October 12, 2006
Baptizing the Imagination
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Our Good Friday this year included no sermon, no worship team, no cutting edge technology or lavish drama. And still people lingered for hours to pray, teenagers returned later in the night with their friends, and children begged their parents for the opportunity to stay longer. Why? I believe it's because our church chose to nourish the most emaciated aspect of people's spiritual lives - their imaginations.
Traditionally discipleship has focused upon two areas - knowledge and skills. Churches have poured enormous energy into communicating knowledge about God through preaching, classes, and small groups. In recent years an increasing number of voices have challenged the effectiveness of information based discipleship. That has resulted in churches shifting their focus to skill driven formation - "how to" have a healthy marriage, share the gospel, or parent difficult teenagers.
However, knowledge and skill based models, while necessary components of spiritual formation, both miss the imaginative aspect of the human spirit. And by ignoring the intuitive capacity of the mind the church has essentially surrendered people's imaginations to the pop secular culture without a fight.
In his stirring book The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann says, "We need to ask if our consciousness and imagination have been so assaulted and co-opted by the royal consciousness [popular culture] that we have been robbed of the courage or power to think an alternative thought." Those filling the pews every Sunday may be full of information about God, and they may be expertly trained to obey God, but without an imagination enraptured by God they will be powerless to live the life he's called them to. They simply cannot imagine living any differently than the culture around them.
Without significant re-cultivation and sanctification of the imagination, aided by God's Spirit, a disciple will be incapable of weeding out sin and living obediently. Oswald Chambers understood this reality. He knew that if "your imagination of God is starved then when you come up against difficulties, you have no power, you can only endure in darkness."
Thankfully many are coming to recognize the importance of imagination in spiritual formation. Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer, author of The Drama of Doctrine and professor of systematic theology says:
"Imagination has been a dirty word for too long?The imagination enables us to see the parts of the Bible as forming a meaningful whole. But we can go further still. The imagination also enables us to see our lives as part of that same meaningful whole. This is absolutely crucial. Christians don't need more information about the Bible, trivial or otherwise. What the church needs today is the ability to indwell or inhabit the text."
Using the imagination to inhabit scripture may seem like a new idea to American evangelicals, but the practice is far from original. Since the middle ages practitioners of Ignatian spirituality have used their imaginations to enter biblical narratives, and Brother Lawrence has instructed Christians for centuries to practice the presence of the Lord with their intuitive senses. The beauty of these ancient models of spiritual formation is that they require no technology, no monstrous church building, not even a digital projector.
On Good Friday we helped people enter the biblical narrative with their imaginations by adapting the traditional stations of the cross into an experiential journey with Jesus from Gethsemane to the grave. While holding a bag of silver coins people contemplated what they valued more than Christ. Children, using a stool if they were too short, lifted a cross suspended from the ceiling while considering if they would have helped Jesus carry his burden. Newcomers jumped as someone nailed a spike into a beam while Isaiah 53 was softly read. Some adults who have known the story since childhood were brought to tears as their imaginations, perhaps for the first time, traveled with Jesus through the suffering.
Ultimately, we do not need multi-sensory events or media saturated worship to engage the imagination. Sometimes we just need the space (devoid of noise and clutter) and the permission (from leaders who affirm the importance of the imagination) to apprehend God and his story intuitively. When biblical knowledge and pragmatic skills are linked once again to an imagination ravished by God, we may finally find the power to obey.
Read more about the imagination's role in spiritual formation in the Fall issue of Leadership.
Posted by Skye Jethani on October 12, 2006
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Comments
Thanks for reminding me. I have always valued story telling, drama, skits, and etc. as part of sharing the Word. This is a good example of what we can do when we get back to basics. Thanks!
Posted by: Chaplain Sam at October 12, 2006
Amen!
Meditating on Scripture takes us places in God that memorization can't; silence before God takes us places that talking (in the form of teaching and preaching) can't. It's impossible to commodify and quantify those disciplines of the spiritual imagination.
So much of what happens in a church is aimed at engaging the left brain (logic) part of people's lives. Though many people are discovering some of the other disciplines typically reserved for the mystics among us (disciplines like solitude, silence, meditation), they are usually an individual pursuit, not part of a corporate church experience. Thanks, Skye, for showing us that nurturing spiritual imagination as a means of encountering God can happen corporately. We need to hear more of these stories - not for "programming ideas", but to capture a vision of what can be...
Posted by: Michelle Van Loon at October 12, 2006
I couldn't agree more. I just taught a class at a local university. In this class of students in their late teens early twenties I discovered that they came alive not when I used movie clips but when they were given time, space and induction.
look forward to next post,
jt
Posted by: jazztheologian at October 12, 2006
This is a great article Skye. I think that is one of the reasons I have always gravitated toward the mystics: to engage my imagination as well as the rational mind. Our church did about the same thing for our Good Friday service, and it was one of the most incredible experiences I have had.
