Desiring the Kingdom Quotes

“Discipleship and spiritual formation are less about erecting an edifice of knowledge than they are a matter of developing a Christian know-how that intuitively understands the world in light of the Gospel.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Liturgies aim our love to different ends precisely by training our hearts through our bodies.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“[E]ducation is a holistic endeavor that involves the whole person, including our bodies, in a process of formation that aims our desires, primes our imagination, and orients us to the world -- all before we ever start thinking about it.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“It's not that we start with beliefs and doctrine and then come up with worship practices that properly "express" these (cognitive) beliefs; rather, we begin with worship, and articulated beliefs bubble up from there. "Doctrines" are the cognitive, theoretical articulation of what we "understand" when we pray.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“What if education wasn’t first and foremost about what we know, but about what we love?”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“An education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of material, embodied practices. And this will be true even of the most instrumentalist, pragmatic programs of education (such as those that now tend to dominate public schools and universities bent on churning out “skilled workers”) that see their task primarily as providing information, because behind this is a vision of the good life that understands human flourishing primarily in terms of production and consumption. Behind the veneer of a “value-free” education concerned with providing skills, knowledge, and information is an educational vision that remains formative.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“A sacramental understanding of the world is simply a shorthand way of describing the psalmist’s claim that "The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it" (Ps. 24:1), echoed in Paul’s claim that in the Creator God "we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28).”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“In short, God’s welcome is a gracious way of reminding us of our utter dependence, cutting against the grain of myths of self-sufficiency that we’ve been immersed in all week long.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly--who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love. We are made to be such people by our immersion in the material practices of Christian worship--through affective impact, over time, of sights and smell in water and wine.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“baptismal promises counter such a configuration: love and its obligations traverse the boundaries of “private residences” and “nuclear families” because they initiate us into a household that is bigger than what is under the roof of our house. The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that “families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“baptism is situated in the context of gathered worship because it announces a social and political reality. When we zoom out and consider the reality that baptism signifies, we should be “awed . . . that God can throw down nations and plant new ones with a few drops of water.”[”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Augustine confessed, which is precisely why “our hearts are restless until they find rest in you.” The announcement of the law and the reading of God’s will for our lives represents a significant challenge to the desire for autonomy that is impressed upon us by secular liturgies. The reading of the law is a displacement of our own wants and desires, reminding us that we find ourselves in a world not of our own making—which is why all our attempts to remake it as we want (as if we ourselves could be little creators) are not only doomed to failure; they are also doomed to exacerbate suffering. The announcement of the law reminds us that we inhabit not “nature,” but creation, fashioned by a Creator, and that there is a certain grain to the universe—grooves and tracks and norms that are part of the fabric of the world.[”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“How does that happen? I’m suggesting that Christian education has, for too long, been concerned with information rather than formation; thus Christian colleges have thought it sufficient to provide a Christian perspective, an intellectual framework, because they see themselves as fostering individual “minds in the making.”[6] Hand in hand with that, such an approach reduces Christianity to a denuded intellectual framework that has diminished bite because such an intellectualized rendition of the faith doesn’t touch our core passions. This is because such intellectualization of Christianity allows it to be unhooked from the thick practices of the church. When the Christianity of “Christian education” is reduced to the intellectual elements of a Christian worldview or a Christian perspective, the result is that Christianity is turned “into a belief system available to the individual without mediation by the church.”[”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“The soul therefore needs three things: eyes which it can use aright, looking, and seeing.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Our essential embodiment will keep interrupting our Platonic desire to do away with the body, will keep insinuating itself into our dualistic discourses to remind us that the triune God of creation traffics in ashes and dust, blood and bodies, fish and bread. And he pronounces all of it “very good”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“What if the primary work of education was the transforming of our imagination rather than the saturation of our intellect?”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“When we gather, we are responding to a call to worship; that call is an echo and renewal of the call of creation to be God’s image bearers for the world, and we fulfill the mission of being God’s image bearers by undertaking the work of culture making.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“learning is connected to worship and how, together, these constitute practices of formation and discipleship.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“In worship, we taste “the powers of the age to come” (Heb. 6:5), which births in us a longing for that kingdom to come, because this taste is also a bit of a teaser: it gives us enough of a sense of what’s coming that we look around at our broken world and see all the ways that the kingdom has not yet arrived. “Come, Lord Jesus!” and “How long, O Lord?!” are both prayers of a futural people.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“The Apostles’ Creed itself locates Jesus in time, in the historical reign of Pontius Pilate. The church is not a people gathered by abstract ideas or teachings or ideals; it is a people gathered to the historical person Jesus Christ. The church is a Messiah-people who worship a God who broke into and inhabited time, who suffered at the hands of historical regimes, and who rose “on the third day.” They are gathered as a people to worship the Messiah, who does not float in some esoteric, ahistorical heaven, but who made a dent on the calendar—and will again.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it’s a matter of being the kind of person who loves rightly—who loves God and neighbor and is oriented to the world by the primacy of that love.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“One of the most crucial things to appreciate about Christian formation is that it happens over time. It is not fostered by events or experiences; real formation cannot be effected by actions that are merely episodic. There must be a rhythm and a regularity to formative practices in order for them to sink in—in order for them to seep into our kardia and begin to be effectively inscribed in who we are, directing our passion to the king dom of God and thus disposing us to action that reflects such a desire.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“secular liturgies” show that the so-called secular still testifies to our religious nature, not just because it involves beliefs or “spiritual” messages, but because even the secular is ultimately about love of something ultimate, with practices intended to form our love. Secular liturgies don’t create our desire; they point it, aim it, direct it to certain ends.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“rather than calling into question the gospel of consumption—the sense that acquisition brings happiness and fulfillment. So instead, the evangelical community simply replays the gospel of consumption but with “Jesus” stuff”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“There are no “private” practices; rather, practices are social products that come to have an institutional base and expression. Practices don’t float in society; rather, they find expression and articulation in concrete sites and institutions—which is also how and why they actually shape embodied persons. There are no practices without institutions.”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“we are involved with the world as traditioned actors. The world is the environment in which we swim, not a picture that we look at as distanced observers.[”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“before we are thinkers, we are believers; before we can offer our rational explanations of the world, we have already assumed a whole constellation of beliefs—a worldview—that governs and conditions our perception of the world. Our primordial orientation or comportment to the world is not as thinkers but as believers. Beliefs, we might say, are more “basic” than ideas.[”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“In short, the goal is to push down through worldview to worship as the matrix from which a Christian worldview is born—”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

“Even if the Word is a gift, it is a gift that we can receive only if we are enabled by the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:6–16).”
― James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom (Cultural Liturgies): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation