Prompting: Choosing Imagination in a Time of Church Change

We are living in challenging times for the church.  I don’t think, I need to rehearse the story of our culture changing relationship with the church. We have a lot of choices: give up, maintain in a hospice mode, dig in and try harder doing the same things we have done before or is there another way? My family system tells me to gut it out and move ahead.

My maternal grandfather was a North Carolina farmer who knew how to make something from nothing. He started farming cotton and ended up successfully starting at least five business.  At 83 or 84, he had both leg amputated due to adult on-set diabetes.  After his legs healed, he was fitted for two prosthetics.  The physician said as he was putting the last one on, “Mr. Dedmon, it will take you weeks if not months to be able to walk.”  My granddad, PaPa, replied very assertively, “Move aside.”  And he walked that day and every day, until his week of death. There are not many PaPas out there in ministry today and even then they are just maintaining the church.

I not a person to give up, like my grandfather, and yet I’m not going to bang my head against the wall of same ole, same ole. So, what are our options? 

Mike Yaconelli captured my attention with this: “Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness. Playing Superman and feeling alive, hearing a voice deep inside, a warm and loving voice, a living, believing, voice, a wild and dangerous voice. Then he realized he couldn't fly after all, and his God-hearing went bad. There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn't that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder--the increasing crescendo of our possessions, the ear-piercing noise of busyness, and the soul-smothering volume of our endless activity drowned out the still, small voice of God. It happens gradually.”

A life-giving Presbytery is skilled in imagination, and listens to God through its intuition.

Someone defined imagination as “creating a mental image of something that your senses do not detect or something that doesn’t exist in reality.”

It is creating something from nothing.

In 1990, J.K. Rowling was a 25-year-old recent graduate of Exeter University, working various jobs and living in London. One day, she was on a delayed train traveling from Manchester to London. During that long delay, an image suddenly came to her mind — a boy who didn’t know he was a wizard, on his way to a school of magic.

“I was staring out of the window and the idea for Harry just fell into my head. I could see him very clearly — this scrawny little boy who didn’t know he was a wizard.”

She didn’t have a pen with her, so she simply sat and thought for the rest of the four-hour journey, letting the world of Hogwarts, the other characters, and even details like the four houses take shape in her imagination.

Imagination isn’t mere fantasy — it’s the bridge between what is and what could be. Rowling didn’t just daydream a story; she entered it. Over years of hardship, poverty, and rejection, she held that inner world alive through faith and sheer love of creation.

That’s what makes imagination powerful — it births something from nothing. It insists that the invisible is real enough to build upon. Rowling imagined Hogwarts so vividly that it began to exist not just on paper, but in the hearts of readers everywhere.

I’m choosing to live into imagination, God’s dream, hopes and aspirations.  Let’s get out of just our heads, and into our hearts and intuition and imagine, based on our perceived values what God’s future is for us.

Imagining What God Desires,

Steve