Showing results by author "Jefferson Bethke" in All Categories

Jefferson Bethke burst into the cultural conversation in 2012 with a passionate, provocative poem titled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.” The four-minute video of Bethke’s spoken-word performance literally became an overnight sensation, with seven million YouTube views in its first forty-eight hours (and 24+ million within a year). The message hit like a blizzard on social-media sites and in forwarded e-mails, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged.

This is your wake-up call to resist the Hustle culture and embrace the slowness of Jesus. Our culture makes constant demands of us: Do more. Accomplish more. Buy more. Post more. Be more. In following these demands, we have indeed become more: More anxious. More tired. More hurt. More depressed. More frantic. What we are doing isn't working! In a society where hustle is the expectation, busyness is the norm and information is king, we have forgotten the fundamentals that make us human, anchor our lives, and provide meaning.

Young people today enter adulthood with expectations of blissful dating followed by romantic, fulfilling marriages only to discover they've been duped. They learned about love and sexuality from social media, their friends, Disney fairy tales, pornography, or even their own rocky pasts, and they have no idea what healthy, lifelong love is supposed to be like. The results are often disastrous, with this generation becoming one of the most relationally sick, sexually addicted, and divorce-ridden in history.

Jesus was most upset at people for seeing but not seeing. For missing it. For succumbing to the danger and idolatry of forcing God into preconceived ideals. What if there were a better way? What if Jesus came not to help people escape the world but rather to restore it? Best-selling author and spoken word artist Jefferson Bethke says that "Christians have the greatest story ever told, but we aren't telling it".

Every heart longs to be seen and understood. Yet most of our lives are unwitnessed. We spend our days working, driving, parenting. We sometimes spend whole seasons feeling unnoticed and unappreciated. So how do we find contentment when we feel so hidden? In Unseen, Sara Hagerty suggests that this is exactly what God intended. He is the only one who truly knows us.

The West's multi-century experiment with the nuclear family has failed. Its toxic hyper-individualism has left us with an unprecedented number of broken homes. Jefferson Bethke delivers the solution we've been seeking: a plan for taking back our families from the modern myth that has derailed us and a vision for returning to the life-giving, biblical model of multigenerational teams. In Take Back Your Family, Bethke uncovers the historic events that led to our obsession with the nuclear family, then exposes the devastating effects of our current "me culture".