Right-Brain Preaching
I just finished an article for Relevant Leader on Right-Brain Preaching. Here is a short excerpt from the article:
C.S. Lewis is the patron saint of whole-brain preachers.
Can you think of anyone in the last century who was more left-brain logical? His theological tombs, from Mere Christianity to The Problem of Pain, are as logical as logic can be. But Lewis combined left-brain logic with right-brain creativity. The Chronicles of Narnia set the right-brain bar!
Lewis once referred to himself as the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom. The night before his conversion, Lewis had a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien, the novelist who wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien tried to convince Lewis of the credibility of Christ, but Lewis was full of objections. At one point, Tolkien countered Lewis' objections by saying: Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part!
Maybe lack of faith is really a failure of imagination?
In his book, The Celtic Way, Ian Bradley writes about the celebration of the imagination in the Celtic tradition.
Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in imagination. Too many Christians today, brought up on the penny plain prose favoured by Rome and even more by the Reformers, have half-formed imaginations.
God wants to sanctify our imaginations and use them for his purposes! Too many of us do ministry out of memory. God calls us to do ministry out of imagination. We don't have to do church the way it has always been done. There are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet.
C.S. Lewis is the patron saint of whole-brain preachers.
Can you think of anyone in the last century who was more left-brain logical? His theological tombs, from Mere Christianity to The Problem of Pain, are as logical as logic can be. But Lewis combined left-brain logic with right-brain creativity. The Chronicles of Narnia set the right-brain bar!
Lewis once referred to himself as the most reluctant convert in all of Christendom. The night before his conversion, Lewis had a long conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien, the novelist who wrote the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien tried to convince Lewis of the credibility of Christ, but Lewis was full of objections. At one point, Tolkien countered Lewis' objections by saying: Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part!
Maybe lack of faith is really a failure of imagination?
In his book, The Celtic Way, Ian Bradley writes about the celebration of the imagination in the Celtic tradition.
Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in imagination. Too many Christians today, brought up on the penny plain prose favoured by Rome and even more by the Reformers, have half-formed imaginations.
God wants to sanctify our imaginations and use them for his purposes! Too many of us do ministry out of memory. God calls us to do ministry out of imagination. We don't have to do church the way it has always been done. There are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet.
4 Comments:
"His theological tombs, from Mere Christianity to The Problem of Pain, are as logical as logic can be."
I think you probably meant tomes and not tombs. In some cases not a great difference but in this case probably not what you were looking for. Looking forward to seeing you at Illinois District Council.
The only question I have is what does "doing church" mean? The time day, in robes, in baseball jerseys, with Darth Vader masks on, from a roller coaster? Seems you are creating a term that deserves an explanantion. Do you agree?
Chip,
Look forward to seeing you!!!
Mark
Doctrineman,
Doing church simply means the way we preach, the way we do discipleship, the way we order a service, the way we do outreaches, etc. I'm using it as an umbrella term to cover the million nuances of what it means to be a church.
For what it's worth, I used to really struggle with the fact that the New Testament doesn't define for us the way to "do church" besides a few ordinances and a few principles. And then I realized that God gives latitude for those prinicples being implemented in unique contexts. Otherwise it would stifle our God-given creativity.
My two cents.
Mark
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