Shawna Renee
Posted by: Shawna R. B. Atteberry at October 12, 2006
Amen. This also has implications on our pop Gospel of reducing spirituality and faith and discipleship to a few steps and "principles" that we insert into our brain which are supposedly easy to implement.
In the mis-guided passion to "save souls" well meaning Christians have forgotten that Jesus called is disciples to follow which is active not passive. Following was crucial for any meaningful teaching of Jesus to make sense and even then the disciples struggles!
The Gospel must be the story of God once again. A story we are invited to live in, because it tells what is really true. That is to say where nation-states offer "freedom, justice and hapiness" God in Christ offers his followers a path of life, death and resurrection with the proimse of all things being made new.
Posted by: Sam Andress at October 12, 2006
Skye,
Great post! I think your comment that discipleship is more than just information retention is apt. I do see knowledge as foundational to imagination, however--not saying you'd disagree with that. Folks can just run off with the notion of "imagining" and start imagining things that are decidedly un-biblical, if we aren't firmly grounded in the revealed Word of the triune God.
Hence Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1 that their hearts would be enlightened--dare I say it, that they would imagine?--to understand, grasp, seize and be "enraptured" (as you put it so well) by what is become reality in Christ, our hope. May we have such an imagination that glories in God's salvation of His people in Jesus!
Again, great post. Blessings.
Posted by: Ryan at October 12, 2006
Thanks so much for this post. I completely agree on the need to include evocative experience and imagination in our churches. The Good Friday service at my church this year consisted solely of a 'reader's-theatre'-style dramatic reading of the Passion narrative. The most stirring and humbling moments for me were those in which the whole congregation read aloud. Our part? The words of the crowd in Jerusalem, demanding that Jesus be crucified. What a powerful way to remember our own frailty and culpability, and the grace that saves us from both. Thanks again.
Posted by: Lindsay at October 12, 2006
Great Post!
Over the past few months, God has been teaching me about the use of the imagination in relating to Him - worshiping Him!
And this is what the youth ministry I am involved with in Singapore wants to explore in 2007. Pray for us ...
Enough of eclipsing God!
Posted by: Kelvin at October 14, 2006
Skye's use of the word "multi-sensory" is interesting. It sounds like his service was VERY multi-sensory. People that think that post-moderns want MTV-style videos on big-screen televisions are completely missing the point.
Posted by: Nathan Woodward at October 14, 2006
Sounds somewhat similar to an Eastern Orthodox Good Friday service. You should go to one some time. You'll be blow away ;)
Posted by: rcm at October 15, 2006
You say, "True spiritual formation requires more than Bible knowledge and skills" - It does; it requires obedience. Jesus said, "if you love me, keep my commandments." (John 14:16) It takes very little imagination to do that but it takes a lot of self-denial. It's not mystical or very imaginative but it is the truth. Sadly, not many wish to do it though.
Posted by: Melody at October 17, 2006
Just another cleverly devised scheme to commodify the life of the church. It all sounds so post-modern and spiritually sexy, but all it seems to amount to is another means to capture, allure and manipulate people. When will the books come out: "How to stir up your imagination and inspire others?"; "Reading the Bible Imaginatively: The Sky is the Limit" or "Rationalize Anything from Scripture with Your Imagination?"
I don't deny that the Good Friday service was a meaningful time for that particular body. But once we start to sell 'it' as a means we have taken the Spirit out of the equation, essentially stealing His copyright. The prophets of old were not stirred up by their own imaginations: they were impacted by, and conduits of, God's imagination. We have become too proud of our own abilities, but all they seem to amount to in the end is sex without love.
Posted by: colin at October 17, 2006
Nathan, you said, "People that think that post-moderns want MTV-style videos on big-screen televisions are completely missing the point." I agree.
I think Skye's point is that using our imagination in worship is an interactive experience. Too often worship ministers--myself included, though I'm just a volunteer drama guy--create interactive and imaginative experiences for the people leading worship.
The congregation then just becomes an audience.
Posted by: Mark Goodyear at October 18, 2006
Good Post!
I think that engaging the imagination is very important to keeping up a commitment to Christ. We need to keep our eyes on God's Big Picture. The story of Jesus is the most shocking and dramatic story there is, and even if we know it backwards and forwards, we need to step back and acknowledge that every once in a while. It helps us keep focus when the day to day obedience becomes tedious.
Posted by: alice at October 18, 2006
Art is metaphor!
And metaphor is a vehicle through which truth is revealed in Scripture.
If it's good enough for Jesus it's good enough for me!
-H-
Posted by: Hal Moran at October 20, 2006