HOW TO...
HOW TO... USE YOUR IMAGINATION John Taylor, former general secretary at CMS, called mission an adventure of the imagination. Yet many people think creativity is a gift you either have or you don’t – and often they conclude they don’t have it. But it is more like a muscle that is strengthened through use – we all have it, but need to practise using it. So how do we get started?
BY JONNY BAKER, DIRECTOR OF MISSION EDUCATION AT CHURCH MISSION SOCIETY
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ne way to be creative is to combine two things from different areas. Einstein called this combinatory play. A classic example is the printing press: Gutenberg famously observed the way that a screw press was used in winemaking to press grapes and combined that with typesetting to create the printing press. A more recent example is James Dyson observing dust extraction at a factory and combining that with a vacuum cleaner to come up with the Dyson. Jesus told a very simple parable saying that the Kingdom of God is like a teacher who took something old and something new out of the cupboard (Mt 13:52). He too knew
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this art of combinatory play. His parables were invariably this kind of combining of, say, yeast and messianic expectation or Jacob and Esau with a story of homecoming. The essence of contextual mission is exactly this kind of combinatory play. It’s an adventure to combine the story of Christ with a culture or context. Let me give you a few examples. When I have helped at Mind Body Spirit fairs sharing Christ with spiritual seekers, I use something new – a pack of cards called the Jesus Deck – with something old – lectio divina. The Jesus Deck is a set of cards with four suits of scenes from the Gospels. Using something from the culture of spiritual seekers, card reading works amazingly well combined with an old method of Scripture reading. Jo and Darren Howie have combined coffee with communion
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to develop the Sacred Bean eucharist. They work with exoffenders and have set up a coffee roasting business around which they are building community and training people so they can get jobs. They have developed a wonderfully creative ritual to remember Christ which the guys absolutely love. KimSon Nguyen has written a brilliant book on contextual theology in Vietnam in which he explores combining the Vietnamese spirituality of the Dao (the way) with the gospel. In this case he is combining something old with something old to come up with something new!
