A few weeks ago church leaders from across the country got together in Alexandria, Va., for the Missio Alliance conference. They met to proclaim a shared sense of call to re-imagine church, how we tell the gospel story, mission and worship. At the end of the conference participants I talked to were encouraged, challenged and motivated to go back home and take on the work set out for them.
But in those as-we-were-leaving, just-outside-the-door conversations I kept hearing a quiet confessing question: “I agree. But how?” How do we reinvent ourselves to connect with a “post-Christendom” world without losing sight of who we are? How do we move into new areas of mission and ministry and not alienate the congregation already dedicated and discipling? How do we tell people about the Good News when we ourselves struggle to understand and articulate the goodness for ourselves?
Lisa Cole Smith
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These are good questions. These are the right questions and I suspect part of the reason so many leave these kinds of conversations with more questions than answers is because there is no program in a box to take home with a set of instructions and an easy explanation of how asking these questions is actually good for our congregations.
I’ll tell you what, though: I kinda hope we never really “figure it out.” I hope instead we can stay in a posture of humility, looking around with our hands spread out, wide-eyed, asking “How, God?” I think in this place where we are faced with questions (not about who or what we believe, but about how we believe) we can finally start to let go of what might have “worked” in the past and start asking God to give us a renewed imagination.
This is what I believe we should be praying for — enlarged imaginations. If we are to re-imagine the life of the church in light of what God is currently busy doing in the world, we are going to need a healthy, functioning, vibrant imagination. And we haven’t been too big on fostering that for quite some time now. Jesus told paradigm-shattering stories on the fly, shaking up people’s expectations, using what they thought they knew and turning it on its head. Peter and Paul had to look into the variety of cultures they encountered and imagine how to tell this good news in ways that captured people’s hearts, cutting them to the core of their need to know and be known by God.
We can do that, too. God has given the Church an imagination beyond compare. After all, we have been given a vision of a new Heaven and a new Earth. We have been told to live in anticipation and expectation of the Resurrected God Incarnate coming again to bring ultimate justice, peace and love. We have been given The Vision of what it looks like to be fully alive in Christ. We have been shown what it means to live as humans fulfilled in the image of God. With all of this floating around in our heads and hearts, how can we not let our imaginations spark and sizzle with creative expressions of how this is lived out in the present?
Unfortunately, it is easy for us humans to allow things like fear, complacency and satisfaction to dull our imaginative gifts. After a while we feel insecure using them and surrender instead to what is determined to “work.” Only, now we are starting to see that maybe it isn’t “working” all that well after all — at least not for enough people. I think we need our imaginations more than ever for what God is calling us to in this place and time. I pray that we are on the verge of a different kind of great awakening, one in which the Holy Spirit unleashes creative and imaginative blessings on all of Christ’s church.
God has provided us with a way forward, an answer, a “how?” Only this time it can’t come in a package. It’s time for us all to do the hard work of stretching our creative muscles and jumpstarting our God-given superpowers — the ability to see what can now only dimly be seen and to show others what we are so excited about. I know we can do this because that is what God is calling us to do. Now.
We have every tool available to solve the issues confronting us today but we’ve got to stretch and pray, allowing God to massage this underused muscle in our collective body. If we do, I believe we will be rewarded not only with answers to “how” but also with a renewed understanding of “who,” “what” and “why?” Imagine that!
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccf.net) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, in Alexandria, Va.