The following is transcribed from a talk given in Nashville, TN on October 2021 at the Liturgy Collective, where David was addressing how the work of worship leaders connects to the hope needed in our world today.
David Kim: What I want to do this morning is to take a step back and ask all of us, what are we doing as worship leaders? Do we even matter for our church and more than that, for our greater society? Because I think before we begin to understand what it is that God is calling us towards, you have to answer that question, “Does my work ultimately matter to God?” And I don’t mean that in a generic way, but I mean it in a very specific way—that you’d have clarity that your work matters to God in that it affects the larger world around you. Because sometimes as people who work in a church, we can feel like a hired hand and oftentimes, instead of being able to see the larger calling that God has given to us, we feel like a cog in a machine—undervalued and not really understood in what it is that we are trying to release into the world. So this morning I want to be able to help us take a step back and understand why your calling matters, not only in the context of the church, but what I want to argue this morning is that your ministry, your work, matters to our larger society, especially given where we are today. And so until we begin to understand how we as worship leaders can impact the larger society around us, I think our vision of our calling is going to be a little bit too small.
Where we are in our society right now, whatever news channel you turn on, there’s not a lot of optimism regarding our future. And I think people also don’t necessarily feel a great deal of agency right now, because they see a lot of institutions that they used to put their faith in—whether it’s government, whether it’s big companies, whether it’s the church—their faith in the ability of these organizations or companies or sectors to create change is waning. So we’re entering into a certain kind of danger zone, a bit of a downward spiral.
What I want to present to you is an exhortation to understand that as worship leaders, you have the ability to begin to move people toward a sense of hope about the future and a sense of agency that they can be part of creating change in this world. From a societal health perspective, from a sense of God’s calling upon our lives as a church to be salt and light in our society, to be a leavening influence in our world—this is such a key part of how we can begin to bring this greater blessing into the world around us. That instead of the myopia of seeing our work and our calling as being about how many people we can bless in this service, or how many people we can draw into our church, we need to begin to expand where we are as a society and see the calling that God gives His people to know the gospel empowers people towards great hope. And how are you going to do that? It’s by expanding the imagination of the people around us.
I want to present to you my thesis for this morning, it is that worship leaders are guardians of the sacred imagination, worship leaders are guardians of the sacred imagination. I want to unpack that, I want to unpack each word, because each word carries a lot of meaning. And I want to show you very clearly that this is not just you influencing the people that sit in your pews, but this is you influencing the larger world around you, changing the way that we think as a society from one of pessimism—that I have no ability to change this world that seems to be going in a bad direction—to one of hope—enlivening a people who feel not only a sense of agency but who are excited to go about their day to day life sensing that “I can create the kind of change that creates the future I am hoping for.” And to see how the worship time becomes a critical part of this.
So let me first start with this idea of the imagination, and imagination focuses on your calling as artists. As worship leaders, you are artists. And as we think about the work that sociologists have helped us understand—this is drawing from the work of Matt Stackhouse in his four volume book, God and Globalization—as sociologists have studied societies all over the world, they have found five basic spheres that constitute every enduring society. The first sphere is family. The second is the economic sphere. The third is the governmental sphere. The fourth is the art sphere. And the fifth is the sphere of religion. Every enduring society has these kind of basic building blocks; I call these sometimes the anatomy of a civil society or a healthy society.
And let me quickly go through this, that, as you think about a very basic or primitive society, you have families nurturing and caring for each other, and these families need to be able to survive. And so if you are a farmer, you look to your neighbor and your neighbor is a hunter, and you begin to create a very basic system of barter and exchange. I’ll give you wheat if you give me meat, and we all should do better as a result. That’s the start of a very basic economic structure. But invariably there are disagreements. The next season comes, and while I promised my neighbor a certain amount of wheat, I’m not able to actually make good on my promise. Yet I ate all the meat he gave me so I’m kind of, I’m kind of screwed at that moment; I’m fearing for my life. But if you have a governmental structure, I can go to a community elder and the elder says, “Okay, David, you didn’t make good on your promise but if you promise next season to give twice the amount, then we’ll have your neighbor promise not to kill you,” and I say, “I can live with that.” And I’m happy, I’m going home and I start to whistle a song, because I’m just so happy. This thing we call the arts, this music that I’m intuitively making comes out of me, flows out of us as human beings.
