I can't insert the pps here so I have found a close and even better one from YouTube. I was surprised there are so many versions of it. Van-Gogh was indeed popular.
What an encouragement from the Lord for me. I just recently had a bitter scolding from someone trying to inflict maximum pain and damage because I had the audacity to set the record straight with her after she suggested that I am losing my mind and should go see a counselor. A few years before she said the same but to see a doctor. I had ignored her then.
I am not surprised it had ended this way with us because I had been warned it will. I thought with Day 40 sent to her it's over but the Lord set me up for trouble again (see far below in red, the way of the Spirit). No one walks into the lion's den unless a power greater than the lions send you there!
I used a couple of hours today to extract the highlights I had made of "The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity" by Skye Jethani. Every chapter in that book begins with a quote by Vincent Van-Gogh. I didn't know that Van-Gogh was a Christian. I was taught in church long ago that since he had committed suicide he is going to hell. Now I think that's rubbish. Even CS Lewis Aslan would tell you to mind your own business here. There are so many dangerous preachers out there. Fortunately some of the best ones write excellent stuff.
Here goes the stuff I highlighted from the book when I read it before:
Christian researcher George Barna concludes, “American Christianity has largely failed since the middle of the twentieth century because Jesus’ modern-day disciples do not act like Jesus.”6
Jethani, Skye (2004-04-19). The Divine Commodity: Discovering a Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (Kindle Locations 270-272). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
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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.
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The interior clamor explains why so many people find silence uncomfortable. As Nouwen explains, “One of our main problems is that in this chatty society, silence has become a very fearful thing. For most people, silence creates itchiness and nervousness.”2 As a result we’ve been conditioned to avoid silence at all costs lest we be confronted with our own inner chaos.
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Like Job and his companions, our words about God are too often definitive, absolute, and proclaimed with an authority greater than their source. We have a certainty about God and his ways that leads us to replace the mystery of faith with manageable spiritual formulas.
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The abundance of our definitive words about God shows that we don’t view him as a great mystery anymore, but as a sterile calculation without ambiguity or obscurity. And, not surprisingly, this definitive God usually conforms nicely to our personal desires and politics. The resurgence of the prosperity gospel movement is one sign of this.
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What makes a consumer society possible is the belief that anything can be assigned an economic value and exchanged,
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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 reduction of even sacred things into commodities also explains why we exhibit so little reverence for God. In a consumer worldview he has no intrinsic value apart from his usefulness to us. He is a tool we employ, a force we control, and a resource we plunder. We ascribe value to him (the literal meaning of the word “worship”) based not on who he is, but on what he can do for us.
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therapist? The god of Consumer Christianity does not inspire awe and wonder because he is nothing more than a commodity to be used for our personal satisfaction and self-achievement.
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In a pre-industrial society a chair’s worth was found not only in its comfort and fashion but in the fact that Uncle Henry made it. The corn was valuable because you knew the people who planted, harvested, and prepared it. An old pair of shoes were repaired rather than replaced because your children played with the kids of the immigrant man who ran the shoe repair store in town. In the past, everything had a story, and the context of an item contributed to its value just as much, if not more, than one’s personal desire. Food, clothing, tools, and virtually everything else people used had a recognized and affirmed relationship to their world. As a result, peoples’ responsibility toward the goods they consumed went beyond their immediate usefulness. In the modern world, however, recognizing the context of the goods we use every day is increasingly difficult. This alienation is reinforced thousands of times whenever we go shopping. Pushing our cart down the aisle at the supermarket we are bombarded with colorful packages. These items are rarely packaged to convey the story of their creation or the human lives impacted by their production. Instead the packaging reinforces our consumer amnesia by appealing only to our desires. Marketing actively discourages shoppers from contemplating where items come from, nor do we want to. We simply want to buy them, use them, enjoy them, and discard them with no larger responsibility.
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During his short tenure as a missionary in the Borinage region of Belgium, one villager recalled the lengths to which Vincent would go to experience God’s power: “On a very hot day a violent thunderstorm burst over our region. What did our friend do? He went out to stand in the open field to look at the great marvels of God, and so he came back wet to the skin.”14
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Van Gogh’s generosity toward the miners extended to his personal affects as well. He arrived at the baker’s home one day with no shirt and no socks. He’d given them away. The baker’s mother asked, “Monsieur Vincent, why do you deprive yourself of all your clothes like this — you who are descended from such a noble family of Dutch pastors?” He answered, “I am a friend of the poor like Jesus was.”46
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Vincent attempted to continue his ministry with the poor miners but, lacking financial and material support, it was not to be. His genuine attempt to love people as Christ commanded had been rejected by Christ’s own church. Vincent simply didn’t conform to external standards of acceptability. The rejection sent him spiraling downward and planted the seeds of his later disdain for the institutional church. Eventually his father came to retrieve him from Belgium, finding his son lying on straw in his tiny hut, physically sick and emaciated, surrounded by the black-faced miners he loved. Van Gogh’s experience as a missionary in Belgium may have been the inspiration behind his painting of the Good Samaritan. (See color insert,Image 4.) Although the focus of the composition is clearly the Samaritan lifting the victim onto his horse, in the distance one can make out the two previous travelers who passed by the man without showing compassion. Vincent is contrasting the Samaritan’s love with the others’ apathy. In Jesus’ telling of the story these characters were a priest and a Levite — two devout clergymen. They conformed to every external requirement of religious law. But their godly identities were façades to hide the absence of divine love in their hearts.
