Central to the task of reimagining Christianity — or imagining how any faith can begin to live up to its promise — is putting the creative energy of imagination to work discovering and building bonds between neighbors. We need to bring every watt of imaginative power we possess to this task, because the barriers to overcome are so formidable and the stakes are so high.
Part of the challenge in this is that we tend not to trust the power of our imagination. And our imaginations are often wounded, crippled by personal experience and/or cultural damage. We like the controlled fantasy of the movies, but we don't trust the freewheeling imagination because it gets out of hand, and we like to be in control. . .
Being open to the imagination is an art. How do we deal with the monsters and mysteries that come up, unbidden, from the depths and learn to treat them as images and not as directives? They should be neither suppressed nor acted upon.
— Alan Jones, Reimagining Christianity