In that very basic and simple example, you can kind of see how these spheres begin to develop over time, and I would argue that this is the same expression of what we see God do in Genesis 1 in creation. Drawing upon the work of Bruce Waltke, he helps us understand the framework of the six days of creation where we see God creating these realms, these structures, within which creation is able to flourish. We as human beings do the same thing; we create structures—structures of family, economic structures, governmental structures, and structures of the arts—so that humanity can flourish all the more. And typically in every enduring society there’s some kind of religion that really shapes the way each of these spheres develop over time.
Why I bring this up is because I think people underestimate the critical importance of the arts. When you look at our society and times get tough, where does the funding always get cut? The arts, right. But sociologists have made clear that artists are a critical part to the health of any society. There’s a lot of work that’s been done on this—Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, K-Pop: the Rise of the Korean Music Industry—there are so many books that have shown that artists are actually the ones who allow so many of these other spheres to flourish. Can you imagine your household during this pandemic without Netflix? Think about that, like what…I mean, I guess there would be a lot of good things you could also be doing— [laughter]
When we think then of these spheres, each sphere in some way tangibly manifests an invisible reality. And that invisible reality—let’s call it essence—this essence is the defining aspect of that sphere, without which that particular sphere would cease to exist. So in the sphere of the family, nurture is its essence. A family that does not nurture its kids or one another will not survive very long. An economy that does not afford opportunity for its people will not stand very long. A government that does not exercise justice for its people will probably be overthrown in a matter of time, and religion that does not have true worship at the heart of it is a dead religion. And the essence of the arts is imagination. It’s bringing to life something that has yet to become tangibly evidenced in the world. Some people define the arts as seeing the unseen.
Each of these essences begins to affect the other spheres, meaning when you have families who know how to nurture their family well, that inevitably bleeds into the workplace, right? Because as you learn about sacrifice, about keeping a child alive, for example, you begin to develop certain virtues, certain capacities, certain aspects that then bleed into the ways you work with your co-workers. A certain humanity begins to flow in, full of empathy and understanding, as a result of what happens in the sphere of the home life.
And similarly, when the arts flourish, the imagination enters into all these other spheres and allows other areas of society to flourish. So for example, in the economic sphere—I don’t know how many of you are in finance, but one of the real wealth-generating concepts in the West has been applying imagination to how we think about capital. The development of ETFs, for example, the stock market as a whole, and more recently NFTs—non-fungible tokens—these are things that are expanding opportunity. How is that happening? It’s because there’s imagination that’s fueling it and as a result, these other fields begin to flourish.
So I wanted to take this first part to show you that the imagination is critical to the flourishing of our society. When imagination begins to atrophy, society begins to wane. And that’s why the work of artists is so important, and why it’s especially important for us, as a church, to begin to uphold artists and say that they are not a kind of ancillary benefit we have, but rather these are people we need to nurture and encourage and strengthen because they play such a critical role in our society.
We now take a step into the realm of the sacred. Why do I call you guardians of the sacred imagination? Because the imagination is not only for the flourishing of our society, the imagination is critical to the very gospel itself, because our salvation is by faith and faith alone—sola fide. And Hebrews teaches us that faith is being sure of what you hope for and certain of what you do not see, so faith without imagination does not exist because imagination enables you to see the unseen. This is the work of the gospel. The gospel is aligning your mind and your heart to the unseen realities that surround us every day, and a sacred imagination is one that has been received as a gift of the Holy Spirit who is now inspiring us to see something new in our lives and in the world around us. No eye has seen, no ear has heard the things that God has planned for His people. And then Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 2 that it is through the Spirit that we now have the mind of Christ.
