Imagination in the Life of the Congregation (Part 2 of the conversation)

*Note: Please refer to my blog post from 8/18/10 titled "A Little Imagination, Please!" before reading this post.

Now, to extend the analogy from yesterday to the church...

Imagination Robbers
I had a soccer coach in high school that would often punish members of the team for being joy robbers.  If someone didn't celebrate with a teammate, cheated to block his goal in practice, or committed some other minor infraction, a whistle would blow, joy robber would be shouted, and push ups would follow.

It is my belief that there are many imagination robbers in the Christianity of the west. Therefore, like my coach, I am blowing the whistle, calling out the fouls, and asking the church to do some hard work to correct the situation. If we are not careful about how we train leaders for and form communities of Christian faith, we will rob them of the life-giving imagination that can come through the Spirit of God. Just a few of the imagination robbers I have seen:

• Conferences - every successful church out there seems to have a conference that, though they deny it, really communicates at some point "Here is how you can be more like us." True, they seek to inspire imagination, but it is an imagination limited by the model/style of the church telling the stories.
• Sermons - we've all heard sermons that take complex topics and boil them down into three easy answers, steps, or points.  The heavy focus on application leaves little work for the listener to actually do.  Simply listen, accept what you hear, and put it into practice.
• Small Group - study guides are a huge money maker for Christian publishers, a big time saver for congregation leaders, and a crutch for small groups (leaders, hosts, and members alike). Study guides are often also a killer of imagination as they propose the right way to study the text is to ask and answer seven discussion questions in order and then to apply it to life.
• Christian Literature - in much the same way successful churches run  conferences, successful ministers write books about their ministry (i.e. Rick Warren, Joel Olsteen, Bob Russell, etc.) I have always hated reading these books because they always tell me how to do ministry just like the author and I have never wanted to be the author (not that they are bad people, ministers, or authors - their just not me and I am not them).
• Church programs - maybe you have been in different scenarios, but the church programs I have been a part of throughout my life were often either copied from another church, created by a minister and then imposed upon the church, or simply done because they had always been done. Many a good Christian faithfully serve in these programs (and good for them!). These servants never or rarely are told they possess within them the imagination to make changes, create new ministries, or take part in completely new movements of God in this world.

Returning Imagination to the Imaginative
Imagination in our board games developed as the players learned together the rules of the game, put initial strategies into practice, reflected upon the experience, spent individual brain time thinking about how to play better, and played again, repeating the process of reflection, development, and innovation after each game.  Might the same not be true in the church?

What would it look like to form a community of faith around the word of God as the book that describes the story of the world and allow that community to take first steps in living out their faith together?  Then, what would it look like to encourage that community to reflect upon its initial attempts, discuss how it might be more faithful to the story of God in the Bible, and plan on making a second attempt?  How can we foster ongoing conversations in the church that foster imagination about how to live as the faith community? What is the appropriate context for presenting ideas, reflecting upon what has worked and what has not, how the community is shaped and how it is not, and what victory/success might look like and what it might not?  How do we give up control of the church enough to allow the common Christian to be filled with the imagination and innovations of the Spirit?

For now, I leave you to imagine some possible answers to these questions and to comment with your thoughts about my ideas.

Tomorrow, I'll discuss some implications from the following point made in a book I recently read - Jesus did not build a church (institutional organization), he built a community of disciples.   (Don't worry, it won't be anti-institutional babble that can be quite common and, sometimes, quite mindless).