DR. JACK R. VAN ENS, AUTHOR

CREATIVE GROWTH INC.

9745 W. 77 TH DRIVE

ARVADA, CO 80005

TEL. 303-420-7416

E-mail: vanensfam@juno.com

Web site: www.thelivinghistory.com

IMAGINATION IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR WHAT AILS CHURCHES

What pops into your mind when you hear the word "imaginary?" As a youngster, my firstborn had an imaginary friend. When I plunked into a chair, my son started to wail because dad had almost squished his friend who occupied this seat.

I smiled when son Craig talked incessantly about his imaginary chum. How easy it might have been to dismiss such childish chatter as outlandish, juvenile and made-up.

Clergy confide how they shy away from boldly using their imaginations because, acting like my skepticism towards Craig's fanciful friend, ecclesiastical rules forbid deviating from the norm. A priest confided, "Cookies go to those who seldom front Church Law. Crumbles are left for those who dare diverge from what's tried and assumed true."

Using imagination to further Christ's mission is often frowned on because churchly strictures crimp it. Throughout history, we see a great irony played out. The Church swears allegiance to Creator God who majestically spun stars into the solar system and propelled planets into orbit. Responding, the Church fosters a track record where creative energies that formed the faith are spurned. Imagination is suspect.

Part of this negativity towards using the imagination arises because the scriptures repeatedly report it as bad, evil, a nest of nasty habits. A venerable way the Bible uses "imagination" links it with the Devil's plotting. Scripture also equates a stubborn heart that rejects God as a prime result of imagination careening out of control. Among six or seven sins God hates, causing them to be abominations to Him, a sage warns, is "a heart that devises wicked imaginations" ( Proverbs 6:18).

Craig Dykstra, a former classmate at Princeton Theological Seminary, now serves as vice president for religion at the Lilly Foundation, Inc. He dispenses huge grants to pastors and religious organizations daring to try new forms of ministry. Dykstra maintains that effective pastors are those who regularly put their imaginations into action. He writes about this valuable trait in an essay, "A Way of Seeing: Imagination and the Pastoral Life" ( Christian Century Magazine, April 8, 2008, pp. 26).

"...the kind of imagination I have been trying to describe," Dykstra exclaims, "lies at the core of almost every good ministry. Without this gyroscope, it is difficult for pastors to keep their balance in the midst of all that is required of them and all that happens to them for good and for ill."

One ill shriveling pastoral imagination is the Church's tendency to crimp it. Dykstra writes as if he is oblivious to this reality. He sounds giddy at the essay's end, "Such ministry [which overflows imaginatively] has about it a freshness, an improvisatory character, a liveliness that is itself infectious. Thus an imagination that is at its heart a seeing in depth-seeing reality truthfully-turns out to be an imagination full of creativity, an imagination that sees what is not yet and begins to create it."

Unfortunately, pastors complain about how such euphoria about using imagination within churches they serve is aborted, not applauded; curtailed, not commended.

Why?

Imaginary routes aren't clearly marked or well lit. They snake into a dim future. Using the imagination means we must gamble, take risks, thrust ourselves forward into what lurks ahead. Churches prefer certainty anchored in creeds and traditions. They religiously fall back on surety rather than fling forward into what's untested.

We seldom get out of ruts and break new ground if we wait for a sure word. Creativity invariably crops up in unstable soil. Imagination springs to life when a bishop or presbytery executive hasn't surveyed all the terrain, marking what's out of bounds.

A journalist asked Ernest Hemingway how he invented the plot to The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway rejected any notion that he had the full story in hand before he wrote the first paragraph to his novel. "When the fish swam around the bait, I didn't know whether it was going to take it or not," admitted Hemingway. "I had to discover whether or not it was going to take it."

Another noted novelist, Flannery O'Connor, who wove religious themes into her plots, endorsed Hemingway's insistence on imagination. Describing how she wrote one of her celebrated short stories, O'Connor confessed, "I didn't know how it was going to come out. I had to discover how it was going to end."

When visiting Princeton NJ, I linger at a bust of Einstein erected near city hall. Einstein railed again convention. The only creed he bowed before professed how no dogma corralled his imagination.

Biographer Walter Isaacson, who wrote Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), describes how Einstein extolled the imaginary way. "Throughout his life, Albert Einstein would retain the intuition and the awe of a child," marvels Isaacson. "He never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena-magnetic fields, gravity, inertia, acceleration, light beams-which grown-ups find so commonplace. ... 'People like you and me never grow old,' he wrote to a friend later in life. 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.'"