Let me just ask you this question, think about your future in 10 years. Imagine where you will be. Take about 30 seconds to do that, to imagine your future in 2031. What neurobiologists show us that’s interesting is that when you think about the future, the part of your brain that lights up is your past. There’s something about our biology that even when we think about the future, we have to access the past. We have no way of thinking about the future apart from the things that we have lived in our own lives, and so if you’ve had a pretty good life, you actually can imagine a pretty great future. But for those of us who have experienced trauma, what trauma does is it hardens that pathway. It says what you’ve known is the only thing that’s going to happen in the future, and trauma begins to undercut our ability to imagine other scenarios, other possibilities. For some of us, when we try to think about the future, because of past trauma we can’t. We don’t want to think about the future; we’re just trying to get through living day-to-day. But into that sad reality, here’s what the gospel does, it says: I will put my Spirit in you, and that Spirit will give you the very mind of Christ. You will have access to what no eye can see and no ear can hear. You will be able to see and hear and experience things that are literally from the future.
The beautiful passage of Isaiah 60 is all about that, a people in exile who have lost hope. All of a sudden God is saying, I’m going to speak to you a different imagination, something that is so far from your current experience of losing all that is familiar to you—your home, the things that you were used to growing up with and would call your culture, your people—these things have been slowly and very dramatically taken away. And into that reality God began to speak of a future that is to come, and it began to paint a different imagination for them: kings are bringing their treasures into this home.
Today, where is it that this sacred imagination gets cultivated? Where do people get a chance to access the reality that Christ has paid for? Christ has come, He has risen, and what? He is coming again. I think sometimes we focus so much on the reality that Christ has come and died and risen, which obviously is so foundational, but where we are right now in redemptive history is that we are looking forward to that last bit: Christ is coming again! He will return! And until our imagination begins to soak that in, what will reign in our lives are the things that we have experienced in our past. And sadly more and more, especially given the past 18 months, a lot of that will be the trauma of being separated.
I think we all understand the mental health statistics that are endemic in our world right now. And to imagine 10 years from now as we play this out, what we have experienced the past 18 months, how is that going to affect the psychology, the mental health of the entire world? Here is an opportunity for the church—just like God did throughout all the prophets—to say, in the midst of this horror, in the tragedy of exile, I am going to give you these amazing visions. Your young men will have visions, your old men will have dreams, and you’re going to be able to witness something of which no one has ever conceived.
Where is it in our society that people have the time and the space to be able to ponder anew what the Almighty will do? To be able to witness something because the Spirit of God is speaking to you something that you cannot see with your eyes, something that you can’t hear audibly, something that hits and pierces your heart so powerfully that tears stream down your face without you even recognizing what is happening? To be able to move from the left side of your brain that understands these propositional truths (to harken back to what Curt Thompson was saying), and then move to the right side because you are now beginning to perceive the truth and the beauty of what the gospel is presenting to us. And our whole bodies begin to light up, because we now understand that God is doing something new! That despite what we have experienced, there is a message of hope that the church has been entrusted with.
And this brings me to my final point: you are all guardians, you’re guardians. What’s a guardian? A guardian is a steward, someone who is entrusted with something precious. Think of guardians of children. You don’t own them. These aren’t yours, but you are entrusted with something so precious. And God’s calling is for you to be guardians of this trust—to echo the language of Paul to Timothy—to guard the trust of what the gospel has done, to begin to foster the sacred imagination of your people so that when they think about their work, when they think about going back to their job on Monday morning, when they think about the state of our society, that they would not go back to the lived experience of the past, but that they instead begin to live into the future, because the Holy Spirit is enabling them to see and hear and perceive.
And isn’t that the hope of the gospel? That we have the mind of Christ? That built into us and into the neurobiology within us we have been given a very different spirit—there is a Spirit that is giving our synapses a different pathway, a different opportunity to be able to think about our future with hope. To know that the lion and the lamb will lie down together. That these walls of hostility will be broken down. That the diversity and the treasures of the nations—nations that will stay intact—they will all bring their native treasures into New Jerusalem. And that there is a city whose streets are made of clear gold, and whose trees bear leaves for the healing of the nations.
