my church Sunday. I support that organization (see the sidebar) because it’s doing a great work getting native missionaries to remote areas in Asia untouched by the Gospel. The numbers the speaker quoted regarding how many are coming to Christ in Asia were staggeringly large. And yet, all the while this man spoke, I kept wondering how it is that America never sees anything like that kind of explosive growth despite having so many “native” missionaries. How is it that we can’t preach the Gospel in a way that resonates with lost Americans?

The podcast clip below starts as Jethani and Taylor discuss what is not working with our Gospel presentation.

Jethani references the late Dallas Willard’s Vision, Intention, and Means concept to explain how Americans Christians are overloaded with means for growing in Jesus. The problem is that we lack vision for who Jesus is and subsequently have made pale substitutions of practical desires.

Yes.

If we Christians in America do not have a clear vision of who Jesus is, then we cannot communicate that vision to anyone else. As a result, if people already have a means for achieving personal desires, they won’t consider Jesus at all.

And this is the problem we find ourselves in.

Worse, Christians who default to seeing Jesus solely as a means for achieving personal desires (even the desire of heaven) will be unable to communicate the Gospel to people because that means of achieving those desires may not be as effective as the means chosen by that lost person. In short, we set ourselves up for having to be seen as a greater success in life than that lost person or else our “gospel” will fail. I’ve written about this before, but Jethani puts it all into the proper “lack of vision of Jesus” framework.

If the Church can’t communicate a real vision for Jesus and downplay this mentality of Jesus as desire-granter, then we will never understand what the Christian life is genuinely about.

Note that I did not say that Jesus never grants people’s desires. But any desire outside of Jesus as our unequaled primary desire is going to distort and weaken the Gospel message.

The American Church has got to stop with all the self-help and personal fulfillment junk and get back to raising up Jesus and focusing on relationship with Him. Nothing else matters.