Thinking about the “future of  mission” (or of anything for that matter) requires imagination.

A couple of decades ago I began to collect ideas and images of the future. One of several descriptors I used to paint portraits of the future was this:The future is violent.

This seems more obvious today than it was 20 years ago, but it was obvious then too. The attacks on New York of September 11 made imagination less necessary to picture a violent future. And, given the fact that there were more terrorists attacks in 2009 than in any year since 9/11, I see no reason to project anything other than that the future is still violent.

But I’m not writing about violence today. I am hoping to provoke your imagination about the possibilities for creating a different future. It is the act of embodying this imagined future in the concreteness of “now” that makes for leading a missional life and adventure. Because of the huge space between the world “as it is” and the world as it will be, it is impossible to think about the future of our mission without thinking about the role of imagination.

The faculty of imagination is at the center of what it means to be human, and is often overlooked in our churches. In fact, more often than not, we consider the imagination the source of heresy, a playground for the the things that haunt the soul. I suggest that perhaps the imagination is also where we engage with God.

Think about it like this. The Bible is a book for the imagination and only the imaginative can begin to comprehend it. It describes a world that no one of us has ever seen. In that future world the lion lays down with the lamb, instruments of war are converted into agricultural tools, there is a harmonious community of nations, an Earth Tribe, so to speak, and God and man sit at the same table.

Imagination is the power to create space for the new, to see connections where there are none, and to act as if worlds not-yet-born are a fully functioning reality.

Religions are forged in the imagination.

Civilization is conceived in the imagination.

The future is born in the imagination.

Walt Disney is famous for the idea that “if you can dream it, you can do it.” He understood the power of the imagination. So must we. The people who follow Christ are an “imagine”-”nation”, a nation, a clan of imagineers, of seers. Like the characters in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this nation is moved by compelling visions that are not fully realized but are fully imagined. In our traditions and in our churches we often value reason, intuition, sobriety. I think we should also value those who are inebriated with imagination that shapes the world towards the kind of future and world none of us has ever seen.

What do you think?

The art for this post is from Larry Price Art — http://www.larrypriceart.com/