Quotes from Sarah Arthur

To those of us who pride ourselves on being "informal," I'd encourage us to consider what story we could possibly be telling without form. Is our story merely about how cool our pastor is and how loud our subwoofers are? Or have we truly developed a biblical theology of worship that imparts the only story that really matters to the next generation?

The best metaphors are a bit magical. They conjure connections that weren't there in our minds before

When engaging youth with the Bible-as-story, we must be wary of our impulse to "clarify" what's happening in a given narrative, to explain "what John is getting at" or "what Matthew is trying to say" or "what Paul really means here."13 I've been guilty of this more times than I care to admit, and I'm not alone.

When well told and well lived by the storytellers, worship, like story itself, offers opportunities for the imagination to be nurtured and transformed.

In my estimation, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism points to a colossal failure of the imagination regarding both the claims and demands of the gospel. The failure isn't primarily on the part of youth or even their parents: it's on the part of the church.

Rarely are youth challenged to take up their cross and follow Jesus down the narrow road called faith—but even when they are, they can't imagine what that really means unless someone famous makes a movie out of it. Without

like story itself, worship works: it offers experiences of transcendence and timelessness, resonance and wonder, intimacy and identity, mystery and enchantment.

The Bible-as-story works. It works in all the ways that story itself works: in offering transcendence, identity, intimacy, timelessness, wonder, and so forth

Part of the magic of the imagination is that it can conjure something out of nothing except the simple medium of words until the hearer really feels as though she's experiencing a multisensory event.

The Bible is alive; it is our students who are dead and must be resurrected. Story stirs the sleeping; scripture raises the dead.

Christians swim in metaphor like fish in the sea. Spiritual formation requires some measure of analogical or imaginative ability, since we are, after all, dealing with an invisible God who can't be humanly grasped except in comparison to things that are, well, humanly grasped.

The imagination is not somehow divorced from reason or the intellect: it's one of the primary ways we learn. I'm indebted to a literary colleague of mine for suggesting that in classical tradition, the imagination is considered "the mind's eye" (emphasis on mind), an actual faculty of the intellect.

It's easy for our young people to think of the biblical stories as taking place long, long ago and far, far away, and thus having no real relevance for our contemporary situation.

Story is one of the most powerful ways we pattern our world and discover its meaningfulness. It goes beyond mere embellishment of a spiritual point to providing a nurturing form or substance for the God-hungry imagination, one that helps young people inhabit a narratable world.

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning."16

The Bible-as-narrative takes precedence over our attempts to express Christian belief in propositional or abstract terms, which is to say the stories come first.

We've forgotten how to humbly interact with a story on its own terms; we've lost the ability to wonder, especially when it comes to stories of human encounters with divine power. So have our young people. As a church, how do we restore that sense of wonder? By restoring our sense of the Bible as story, both for us and for the youth we serve; and by surrendering to the work of the Holy Spirit in and through this text that is mysteriously more than text.

The idea behind reciting a creed is reasonably simple. If you do not say the right lines, you may not be in the right story. For example, if you don't hear the lines, "To be or not to be, that is the question," chances are you are not watching a performance of Hamlet. —RICHARD A. LISCHER19

One major difference between imagination and reason is that imagination often operates beneath the surface of analytical thought. Here I can't help thinking of Sherlock Holmes, musically brooding with his violin till the solution to the mystery presents itself.

For the past few years I've been on a quest to find a good definition of the imagination. To begin with, the task is rendered difficult by the general suspicion on the part of many decent Muggles1 that the imagination—loosely understood as the image-making faculty—is somehow evil or at least something we're supposed to grow out of.

Even though universal metanarratives are largely absent, personal "I" narratives are everywhere. The popular imagination is saturated with self-obsessive stories in film, television, advertising, music, MySpace, and YouTube—but this is the equivalent of bingeing on junk food while dying for want of substance.

No man is saved by his imagination," quipped nineteenth-century Scottish preacher George Morrison. "It is a question if any man is saved without it."18

imagination is the image-making faculty of the intellect that helps us discover, process, and creatively express coherent meaning.

The youth-pastor-as-bard is charged with expressing the language, narrative, and culture of the kingdom to listeners who think they already know what the kingdom is all about. For the leader among quasi-believers who are bored and mostly apathetic, who think they know all about "God and stuff," the emphasis is on story.