Light It Up
If I asked you what the best college sports program was, you might have an opinion, and you might not. (Those who do college sports do them passionately.) If I asked you your favorite breakfast, you’d tell me about eggs and bacon or a fruit and yogurt parfait, a McMuffin, avocado toast, banana bread hot from the oven, or coffee with just the right amount of organic coconut creamer.
But what if I asked you about the greatest threat facing the church in America today? What would you say?
You might have a few answers in mind: the secular left or the secular right, hypocrisy, and scandal, an inward focus, getting too political, not getting political enough.
As a pastor, some of these worries have my head popping off my pillow to perseverate in the middle of the night. Every pastor has their own list of concerns borne of culture and context, reading Scripture and the newspaper, looking into the eyes of their congregants to gauge how they are doing and to whom they are listening.
One thing not on my list of worries? Imagination. Which was why I was surprised to hear author and professor Karen Swallow Prior on a recent podcast saying that the greatest threat facing the church in America today was:
An impoverished imagination.
What now?
Dr. Prior told Phil Vischer and Skye Jethani and the listeners of the Holy Post Podcast, “Because we are made in the image of a creative God, we who bear his image are creative, imaginative people. So we are going to use our imaginations whether we intend to or try to or not.”
She drew the line between an impoverished imagination and falling prey to conspiracy theories, which is worth pondering in and of itself. A healthy Christian imagination pursues truth, goodness, and beauty wholeheartedly. An anemic one is liable to get stuck in all sorts of quicksand, following the wrong leaders, listening to the wrong voices.
I love how Jesus puts it in Luke 11:34-35, which says, “Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” ( NIV)
See to it that the light within you is not darkness.
We are bad judges of ourselves. We can’t see who we are very clearly at all. I truly don’t believe I have an accent until a new friend points out my northern-Midwestern lilt on words like “no” (Noooo-ah) and “boat” (Boooooo-at). Then I still don’t believe it until I hear myself on a podcast and realize she was right.
To follow Jesus wholeheartedly, we need healthy imaginations, trained in critical thinking, decadent dreaming, and passionate hope. We are called to train our appetites with spiritual practices, and our imaginations are no different. We are invited to chew on Scripture, ponder it and mull it over, and put ourselves in the story with the disciples, the Psalmists, and the children. To translate it for our context today.
Dostoevsky once wrote that “Beauty will save the world,” yet we’ve often treated it as a luxury item, something we don’t have time to pursue.
In a year of intense leadership stress, my co-pastor husband and I have found ourselves drawn not to manuals or seminars but novels and poetry. He read C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy and Wendell Berry. I read A Children’s Bible and Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Jane Kenyon. We both wept and wept and imagined a deeper, better way.
Imagination takes us beyond ourselves. It helps us place ourselves in the shoes of another. It shows us the narrow road and the broad path and which choices lead to glory and which to ruin.
The fate of the church lies with Jesus. But the work is given to us. The imagination is granted and gifted and given. Will we embrace it, not only for ourselves and our children but for the entire wide, hurting world that God loves?
Pastor Rich Villodas put it this way: “God has a way of exalting the vulnerable. May the church have the same social imagination.”
is a speaker, pastor, and author of Happy Now: Let Playfulness Lift Your Load and Renew Your Spirit, Uncluttered: Free Your Space, Free Your Schedule, Free Your Soul, and Almost Holy Mama: Life-Giving Spiritual Practices for Weary Parents. A resident of California, she and her co-pastor husband have three kids. Together they hike the brush-covered hills, plant veggies, seek wisdom, and embrace hope. You can find her on Twitter, on Facebook, or at www.courtneybellis.com.
Photograph © Tetiana Shyshkina, used with permission
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