Imagination is the key to change

 

Alison Morgan

 

Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.

Isaiah 43.18-19

 

Living in a changing world

 

I belong to a city centre church in Leicester. It’s a large church; there are about 800 of us, though we don’t all come at once. What’s interesting about us is not what we’re like – we are a motley collection of quite ordinary people - it’s who we are. We come from all walks of life and from all over the world. We come from Christian backgrounds and secular ones, from privileged ones and from messy ones. We speak maybe 20 languages, we come from many cultural and religious contexts. We are teachers, business people, carers, unemployed, students, asylum seekers, doctors, retired people, council workers, street people, children. We are old and young, well and ill. We are the changing urban world of the United Kingdom, in a gathered community of believers in Christ.

 

How then do we set about the task of being church, in a city where everything is changing? Well, we are a cell church. We overcome the disadvantages of size by dividing ourselves into small units of belonging, meeting midweek in our homes, coming together on Sundays. But is that enough? That’s form; it’s a structure. But a living cell is more than structure, more than just an outer boundary and some inner plasma. A living cell has energy, energy dependent on materials from the outside but generated within, in minute particles called mitochondria. A cell without energy is a dead cell. Where then does the energy, the energy on which the life and vision of the Christian cell is dependent, come from?

 

 

Making holes in heaven

 

Mark 1.10 reads: just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

Mark 15.38 reads: Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.

 

In both cases the verb is the same. It’s the verb ‘schizo’, to split or to tear - from which we get our words ‘schism’ and ‘schizophrenia’. On these two key occasions, at the beginning and end of Jesus’ ministry, something happened. It was violent, significant and it was a work of the Holy Spirit. It was a tearing of the heavens, a ripping of the vault of the sky and its symbol the curtain of the temple – a ripping of the barrier between God and man, a ripping which made active and dynamic participation in the Christian life possible for all believers. This was the act which put us back in touch with the spiritual energy which created the universe, when the Spirit of God first swept over the face of the waters and life on earth began.¹

 

I think at some times we are more aware of the ‘hole in the heavens’ than we are at others.  The key moment for me was when my husband was rushed into A&E having been hit by a lorry as he crossed the road. ‘I’m sorry, but he’s critical’, the consultant told me after some hasty but methodical investigation of the damage. Before he had got the words out, I found myself staring straight through the curtain, straight into the spiritual realm, the realm I suddenly realised was the only real one - the hospital and the city and everything in it were just shadows, a passing world on which the real events of this spiritual world were played out. It happened again 5 years later, as I stood on a hill in Zambia, watching the sun rise over the wooded land, wisps of smoke rising to greet it as people rekindled their fires for cooking. Again, I found myself caught up into the place where God is, glimpsing the world as he sees it rather than as I was accustomed to seeing it, and suddenly knowing that I had a part to play in his plans which as yet was hidden to me.

 

Imagining that things could be different

 

The problem for most of us is not that the hole isn’t there, or that the curtain has been surreptitiously mended. It’s that we aren’t used to looking. We live in a society which packages reality for us, which offers us a pre-interpreted world, a make-believe world, a world which stunts the imagination, which tells us what we need and how to get it. It’s not just us; it’s always been like this. That’s why the prophets of the Old Testament cried out in poetry, acted out their prophecies in bizarre ways, flung out not explanations but images. It’s why Jesus taught in parables, refusing to answer questions but always jolting the imagination of his hearers. Imagination is the key to change, because it’s with the eyes of our imagination that we can see through the curtain, penetrate the hole in the heavens, get in touch with the spiritual energy that created the world and is now available to all believers - if only they can be jolted out of their comfort zones.²

 

Bishop John Taylor once wrote that we should trade the traditions of the church for the dreams of its people. ³ That is my prayer for the church, for each cell: that it should walk through the looking glass and recreate reality. That it should know that it is in touch with the power of the Holy Spirit through the person of Jesus Christ. That it should refuse to settle for the fabricated reality of a media-dominated world, the soundbite life of a materialistic society. That it should be a place where spiritual reality meets the visible world in which we think we live. A place where people pray for one another and meet with God, where they have the confidence to invite their friends and neighbours to peek at little holes in heaven, where they imagine ways of being what they are: a foreshadowing of the kingdom of God. A church, writes theologian Gordon Fee, is an eschatological community. ⁴  It belongs to the spiritual world but lives in the visible one. It lives as if it’s standing in A&E, as if it’s looking with a God’s-eye view from a hill. It doesn’t do things the way the world does them. It’s tomorrow’s world, a time-stranded particle of eternity.

 

Tools for the future

 

How then do we get from one world to the other? What are the ingredients which the mitochondria of each cell need in order to generate the energy that makes it alive rather than dead?

 

Two things. One is scripture. Scripture helps us escape from the cage of our own culture. It opens a way to the imagination, a way to measure reality in a God-centred way, a way of seeing how things could be different. And the other is prayer. Prayer takes us through the hole in the heavens, puts us in touch with the holyspiritual energy to bring about what we have learnt to imagine. If we keep our eyes focussed on these two things, our cell life will be vibrant and effective. Here in Leicester we live in a multicultural, multiracial society. The Christian cell is perhaps the only place where the fragmented parts of that society come together, in a spiritual community which is an outpost of the kingdom of God, empowered by the energy generated within its walls.

 

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