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Though few pastors would say their church is attempting to be more entertaining than network television, the motivation behind his emphasis on experience is quite common. He believes orchestrated experiences are used by God to transform lives. He continues, “I have told people not to miss one single Sunday in December because our team has put together some stuff that we know God is going to use to impact thousands of lives.”6
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These pastors, representative of so many contemporary Christians, believe that God changes lives through the commodification and consumption of experiences. If our worship gatherings are energetic, stimulating, and exciting enough then people will attend, receive what’s being communicated, and be spiritually transformed. The justification for this approach is simple — people won’t come to a church that’s boring. And what qualifies as boring is defined by our consumer/experience economy. But the moment we believe transformation occurs via external experiences, the emphasis of the ministry must adjust accordingly. Manufacturing experiences and meticulously controlling staged environments become the means for advancing Christ’s mission. And the role of the pastor, once imagined as a shepherd tending a flock, now conjures images of a circus ringmaster shouting, “Come one, come all, to the greatest show on earth!” In Consumer Christianity, the shepherd becomes a showman.
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New Testament spirituality, properly understood, is immune to the forces of consumerism. An internal communion with God through the Spirit cannot be packaged, commodified, and marketed to religious consumers. It cannot be bundled, branded, or put on display to draw a crowd.
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The gospel writers may have used this Greek literary device because it fit their own Hebrew worldview. “To a Hebrew, to remember meant to re-experience in the present the power and effect of a past event.”26 Remembrance was not merely an act of recollection, but an act of reliving. For the Hebrew mind this required more than logical faculties; it required the imagination. Consistent with this understanding, one pastor notes, “Information alone never leads to transformation. Rather, it is what we experience as real on the inside that transforms us. That is all about the use of the imagination.”27 Unfortunately, this ancient practice of imaginative prayer is all too rare among contemporary Christians. There may be at least two reasons. First, prayer in general isn’t a high value in most churches. George Barna reports that prayer is listed among top priorities by less than one in twenty-five churches.28 Although rhetoric about having “a personal relationship with God” is pervasive, actually teaching and modeling such communion with God is woefully absent in the contemporary church. Far more energy is poured into the Sunday morning experience than actually equipping people to internally experience God throughout their “common business.”
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After his disillusionment with the institutional church following his missionary service, van Gogh came to see whatever glory existed in the church as reflected light. But in most cases, as his paintings reveal, he saw no light in the institutional church at all. The efforts of institutions to reflect God’s glory and disperse it to the masses were flawed. They diminished the beauty and power that was the essence of true religion. Instead, van Gogh celebrated the “Light uncreated” that he believed was accessible to all through prayer.
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Traditional churches did struggle, but a new breed of Christian leaders began tinkering to see if rejuvenation was possible. In 1975, a young pastor named Bill Hybels began to wonder why so many of his contemporaries still professed faith but avoided going to church. With members of his youth group, the twenty-three-year-old Hybels began to knock on doors to survey residents in the Chicago area. They asked, “Do you actively attend a local church?” If the answer was no, they followed up with “Why not?” and recorded the reasons. What Hybels discovered was that churches must now compete in a culture of television, rock and roll, and in-your-face entertainment. The old utilitarian function of the church — gathering people and connecting them with God — simply wasn’t going to cut it anymore. Americans wanted church to be comfortable, entertaining, relevant, and nonthreatening.
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Hybels, along with other up-and-coming pastors, had shown that people would still attend church in a post-Christian culture if it appealed to their perceived needs and desires.
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Repositioning the church to be both the vehicle and the destination triggered explosive growth in the size of congregations.
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Today, we still depend on a network for survival, but it is increasingly populated with corporations — disembodied persons with names, faces, and personalities imprinted through branding on our imaginations. Old Navy is our tailor, Blue Cross our doctor, Costco our grocer, and our minister? He is now a set of programs bundled together and organized into an institution we nostalgically call “the church.”
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Throughout most of history Christian faith has been transmitted life to life. Disciple to disciple. But we no longer expect this to be the case. We can avoid the messy reality of human relationships because somewhere a curriculum has been published, a book has been written, a program has been created to meet our spiritual needs. Who needs a spiritual mother or father? We now have the institution to shepherd us in the faith.
