Imagine Part 1 “Aphantasia” THRIVE Service Livestream

Studies show that approximately 2.6 percent of people have aphantasia.

If you’ve never heard of it, you’re not alone. It’s not a mental illness. It’s simply a rare condition characterized by the lack of one’s ability to imagine.

If you have aphantasia it means you’re not capable of visual imagination; it prevents you from picturing things in your mind.

Imagination is key to understanding what Jesus teaches us. He points to what he calls, “The Kingdom of God,” this grand, lofty, worthy ideal of what we all should aspire to, and help create.

Time after time Jesus tries to help us imagine what he means by “The Kingdom of God.” He paints word pictures, points to real life examples and uses parables to describe it. The Kingdom of God is like a treasure, like a pearl, like a seed buried in the ground, like a great feast where everyone is invited, and no one wants to attend.

It’s clear though. The Kingdom of God is not solely about a place to go after we die. It’s about here and now, loving our neighbors, working for peace, seeking justice, healing pain, and building the kind of world God intended.

It begins with imagination.

Imagining the world God intended.

Becoming the church Jesus imagined we could be.

I’ve never been a part of a dying church, never led a church that had to close its doors, never will.

But I am aware of some that didn’t make it. Churches where the neighborhood changed, and the mission didn’t. Churches that longed for the good old days when everything was working. Churches faced with declining membership, having fewer and fewer resources, facing an uncertain future, and dwindling down to the final few faithful individuals until the doors closed and the church died.

In the final autopsy of a dying church, more often than not, the cause of death wasn’t declining membership or dwindling resources.

The real culprit, the actual diagnosis was death by a lack of imagination.

Or how does the Bible put it?

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Imagine…

Becoming the church Jesus Imagined.