The Communal Imagination: Finding a Way to Share Life Together

by Mark Votava, Paul Sparks (Preface)

Everyday life is often times not experienced as very relational anymore. The church has been co-opted by services and meetings detached from a relational expression within a particular place or parish in everyday life. We need to create the context to reimagine the body of Christ in everyday life as embodied through its proximity and shared life together. Without the value of inhabiting and listening to the place where we live, we will have very little expression of faith together in everyday life. There needs to be an embodied expression for our ecclesiology to make sense. If we do not have a local expression together, we will create a duality between our spirituality and our everyday lives in the ordinary. The Communal Imagination will draw out a new way of being for ourselves into this transition of embodied expression by stressing the importance of proximity and shared life within a particular neighborhood where we live, work and play. We need to embody practices as a way of life that are based on a spirituality of love, grace, humility and simplicity within the place where we share life together. This is how we will be able to get along and function in a healthy way over time that does not do damage to the cultural context we are in as we build on the particulars of our relationships together.

246 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2014

Reviews

[Ron Willoughby · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted so much to like this book. Votava shows a depth and breadth of reading. Between the repetition, the using of a term to define that term, and the nebulous . . . meandering, I simply couldn't engage. Sorry. I really did try.