A Better Way

imagining how things can be

I’ve confessed before my love for the phrase, “Semper Reformanda.” Not just the phrase, but Semper Reformanda as a general ethos for living the Jesus way or living as the people inhabiting the story God has been telling. I think the people who follow Jesus are the people who are meant, by the nature of our Story, to be continually course-correcting, setting aside “you have heard it said” for the “but I tell you”s of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The trap we always find ourselves tempted to fall into is dullness and trading our prophetic imaginations of what can be for the hubris of living with the false confidence we’ve arrived at the pinnacle of the fulfillment of our story.

It's the same vibe I felt with my class in high school whenever we sat in the cafeteria, eating our lunch and mocking the photographs that lined the walls of the classes that had graduated before us. We would laugh at their haircuts, their clothing, the style of their glasses – from the self-assured confidence that we had arrived to be the graduating class that would forever define what “cool” and “style” really meant. There would be no progress after us. There would be no changes necessary or worth making.

I sometimes imagine the students in the current graduating class having a go at the high school class picture from 1981. Despite the promises the Jetsons made us about flying cars and machines that would dress us, it didn’t seem like there was anything worth imagining beyond us.

Thank God for the dreamers. For the prophetic imagineers. For the people unwilling to live in the institutions as they were who maintained scope for the imagination of what could be.

Incredulity towards the meta-narrative means, in part, that we live out of an ethos that refuses to believe that the world around us and the story we are in can easily be explained in mathematical equations and scientific formulas. Life is more enchanted than that. Even science seems to recognize this.

Francis Collins, scientist and leader of the human genome project, wrote,

“Science is progressive and self-correcting: no significantly erroneous conclusions or false hypotheses can be sustained for long, as newer observations will ultimately knock down incorrect constructs. But over a long period of time, a consistent set of observations sometimes emerges that leads to a new framework of understanding. That framework is then given a much more substantive description, and is called a “theory”—the theory of gravitation, the theory of relativity, or the germ theory, for instance.” (Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief)

The story of science is the story of status quo beliefs about how things are and how things work giving way to a new discovery that sometimes confirms but often upends the currently held practices and beliefs. And that all starts with a prophetic imagination. The capacity to believe that what you have always thought might not be all there is or the final word or even the best word on a given subject. There could be a better word. Or a better world.

It seems, however, that even those who were brave enough to dream of a new world are ready, at a future time, to go to war with those who suggest there’s even more to the story, that our story is leading to another change, that we haven’t figured it all out, that we haven’t quite arrived – that we’re not “all that.”

Walter Brueggemann, in his book, the Prophetic Imagination, shows our tendency – from Moses to the disciples of Jesus – to enshrine our own experience of reform. There’s a beautiful moment in the Gospel according to Mark that shows this human tendency. The story goes like this:

John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone using your name to cast out demons, but we told him to stop because he wasn’t in our group.”

“Don’t stop him!” Jesus said. “No one who performs a miracle in my name will soon be able to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us. If anyone gives you even a cup of water because you belong to the Messiah, I tell you the truth, that person will surely be rewarded. (Mark 9:38-41)

In the charismatic circles I rolled in during the early 2000s, we would have said, “Hey pastor, we saw someone without an official ministry team badge casting demons out of somebody!” And we would have put a stop to it. We’d figured out the “divine protocol” and if you didn’t have our stamp of approval (the ministry team badge or the red dot on your name tag) you better not be casting out demons willy-nilly.

I was talking to a friend recently and trying to explain this experience that comes up so often. You meet with someone or a small group of people and someone offers up an idea about something they feel we really, really need to do in our church. And in 1991 it was an innovative idea. I’m not saying old things can’t become new again, but context changes. 12 years ago we had a big board in our church lobby with slots to hold brochures and we had a ton of brochures that visitors could pick up that would answer their questions about our youth ministry or our food pantry or baptism or our children’s ministry or women’s ministry. Even 12 years ago, in the age of the church website and emerging social media, a rack of brochures mostly represented the death of a lot of trees for no good reason.

But still, someone – usually close to my age – will ask me if we’ve ever thought of putting out some brochures with info about our church – because in their experience that was a new innovation, it made an impression on them somewhere along the line and a part of them would look at a wall of brochures and think, “Cool.”

It's not cool. Not really. Not anymore. It was, but context changes.

Brueggemann writes, “The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.” (Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination)

Walking the Camino de Santiago involved several long, uphill climbs. There were “peaks” we could see as the path went on ahead of us and we could muster enough imagination to get to that peak. It was demoralizing to reach that “peak” only to discover that it wasn’t “THE” peak. If it was toward the end of a long day it was especially challenging to find the imagination for climbing the next peak. It was easier to just imagine we had gone far enough for that day’s hike and that this peak was “peaky” enough. After 40 years of ministry (honestly, after 20 years of ministry) engaging the prophetic imagination can feel daunting. I think it must be mostly the same for anyone who has been a part of the church for over a decade. It’s easier to think about re-doing what has been “successful” or whatever we have the fondest memories of as the pinnacle of our church experience. As having gone far enough.

Think of the innovations that have been a part of our Story already. What seemed to be an exclusively Jewish story suddenly expanded to include Gentiles. What was Middle-Eastern spread across continents. Core theology has been hypothesized and then canonized into dogma. We have been eucharistic and evangelistic. Our meeting places have been caves and cathedrals and open fields and living rooms with no small amount of controversy among us as we’ve moved from one to the other. We’ve been patriarchal and matriarchal and egalitarian. We’ve fled to the desert when it was too popular and too easy to be a follower of Jesus and we’ve huddled in catacombs where it’s been dangerous to sing out loud. We have been the persecuted and we have been the persecutors. We have been Crusaders and we have been Peacemakers. We have been violent and we have repented.

And we’ve repented.

And we’ve repented.

But the Story we find ourselves in invites us, over and over again to Semper Reformanda. What can we imagine? What could be? What aspect of the kingdom coming do we not see in our here and now that we need to imagine and ask, empower and equip the artists to help us envision? I’m not talking about tweaks to the system or moving the service time by thirty minutes or creating a new hierarchical system of governance but rather a new way of embodying THE Way and being a manifestation of the kingdom of life and freedom and abundance and love that’s coming into the world? How many layers of dragon-skin must we look to Aslan to cut us out of like young Eustace in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader? What do we need to let go of today that we think we cannot live without so that we might receive the beautiful thing God has prepared for us to be from before the foundation of the world?

Or is it impossible to imagine that when Jesus preached the kingdom coming that our forms and institutions today are not the pinnacle of all he was imagining? If there’s anything I’ve learned from our Story so far, there’s always a better way for the day in which we find ourselves. Will we make room for the dreamers and seers and truth-tellers and poets?

It’s not nostalgia that we desperately need, it is people with prophetic imagination who can look at a tiny seed and describe for us all the kind of fruit that it could produce, the kind of beauty hidden in its plainness.