The Imagination of Faith

Faith and mission are closely related.  The relationship between faith and mission became evident by the response of members of a number of Lutheran Churches to the invitation to participate in a mission trip to South Africa either by joining the groups or by donating towards the proposed project.  The invitation to participate in the mission triggered a new and more profound understanding of faith.

Mission is about the future.  The Church is called by God to live out God’s mission within the world.  This call to mission provides not only identity but also purpose and direction for the church. As a movement into the future, the source and understanding of that mission is rooted in the promises of God. A community led and guided by the promises of God into the future is never a static entity.  It is a movement, enlivened by the Spirit participating in the advent of the Kingdom of God.

As the people defined by God’s future, the Church in mission is a community of faith.  Faith is at the core of the nature of the relationship with God.  Since it is God’s Church, it is God who leads the Church.  Faith is about relationships, with God, others, self and the rest of nature.  The Reformers were specific about faith as relational term.  Faith is trust; trusting God’s leadership of the Church into the future.  They challenged the institutional understanding of faith as assent to some theological doctrines or teachings.  Faith as assent distorts faith and transforms it into obedience usually to some authority such as a religious leader or even for some a blind obedience to scripture. Luther was clear about the very nature of faith as trust.  It is this essence of faith as trust, a term that describes the relationship with God that informs Luther’s explanation of the first commandment in which he clearly states that we are to fear, love and trust of God above everything.   When faith and mission are separated, the Church loses the dynamism of a movement and becomes simply and institution stuck in the present.  Faith then loses its ability to foster the imagination.

When God called Abraham and Sarah to leave their home and travel into the unknown future, all they had to sustain them on their journey was God’s promise. This promise inspired their imagination and led them to persevere towards their goal.  When Moses led the people from the slavery of Egypt all they had to focus on was the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey.  So too the promise of anew future framed as the coming of the New Jerusalem, or the Kingdom.  Then there is the promise of a new society pictured in the concluding chapter of the Revelation to John.  The society is pictured as one of justice in which there is no hunger, where there will be plenty of food and water, no poverty, sickness, grief and death.  This image has captured the imagination of Christians over the centuries and encouraged them to keep moving towards that future and praying that the promised future may come to them too. Or as Jesus taught “

The problem for the church today is the way we have over reacted to distortions in our proclamations.  At the turn of the twentieth century the church was perceived as being the handmaiden of the wealthy and the powerful. This view of the church was reinforced by the emphasis in much of the church’s proclamation on “going to heaven” as the central message of the Gospel.  This focus on “going to heaven” largely ignored the suffering and poverty of a large number of people and was parodied in the 1911 workers song which mockingly coined the phrase “pie in the sky in the sweet by and by.”  During that period Karl Marx referred to religion was the opiate of the people, meaning that religion deadened people to issues of poverty.  The focus of the church’s proclamation on heaven led to it being criticized both from within and without.  It was claimed that the church was so heavenly minded that it was no earthly good.

The response to rectify this aberration led to an overreaction which then led to the loss of the future orientation of the church.  The debate between social justice and the future orientation of the church’s proclamation became extremely polarized.  For some it was an either – or situation.  There was little room in the debate for a ‘both and’ position. The debate continues in the church.  Upon my return from South Africa I was asked whether we had proclaimed the Gospel as well as doing construction.  These two actions were seen to be mutually exclusive by the questioner. 

The church continued to understand the centrality of faith but this was a static view of faith, a faith that had lost its imagination since it had lost its future orientation.  When faith loses its imagination the church loses its understanding of itself as a movement and as a result its dynamism.   God may be unchanging, the same yesterday, today and tomorrow, but that is not what the Church is called to be.  A movement is never static since it is focused on its purpose.  When the imagination of faith which is shaped by the promises of God is lost then the spirit of adventure is lost and the curiosity of faith becomes wooden.

Reflecting on the response by members of congregations to the two mission trips it became increasing clear to me that they were desperately seeking something that would reorient and encourage their faith journey.  They responded generously and integrated into their own lives of faith the spirit of adventure.  For them, as for the participants in the mission trip, there was a new found excitement, new sense of participating in bringing in the Kingdom of God.  Awakened in them was the imagination of faith.