Here is my contribution to Renew 52: Ideas to Change the Church put out by Luther Seminary. You can still download a free copy by clicking here.
“In my dream, the angel shrugged & said, If we fail this time, it will be a failure of imagination & then she placed the world gently in the palm of my hand”—Brian Andreas
I believe the church today is suffering from a failure of imagination. We have a long and distinguished history of being the church and this tradition has served us well. It allows us to function and helps us remain faithful to God’s call. But I wonder if we are too comfortable with this tradition and history. I wonder if we are resting too much on the foundations and structures provided by those who came before us.
I have attended, worked at, and visited more churches than I can count. And while each congregation, each community, incarnates God’s presence in their own unique way, I find there is a sense of the expected in each of them. When we gather to worship on Sunday mornings we know what to expect. When we become involved in the governing of the church we come to know what to expect. We know what our committee meetings will look like, how long they will take and, often, what their outcome will be.
When we sit in the pews on Sunday morning and hear Scripture readings and sermons it is often as if the stories of our faith have become old news rather than good news. We are suffering from a failure of imagination: a failure to imagine the new ways in which God is calling us to be church, to do ministry, to be Christians.
When we look to the Bible there are plenty of sources for inspiration. Sarah and Abraham get pregnant at an old age despite the medical impossibility and their own disbelief. David defeats Goliath despite severe and obvious disadvantages and all logic. The Canaanite woman convinces Jesus to heal her daughter despite the protests of the disciples and Jesus’ own sense of his mission only to the children of Israel.
When we read these stories we are often called to strengthen our own faith based on the good works God can do in hopeless situations. But if we reread these passages, I believe we can also hear a call to renewed imagination and renewed hope in the promise that God is moving in mysterious and challenging ways.
Combating a failure of imagination is both simple and challenging. It is simple because all it requires is that we begin to imagine anew. It is challenging because often we are unsure how to begin. If we keep in mind that our goal is to allow God to challenge us into new visions of, and practices in, the church, our ministries, and our lives, then it becomes clear that there is no formula—no one way to do this; it will look different in every ministry, every congregation, every life. With that said, allow me to offer a few suggestions to prime your imagination and get you dreaming.
What if we re-imagined our image of God? A common spiritual practice is to recall our images of God from different periods in our life: how did you envision God when you were a small child, a teenager, a young adult, or a new par- ent? What would happen if we acknowledged those images, including our current vision, and challenged ourselves to imagine God differently? How could that new image shape our ministries? Our sense of call? What new places in the world, our community, our Church, might this new vision of God invite us to explore?
Or, what if we took a familiar Bible story and forced ourselves to find something new in it—something that had never occurred to us before? What if we looked for the most scandalous interpretation we could find or think of? What might this “new” story be calling us toward?
Finally, what if we invited our church into a period of dreaming and imagination? What if we held a retreat or an afternoon session in which we encouraged and prompted people to dream anew about God’s call to live into the Kingdom of God? And, what if we actually went about putting some of these new dreams into practice—even if we knew they would fail? What might we learn about ourselves, our ministry, our God, and the call to risk?
In the name of the ever-present, ever-challenging, ever-new Spirit, may God inspire you with new dreams and imaginations for your ministry and your life.
