Filing in each Sunday morning, they come with their immediate concerns, little children who struggle to wake and get dressed for church and school each day, teens with their thumbs permanently glued to their phones, husbands and wives arriving with a thousand anxieties—jobs, mortgages, politics, aging parents, and more. And it doesn’t stop there.

There are others gathered as well, divorcees, young singles, those who feel left out and abandoned by a community or country who feel as if no one understands them or cares to understand them. Every day, from social media to cable news to whatever topics rage around the workplace water cooler, church members cannot help but feel the impact of their own, and the world’s, pressing troubles.

This is the gathering of the saints in the weekly worship of the church.

A natural and good response from preachers might be to address these very real concerns. Karl Barth was right when he argued that we preach with “the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other.” That was how I was taught to preach. But after 25-years of vocational ministry, I have found Barth’s words true but insufficient for the preaching task in our present moment. It’s not that Barth was wrong, he just didn’t preach in 21st-Century America.

Barth’s world, though laden with its own challenges, lacked the toxicity present in Facebook, Twitter, and the mass monetization of the Christian message, where just about everyone with thumbs and owning a device with a video camera seems to have something to say about both the Bible and the newspaper. The most uninformed, misinformed, and deliberately misinforming use and misuse both the scriptures and the newspapers to execrable effect.

For 21st-Century hearers, all holding their own Bibles and their own newspaper, information about the scriptures or the news is not the problem. Preachers are no longer shaping the interpretation of the world for their congregations, they are undoing the mis-interpretations the church already got from somewhere else.

We now live in an age that when the church hears the Bible and newspaper hooked together, we no longer hear Scripture as “the word of the Lord.” We hear it as “the opinion of the speaker,” and all too often, that is exactly what it is.

Add to that the reality that in many settings, sermons have become “advice” or “tips” or “suggestions.” This happens when sermons (and the women and men writing and delivering them) see their vocation, not as prophets, pastors, priests, or homiliticians, but as arm-chair therapists, life-coaches, C-suite executives, entrepreneurs, non-profit CEOs, social media influencers, or frustrated business people.

Too many contemporary preachers, nursed on the notion that they are authorities over the church rather than attendants to the church, miss our central kerygmatic task. Our task is not to tell the church what to do and how to do it, but to help them imagine what the world could be. That is, to imagine a new world!

Why? Because humans enact what we imagine.

Human beings are fundamentally imaginative creatures. Imagination serves as a mental image or concept of the possible. It is our imaginations which press humans to explore, stretch, grow, and develop. Imagination is our innate resistance to what is.

In history, we have seen imagination push humans forward, from creating tribal communities for safety, to the circumnavigation of the globe, to the moon landing, and exploring the outer reaches of our galaxy. None of these projects began knowing much of anything. There was a sketch, but no plan. Humans had to imagine in order to flourish.

When the human imagination is aflame, we envision and pursue new heights. This is why preaching must engage the imagination.

For example, a parent who cannot imagine an adult child who fails to enter the family business, will push, cajole, and pressure their sons and daughters to that end. Those who imagine that all honesty and righteousness are warehoused in their political party, cannot see its own hypocrisy or inadequacy no matter how prevalent nor can they see the virtue in any of their opponent’s positions. Those who imagine an angry God, give themselves permission to be angry and preach an angry message. These are all acts of the imagination. We enact what we imagine.

The simple question is how can our preaching free itself from the paint-by-numbers, advice giving that many have fallen into? How can we develop the church’s imagination for better lives and partnering with God to bring about God’s will for all of creation?

Perhaps the most helpful reminder is that Jesus did not traffic in points or propositions. Jesus told stories. We know how stories work. After reading or watching a story, no one asks, “What was the point?” “The point” is theirs to discover, to discern. The best and most well told stories continue to open themselves up to fresh questions and responses. Great stories force the hearer to go deeper, stretch more broadly and deepen.

Points and propositions, on the other hand, give too much power to the proclaimer, which may be the reason preachers preach them. Unfortunately, they foreclose imagination and personal and communal discernment, and take the church captive to the preacher’s personality and perspective. The church misses what the preacher misses, and have nothing to bring to the sermon nor take away on their own. The sermon, like all acts of worship, belongs to the church not the preacher.

Preaching for imagination allows us to take seriously that the church too has the scriptures and a newspaper and may be ahead of her pastors in merging those horizons. Imagination breaks the church out of her immediate and pressing concerns to consider the larger story they inhabit and their role in God’s unfolding drama.

When the church tumbles through the door each weekend, all their concerns and worries in hand, they need more than a pastor’s hot take on the day’s news. They need new ways to see the day’s news.

Sean Palmer is the Teaching Pastor at Ecclesia Houston, speaker and speaking coach, and author of several books including--Speaking by the Numbers: Ennegram Wisdom for Teachers, Pastors, and Communicators.