Kerry Dearborn and Chris Hoke Engage Their Imaginations — And Ours

Churches can use some imagination.

Not imagination as a flight of fancy (although that can be good), but imagination that carries Christians into the hard places where reconciliation and transformation are most needed.

“Imagination gets us in touch with what is most real,” says Kerry Dearborn, a professor in the School of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. However, Dearborn adds, imagination is a “tool we haven’t allowed God to access.”

During a recent presentation Dearborn joined with Chris Hoke, who serves with Tierra Nueva Ministries in Skagit County, to explore the meaning of imagination in Christian life. Both have just published books that explore Christian imagination: Dearborn’s “Drinking from the Wells of a New Creation” and Hoke’s “Wanted,” a reflection on his work within prisons and among immigrants.

Hoke (who appears above in a CBN profile about a man cared for by Tierra Nueva) pointed toward the imagination as he read from his book:

Growing up in many churches, I never found them to be raw or extremely honest places — not places where you could show the worst side of yourself. But I found the jail to be a place where inmates didn’t have the option to hide their problems … Here, people are left staring — innocent or guilty of the specific charges — at the wreck of their lives. And in this place, in these rooms of unadorned life, I found something that clergy call sacrament, mysteries I could feel.

In light of Hoke’s experience, perhaps it is no surprise that in researching her book Dearborn found the most striking examples of imagination and grace among the marginalized, who are open to the Holy Spirit in a way that cannot be matched by those of us who are more affluent, more respectable — and who feel like we have more to lose.

Imagination, Dearborn says, can work like a solvent that washes away old, false truths and renews one’s faith — and one’s ability to see the “other” in fresh new ways. But Christians in Western culture too often fail to use this gift.

“In a very cerebral culture we demean imagination,” Dearborn says. But that is to our loss.

At a time when the culture wars promote false choices, when churches are too often complicit in the injustices of this world, and when congregations crumble because they can’t adapt to a changing culture, the need for a renewed imagination shines brighter than ever.

And the words of Dearborn and Hoke feel much more daring than they ought to be.

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Hospitality and Loneliness

Many words, such as care and compassion, understanding and forgiveness, fellowship and community, have been used for the healing task of the Christian minister. I like to use the word hospitality, not only because it has such deep roots in the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also, and primarily, because it gives us more insight into the nature of response to the human condition of loneliness.

Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveler. Hospitality makes anxious disciples into powerful witnesses, makes suspicious owners into generous givers, and makes closed-minded sectarians into interested recipients of new ideas and insights. …

When loneliness is among the chief wounds of the minister, hospitality can convert that wound into a source of healing. Concentration prevents the minister from burdening others with his pain and allows him to accept his wounds as helpful teachers of his own and his neighbor’s condition. Community arises where the sharing of pain takes  place, not as a stifling form of self-complaint, but as a recognition of God’s saving promises.

— Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

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