Prophetic Imagination: A Living Word for a Living Public Ministry
- windycooler
- Aug 25
- 9 min read
Last week, Friends gathered for the very first session of our new seminar series on Walter Brueggemann’s work, led by Friend Jim Webner. We began with The Prophetic Imagination (1978), a book Jim described as Brueggemann’s “very early, seminal piece of writing.”
Though it was written nearly half a century ago, the book still feels startlingly fresh. It is, as Jim reminded us, “packed with ideas” — ideas that do not sit comfortably in the past but spill into our present lives with urgency. Friends in the class resonated deeply with this: it was not an academic exercise, but a living conversation about what it means to be faithful in our time.
And here’s the good news: if you missed that first class, don’t worry. You didn’t need to be there to join us this week. Each session stands on its own. The door is wide open for you to step into this lively conversation.
Our next gathering is Wednesday, August 27th. You do need to register, and it free (donations so appreciated!!)
Who Was Walter Brueggemann? Prophet, Teacher, Interpreter
Walter Brueggemann, who recently passed away at the age of 92, was a beloved Old Testament scholar and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Over his long career, he became known for something unusual: combining the tools of biblical interpretation with sociology. That might sound dry, but in Brueggemann’s hands it was electric. He made the Bible come alive — not as a relic of the past, but as a book that speaks to our world here and now.
He returned again and again to one central idea: prophetic imagination. From The Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (1986), to The Practice of the Prophetic Imagination (2012), to Reality, Grief, Hope: Three Urgent Prophetic Tasks (2014), Brueggemann kept circling back, refining, expanding, and daring us to take the prophets seriously as guides for our own day.
Jim helped us feel the pulse of this theme by starting at the beginning — with The Prophetic Imagination.
Two Modes of Prophecy: Critiquing and Energizing
At the heart of Brueggemann’s early book is a simple but profound claim: prophecy has two modes.
Criticizing – the language of lament, grief, and protest. This is not polite complaint or detached analysis. It is the raw cry of anguish in the face of injustice, the grief that refuses to accept oppression as “normal.” It is also the divine sorrow — God’s own discontent with the world as it is.
Energizing – the prophetic work of hope. Here the prophet dares to imagine God’s future and to put it into words that inspire amazement. Energizing often comes through song, poetry, and worship — what Brueggemann calls “doxology,” the music of praise that lifts us beyond despair.
We looked at how this rhythm plays out in Scripture. Jeremiah, heavy with grief and critique. Second Isaiah, radiant with visions of hope.
Jim also brought in James Cone’s comparison: Malcolm X as the criticizing prophet and Martin Luther King Jr. as the energizing one.
Both were necessary. Together they formed a rhythm of grief and hope, judgment and promise.
Brueggemann’s Challenge to the Church
Brueggemann’s sharpest words were not reserved for governments or empires, but for the church. Already in 1978, he warned that the church had become so “enculturated” into consumerism that it lost its prophetic edge.
He wrote — and it still rings true — that churches, whether liberal or conservative, too often mirror the values of the dominant culture instead of offering a real alternative.
Participants reflected honestly about this. One Friend noted that when the “survival of the institution” becomes the priority, we risk losing sight of the prophetic call.
Jim pressed further: "When we fixate on dwindling numbers or try too hard to be attractive to newcomers, do we silence the harder truths? Prophetic speech is often alienating, uncomfortable, even confrontational. What happens if we soften the edges so that people will like us?"
We also named subtler idols: the Protestant work ethic, for example. Jim reminded us that Jesus was accused of being an idler, yet churches often glorify relentless productivity. Even stewardship conversations can reveal attachments to maintenance and control, rather than to the living call of the gospel.
Liberal and Conservative Pitfalls
Brueggemann saw that different branches of the church fall into different traps:
Liberal Christians: strong in critique, oriented toward crisis, unafraid to call out injustice. But often weary, indignant, and disconnected from the energizing vision of hope.
Conservative Christians: strong in hope, lifting up visions of heaven or millennial promise. But often complacent about present-day injustice, content to defer transformation to the future.
As a progressive himself, Brueggemann admitted that he criticized liberals “way more” — because he was addressing his own house.
