Do we think of the church as a creative avenue for our imaginations?!  And granted, creativity is not the first thing we see the church embody, but it’s probably not even in the conversation.  Why are sermons not seen as an art?  All too often we are not asked to push our imaginations.  “What if?!”

There is a video from the author of Eat, Pray, Love named Elizabeth Gilbert at TED.  I watched it this week, and I think she is connecting with something that gets close to something the church can acknowledge.

There are a couple other quotes that track with what she is saying.

 ”How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?’ Fundamentalists have at least one characteristic in common with most scientists. Neither can understand that poetic and religious imagination has a way of arriving at truth by giving a clue to the total meaning of things without being in any sense an analytic description of detailed facts.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr

“But the Christian imagination – shrunken and starved throughout the long winter of secularism – needs to be awakened, enlivened and pointed in the right direction…Christians needs to sense permission, from God and from one another, to exercise their imaginations in thinking ahead into God’s new world and into such fresh forms of worship and service as will model and embody aspects of it. We need to have this imagination energized, fed and nourished, so that it is lively and inventive, not sluggishly going around in small circles of a few ideas learned long ago…

Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God. The beauty of creation, to which art responds and tries to express, imitate, and highlight, is not simply beauty which it possesses in itself but the beauty which it possesses in view of what is promised to it… If Christian artists can glimpse this truth, there is a way forward to celebrating beauty, to loving God with all the soul, without lapsing into pantheism on the one hand or harsh, negative ‘realism’ on the other. Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are, but to the way things are meant to be.”
- N.T. Wright

I’m not drawing a conclusion. Just a prayer for something in Mason City and north Iowa.  Rhythm Church among so many good Mason City churches, so many creative and talented people here, and I hope we can be something imaginative and creative in our communities.

Cheers.