What can our imaginations do to enrich our faith and spirituality? 

One education expert says that there are eight facets in learning styles: community, presentation, experience, reflection, individual, discussion, study, and confrontation.  It seems interesting to me when I look at those eight learning approaches, they are all focused on helping individuals to process and think creatively by themselves and to grow further through their learning experience. 

Peter Senge, a leading organizational theorist at MIT says that the excellent companies are ones that keep learning and adjusting to changing world as a whole organization which consists of individuals that keep learning and generate themselves creatively.  Either individually or organizationally, it is not the ones who cling to conventional answers but it is those who keep learning, processing and thinking creatively by themselves that keep growing and make unique contributions.

The same can be said of our faith and spirituality.  One theologian uses Shakespeare as a metaphor, “we are not here to repeat a drama Shakespeare had written, but we are to write our own new chapter following Shakespeare’s drama.”

How do we learn the Bible?  Do we keep learning the Bible in a way to foster our theological imaginations and generate creative stories in our own living?  Or do we read the Bible and just input some principles and applies to our lives without inquiry or creativity?   If true learning takes place not by memorizing, but by inquiring questions and thinking creatively by ourselves, it means that we come to understand and grow in the Bible when we engage the Bible in the same way.  What impact can it make as we keep learning the Bible with theological imagination and live creatively!  We are invited to create another chapter of God’s redemptive story.

By Ryo Goto

~ by chris on October 22, 2009.