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Their intent to precisely follow God’s law was not motivated by love, but a desire to manipulate God and control outcomes. But Jesus says God isn’t like a gumball machine; he’s more like the wind: unpredictable, uncontrollable, no more containable than wind in a bottle. The wind blows where it wishes, and any attempt to define where it comes from and where it will go is futile. And those who are born of the Spirit will not rigorously focus on defining God’s ways to contain and control him, but will humbly submit to the Spirit’s unpredictability and happily be carried along on his breath. Nicodemus failed to understand this, Jesus said, because he had never experienced it. Like the Pharisees and the pagan priests of old, we also want to contain and control God. The 1995 bestseller Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom forVisionary Leadership, by Laurie Beth Jones, is a stark example of modern divination.
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Our insistence on an institutional and programmatic faith is a savvy new form of divination. Invariably, churches that experience significant numerical growth will publish books outlining their methodology and create conferences so other leaders can reproduce such success in their own churches. The assumption is that with the right curriculum, the right principles, and the right programs God’s Spirit will act to produce the outcomes we desire.
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This is what highly institutional Consumer Christianity fails to grasp. It 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. And God’s Spirit does not empower programs or inhabit institutions. The Spirit fills people who were created in God’s image to be the vessels of his glory.
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Vincent’s portraits of Augustine Roulin, along with the many other faces he painted in Arles, stand in bold contrast to his experience at the fine arts academy. He recognized that people were the vessels of God’s Spirit, and that love is something transmitted along the medium of relationship. For van Gogh the world of institutional art was a skeleton. It had the form and structure of a human being, but none of the flesh, breath, or feeling that makes someone truly alive. And while locked within the academy, an artist did not experience the full humanity of his calling. He did not relate to his subjects in their world and know them as whole people. They were merely objects of light and color to be replicated on a canvas. But Vincent lived and moved among his subjects. He entered their homes, drank with them at the café, and worked beside them in the fields. This explains why the colors in his paintings evoke such emotion. He wasn’t just painting the person in front of him; he was painting his relationship.
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the data showed that the more spiritually mature people became, the more dissatisfied they were with the church. In fact, those recognized to be the most Christ-centered were the least enthusiastic about engaging church programs.
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The research found that what impacted a person’s spiritual growth most were personal Bible reading, prayer and meditation, a meaningful relationship with a friend or mentor, and serving others.
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Van Gogh’s art was transformed when it was set free from the academy and integrated with his life and relationships.
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churches are in competition with one another for survival. They must convince a sustainable segment of the religious marketplace that their church is “relevant,” “comfortable,” or “exciting,” while at the same time creating a desire for church among a population that does not feel the need.
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Whether by trials of circumstance or by disciplines of choice, we cannot escape our calling to suffer with Christ. We are invited to follow in the steps of the Suffering Servant, who indulged his deepest desire and pursued eternal joy by embracing the temporary pain of the cross. Although the forces of consumerism would have us remain forever in Neverland by running after every product promising to satisfy our desire and alleviate our suffering, the invitation of Christ is precisely the opposite. The gospel calls us to embrace the paradox of pain by taking up the cross, and under its heavy beam discover the object of our greatest desire — God himself.
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It had not occurred to the Corinthians that their behavior was inappropriate. In Corinth the rich and poor did not share meals together. They did not sit as equals around the same table. This mentality was carried into the church to effectively create two churches — one fellowship for the rich and another for the poor. The Lord’s Supper, an event intended to display the unity of God’s people, was being used to reflect the divisions of the world.
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Rather than challenging the social divisions of our culture, the church has capitulated to them. Rather than defending the radical imaginations of Jesus and his apostles, who called for unity that transcended the dividing walls of culture, ethnicity, and economics, the Consumer Church has enthusiastically defended the status quo.
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In Consumer Christianity, our concern is not primarily whether people are transformed to reflect the countercultural values of God’s kingdom, but whether they are satisfied — often measured by attendance and giving.
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Consumerism has focused us so fully on the individual, that we’ve lost the corporate and social dimension of the gospel. We have forgotten that part of what Christ accomplished through the cross was not only the reconciliation of individuals to God, but also the reconciliation of estranged people groups to one another.
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The love of the world is always conditional. Every strata of our culture and every advertisement we encounter reminds us that our significance and acceptability is rooted in what we achieve, what we have, what we do, how we look, and how we perform.
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These phrases all communicate the same thing to the buyer: surely millions of people can’tbe wrong. This message feeds into our broken, insecure human nature that longs for acceptability and being comfortably part of the crowd. As a result, in a consumer culture a product’s perceived value is directly proportional to the number of people it impacts. Popularity not only equals success, it also equals legitimacy.
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Phil Vischer’s epiphany while scouring through the debris of his ministry was that the Christian life “wasn’t about impact; it was about obedience.”
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I am still far from what I want to be, but with God’s help I shall succeed. I want to be bound to Christ with unbreakable bonds and to feel these bonds. Vincent van Gogh
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And above all, I want a controllable god. I want a divine commodity to do my will on earth as well as in heaven.
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