Trouble with Paris: Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises by Mark Sayers

From the Publisher

What if you're living in the wrong reality?

Doesn't everyone want the good life these days? Our shopping mall world offers us a never-ending array of pleasures to explore. Consumerism promises us a vision of heaven on earth-a reality that's hyper-real. We've all experienced hyperreality: a candy so 'grape-ey' it doesn't taste like grapes any more; a model's photo so manipulated that it doesn't even look like her; a theme park version of life that tells us we can have something better than the real thing. But what if this reality is not all that it's cracked up to be? Admit it, we've been ripped off by our culture and its version of reality that leaves us lonely, bored, and trapped. But what's the alternative?

In The Trouble With Paris, pastor Mark Sayers shows us how the lifestyles of most young adults (19-35) actually work against a life of meaning and happiness to sabotage their faith. Sayers shows how a fresh understanding of God's intention for our world is the true path to happiness, fulfillment, and meaning.

Publishers Weekly

Sayers, an emerging church pastor in Australia and director of the young adult discipleship ministry Über, focuses on what sociologists have termed "hyperreality"—the happy, carefree, better-than-real life that advertising promises us. Sayers believes that this vision of life, in which acquiring more is a central motivation and personal fulfillment is paramount, has become a folk religion of sorts in the Western world and is the single biggest threat to Christian faith. In his experience, when young adults buy into this vision of life, satisfaction and happiness elude them. They begin to question God, although faith is the only path to true happiness. The book is broken into three sections examining the hyperreal world, the reality we live in and God's reality. It grew out of an address of the same name; Thomas Nelson released a related DVD curriculum and study guide in February. The title is obscure, and Sayers's negativity about the culture is almost endless, but the book's comprehensive examination of the challenges consumerism presents to faith is unique and should spark meaningful discussion. (June 3)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Following Jesus in a World of Plastic Promises

Copyright © 2007 Mark Sayers
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-1999-2

Why Your Faith Does Not Work

She looked like a girl who had it all. She was strikingly beautiful, confident, and hip. Half the guys in the room were looking at her, and all the girls in the room wanted to be her. She had ticked all the boxes: she was deeply involved in her church, had a high-paying job, traveled all over the world, and had a social life most of us would be jealous of, with a bevy of male suitors. Yet for her this meant nothing.

She looked me square in the eye with pain in her face and told me, "I was promised an awesome life!" I was immediately thrown. This girl had everything that society tells us will make us happy. Yet as I listened to the reality of her life, I realized that nothing could be further from the truth. Behind the glamorous exterior was a person who was struggling, who was unsure of who she was, who struggled with depression and with the dissatisfaction of constantly feeling as if she needed more. Her life was in limbo, and she was constantly waiting for this awesome life to turn up, yet it never came. She had finally come to the realization that she was miserable, and she felt very, very ripped off.

This is a story that can be heard among thosewho have left the Christian faith because it didn't deliver them the perfect life they believed they were promised. It can also be heard in the dissatisfaction and frustrations of those who still have faith. And finally, it can be heard in those who never had faith yet invested all of their hope in the fact that one day the perfect future will arrive. If we are to live lives of meaning, satisfaction, and happiness, it is essential that we understand what effects our culture has on our quality of life and quality of faith. Let's begin with faith.

SOMETHING IS EATING YOUR FAITH

Throughout the developed Western world, a corrosive epidemic is eating away at the faith lives of Christians. It assails us in our darkest moments; it comes to us at three o'clock in the morning when we can't sleep. It confronts us at every corner, three to ten thousand times a day. It whispers to our hearts that we've got it wrong, that our faith should not be in Jesus Christ of Nazareth but in something else. In this context your faith is getting torn apart and most likely will not survive. Contrary to popular belief, you and your friends probably won't lose your faith because of sex, drugs, or doubt but for a much more insidious reason. Sure, you can fight it; you can think, It won't be me. But how do you fight an enemy you can't name, an opponent you can't see?

The thing that will eat away at your faith, make it impotent, and finally kill it off cannot easily be named. It is a framework, a formation system, an entire worldview. It tells us how to live and how to act. It speaks to our sense of identity. It shapes our personality. It tells us what to love, what to commit to, and what to have hope in. It is a virus that eats our faith from the inside out. This virus is the allure of the hyperreal world.

If you want to blame someone or something for your life not ending up as wonderfully as you were led to believe it would, a good place to start is the cultural phenomenon called hyperreality. The combination of a hyperconsumer culture, mass media, and rampant individualism has created a world of hyperreality. What is hyperreality? It's a term I learned from a French guy named Jean Baudrillard. He was a twentieth-century philosopher who took a trip across America, visiting places like Las Vegas and Disneyland. He said that our culture had become hyperreal, meaning that we could now have things that were even better than the real thing. The media-drenched world in which we live has overextended our expectations of life.

Following are some examples of hyperreality:

* A fairly pretty girl works as a model to support her studies. She does a photo shoot for a fashion magazine. The photographer skillfully uses wardrobe, lighting, and makeup during the shoot. After the shoot, computers are used to take away the model's imperfections and to improve her overall look. The magazine hits the newsstands, and through the magic of technology, a fairly pretty girl has been turned into a stunningly beautiful cover model. Thousands of women buy the magazine and wonder why they cannot be as beautiful and glamorous as the model on the cover, not realizing that if they walked past the actual model in the street, they would not even notice her. * A man drives to work every day past a billboard advertising vacations on an idyllic Pacific island. As he works in his stressful office job, he fantasizes about relaxing on the white beaches under the palm trees of the beautiful Pacific paradise he sees on the billboard. The man purchases a two-week vacation on the island. Upon arrival, the man discovers that for most of the year it rains. He tries swimming only to find that the coral cuts up his feet and that he has to be careful not to contract malaria from the mosquitoes on the island. The man spends most of his vacation watching satellite TV in his resort room. * A group of friends share a house. Each week they watch a situation comedy about a group of friends who share a house as well. As they watch, each person wonders to why they cannot be as close and as happy as the characters in the sitcom. In real life, the cast of actors cannot stand each other.

Hyperreality means that often we cannot tell the difference between what advertising tells us about products, places, and people and what they are like in the real world. In the rush to sell us things, corporations have sacrificed reality; truth telling is gone. Sociologist Krishan Kumar explains:

Our world has become so saturated with images and symbols that a new "electronic reality" has been created, whose effect is to obliterate any sense of an objective reality lying behind the images and symbols. In this "simulated" world, images become objects, rather than reflecting them; reality becomes hyper-reality. In hyper-reality it is no longer possible to distinguish the imaginary from the real ... the true from the false.

An ad by the New York tourism board is not going to tell us about the street crime, high prices, pollution, and poverty we would find in the city. Rather, they are going to show us the New York we know from countless movies and TV shows such as Seinfeld, Sex and the City, and Friends. And if they are smart, they will use the Frank Sinatra song, "New York, New York" to top it all off. After seeing an advertisement for New York and experiencing New York, we would be left scratching our heads and asking, "Which is the real New York-the metropolis we know from our years of watching popular culture or the actual city situated on the East Coast?" We would have confused the symbol (the popular culture's imagined New York) with the real city. Of course, the popular Hollywood version of New York would be the more attractive one. This is hyperreality. It gives us a world of symbols that are detached from the reality of what they are supposed to be symbolizing, and they appear more attractive than the original objects they are representing.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Trouble with Paris by Mark Sayers Copyright © 2007 by Mark Sayers. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---