You know, moving from the city to the suburbs in the last couple of years myself, I have grown in appreciation for what that passage in Revelation 21 with the trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations is all about. I kind of saw that as almost a mystical reality, like what’s in those leaves that is injecting some kind of chemical or something into the city and bringing this healing? [laughs] And literally, it’s just a tree doing what trees are meant to do, to glorify God! When I moved back to the suburbs, after living in the city for a number of years, just the presence of trees doing what they do faithfully year in and year out, putting on new leaves, creating safety and refuge and beauty, changing colors as their true colors come out in the fall, and then dying again. That cycle brings a sense of healing. That’s New Jerusalem! Where all of creation will do what it was created to do, to glorify God, where all of our eyes now see! Faith has become sight.
And all this beauty that the New Testament harkens to from the prophetic texts, that is what we have to enrapture the minds of our people with and to give them the time, the space to allow the Spirit to speak to them. As guardians, that’s the trust that you have to be able to take within you every week—to know that this is the opportunity for the Spirit to speak into the lives of His people, this is the opportunity for the Shepherd to show them that He wants to shepherd His people. He wants to give them life-giving words that take them out of the trauma of the past and move them into the hope of the future, and to experience how that past trauma can be uniquely used by him to access a greater vision of that glorious and beautiful future. To see how the trauma has become the very pathway to seeing that greater beauty.
I remember when I first started to lead worship, the pastor told me, “Don’t lead with your guitar, David.” And I know a lot of you know what that means; we like to hide behind the guitar, there’s a certain safety having that guitar in front of us, especially if you don’t feel as competent in other areas of your ability, the guitar sometimes becomes a shield for you, and you learn how to lead, either through your guitar or through your voice, or through your music. What I am exhorting all of us together here this morning is not to lead with those things; lead with the Holy Spirit, because it’s the Holy Spirit who wants to give His people a different imagination! You can’t give people a different imagination—we’re caught up in our world—but we have the Spirit of God.
That was Paul’s message to the church in Corinth, so filled with division, so filled with strife, so filled with immorality that his message to them in the very beginning was that he did not come with power. He came with the Spirit. So as you lead, allow the Spirit to give to His people the mind of Christ. And that requires in a very practical way, time. Time for people to engage their imagination! So that instead of sitting in the pews almost in a passive way, you’re asking them, you’re prompting them, you’re inspiring them to actually activate this thing, this faculty that we call the imagination! You’re saying: Bring that here, because the Spirit of God needs to fill that! In the same way the Spirit of God has to fill our minds and our hearts and our emotions and sanctify all these things, He also has to sanctify and fill our imagination, because that’s the thing that will take a society from waning into one of flourishing and prosperity.
How do we begin to cultivate that? How does Scripture, and the beautiful prompts of Scripture and the beautiful lyrics of the songs that we have sung over the course of these past two days, how do we give people a little bit of space? How do we get people not lost in the mechanics of the music or in the presentation? How does that all go into the background? In the same way that a powerful technology is one that goes to the background, how is it that your music somehow fades to the background, so that what people don’t even think about are the particular notes, or what was done right or wrong, and rather what comes to the foreground is, I am hearing the voice of my shepherd. I’m hearing not only His voice, but there’s a song that I’m beginning to hear, the song He sings over me, that song He is placing within me, a New Song. How do you allow people then to bring that New Song into the world when they go back on Monday? Because God cares about the world that they’re going to enter into on Monday, whether it’s agriculture, finance, law, hospitality, business, education… All of these industries need new vision.
One of the things that I’ve been saying a lot and encouraging other people to say, especially during this time is, “Something new is happening!” And as guardians, to lead toward this— For people to wake up on Monday morning and say to themselves, “Something new is happening!” is so different from feeling that grind, that drudgery, that dread of, “Not this again and again!” But to be able to say in that same context, “God has placed a new song in my heart, and so I go in this morning with this conviction to begin to live into that new reality and allow the kingdom of God to come on earth as it is in heaven.”