Resourcing and Guiding Communities

Ecclesial imagination is most likely to emerge when pastoral leaders possessed of rich pastoral imaginations make it their primary task to guide and resource communities in embracing this kind of life. The fundamental work of pastoral ministry is to foster such a way of life among a particular people. Pastoral work is first and foremost the work of enabling, teaching, helping, guiding, and encouraging a specific community to practice Christian faith themselves.

This may seem obvious, but I fear that many pastors, including me, lose sight of this all the time. It is an easy trap to fall into. In any kind of hard work (especially work that takes place in public and often under considerable pressure), it is our natural human tendency to attend primarily to our own performance, to our own action, to what we ourselves are doing, to how well we are performing—and, perhaps especially, to how other people think we are doing.

The genius of a pastoral imagination built on the knowledge of the buoyancy of God, however, is its capacity to attend first and fully to others, to the people, to their lives and their life together. The confidence that arises when pastors themselves know, in a deeply personal way, that they too can rest confidently in God's upholding arms enables them to let go of the anxieties that can plague and eventually defeat pastoral work when it is driven by compulsive striving.

Under such conditions we are freed to do pastoral work that is not mainly about us and, say, our preaching. We are freed to attend first and above all to how the people are proclaiming the gospel in words and with their lives. Our own preaching, we can then come to see, is in service to their ways of proclaiming the gospel. Similarly, we can also see that what matters is not our own liturgical leadership but rather the people's worship of God.

A spiral of mutual influence, encouragement, and empowerment takes hold when pastors and congregations give these gifts of God to and receive them from one another. Pastoral imagination is a gift that is given by God in and through communities of faith possessed of deep, rich ecclesial imaginations. Ecclesial imagination is a gift that is given by God through the sustained nurture and shaping ministries of wise and faithful pastors with deep, rich pastoral imaginations.

Through eyes of faith, pastors come to see the abundance that is before them and that surrounds them already. Through eyes of faith, they can see what gifts they have been given in the people who, however flawed, are the members of their congregations. Likewise, through eyes of faith, the members of congregations come to see the abundance that is before them and surrounding them too. And through those eyes, they can recognize what gifts they have been given in the people who, however flawed, have become their pastors.

Ministry like this has about it a kind of beauty and allure that is almost irresistible. And so it replicates itself by drawing more and more people into it, forming and shaping their lives and imaginations and launching them into new ministry in turn. Such ministry has about it a freshness, an improvisatory character, a liveliness that is itself infectious. Thus an imagination that is at its heart a seeing in depth—seeing reality truthfully—turns out to be an imagination full of creativity, an imagination that sees what is not yet and begins to create it.