Cultivating Imagination

If there is one concept about missional leadership that has been in my mind lately, it is the idea of cultivating the missional imagination of the Christian community.  I believe God appoints leaders and does give them vision and inspiration to lead.  However, I also believe God can do the same in and through the followers, or members of the community.  Good leaders, I think, will help their community travel down a certain path God has revealed to them WHILE inspiring the community to find unique ways to actually go down the path.

To explore this further, maybe it is like the TV Game Show, Amazing Race.  The leaders of the show reveal and explain the destination to contestants, but do not tell the contestants exactly how to get their.  Clues are given, aides are provided, and the teams are never completely abandoned to the extent where they could be hurt.  This all adds up to empowering each team to find their way to the goal.  Some make it more quickly than others, but all eventually make it.  My guess is the experience is much more memorable and powerful (both positively and negatively) than it would have been if they were simply given directions to follow.

Leadership in the church, I believe, can empower people to use their imagination to follow the path God has in store.  The innovations, ideas, and inventions the Christian community might come up with could quite literally change lives and change the world.  Those who are speaking into my life - authors, practitioners, friends, family, teachers - are cultivating within me a missional imagination.  As the imagination is ingited by these outside sources, the Spirit of God within me adds fuel, leading to a blazing fire of imagination just waiting to burst forth into my life.  Now, my job is to spread the imagination to others.  Imagine this: 100 committed Christians imagining how God could use them to be missionaries to their own context and dreaming about how they can help others imagine the same.  I imagine that would be quite the powerful community.

Imagine if...