Royal Consciousness vs. Alternative Community
One of the most striking ideas we explored was royal consciousness —Brueggemann’s phrase for the mindset of empire. Pharaoh’s Egypt, Solomon’s Israel, Rome’s Judea — all shared this. It suppresses imagination, teaching people to believe there is “nothing new under the sun.” It discourages hope that God might break into history.
Against this, prophets recall Moses and the wilderness, when God was mobile and free, traveling with the Ark of the Covenant.
That wilderness memory, Brueggemann argued, resists empire’s insistence that everything must stay as it is.
But even Israel eventually succumbed to empire-thinking. Solomon’s temple boxed God in, subordinating divine sovereignty to royal power. When God is beholden to kings and priests, there is no longer an appeal for the poor or the marginal.
Prophetic Speech Is Partisan
One of the boldest points Jim highlighted: prophetic speech is always partisan.
Empires want reasoned voices who can “see both sides” and keep the peace. Prophets, by contrast, take sides. They insist God is on the side of the enslaved, not Pharaoh.
Friends in the seminar found this deeply relevant. We named how movements like Black Lives Matter are muted by calls to “both sides” discourse. But that very moderation, Brueggemann argued, is how empires preserve stability. To lament, to grieve, to protest: this is partisan.
Modern Prophets Among Us
We ended last week’s session by looking for modern prophetic voices.
Some saw it in the anti-racism work within Quaker yearly meetings.
Others pointed to Greta Thunberg’s passionate outcry over climate collapse.
Some shared stories from Gaza, where amid devastation, people spoke of “unjustifiable hope.”
Jim's personal “classic” example was Sinead O’Connor’s 1992 Saturday Night Live performance, tearing up a photo of the Pope and crying, “Fight the real enemy.” The lament was so raw, so shocking, that it sparked global outrage. Yet in it we glimpsed true prophetic speech — grief breaking open the possibility of hope.
The Task Before Us
Brueggemann sums it up in one sentence:
“The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the dominant culture.”
That is the work — for prophets in Israel, for the early church, for Friends today.
And as Jim reminded us, this is not an abstract task. It is urgent. The prophetic call is to nurture and evoke right now, in our meetings, our communities, and our world.
Some Queries for Public Ministers and Meetings...
Your Prophetic Message
In my ministry, how do I balance lament and critique with energizing visions of hope?
Have I been more comfortable in one mode than the other? What is lost when I neglect either grief or amazement?
How do I discern whether my ministry is offering the “raw cry of anguish” or a “song of amazement,” and whether my community can receive it?
Your Meeting
How might my meeting (or the wider Quaker community) be overly enculturated—whether in productivity, institutional survival, or consumer values?
What does it mean for Friends to risk being alienating or confrontational when we feel the prophetic word rising?
How do I recognize when I am softening the edges of prophetic speech in order to be liked or to avoid conflict?
Partisanship and Prophetic Witness
What does it mean, practically, for prophetic speech to be partisan? How do I navigate this without slipping into partisanship for its own sake?
When have I witnessed the “both-sides” discourse that Brueggemann critiques, and how might I speak faithfully against it?
What prophetic voices today (in or beyond Quakerism) challenge me most deeply, and why?
Royal Consciousness vs. Alternative Community
Where do I see “royal consciousness” shaping my meeting, my ministry, or my culture—ways of thinking that insist nothing new is possible?
How might Friends today recover a wilderness imagination that insists God is not boxed in?
What practices might cultivate a community that embodies alternative consciousness?
Exceptionalism and Chosenness
How does the ideology of chosenness or exceptionalism show up in Quaker history and identity? Do Friends fall into this trap today?
How do I, as a minister, discern when my community is presuming on God’s covenant rather than living faithfully into it?
How might prophetic imagination help us resist American exceptionalism and its entanglements with racism, militarism, and oligarchy?
In what ways do Friends need to be awakened to reality—just as the prophets awakened Israel to the truth of exile?
Quaker Practice
How do I know when prophetic ministry in worship is faithful, especially if it shocks, unsettles, or even offends?
What can early Friends’ radical practices (refusing titles, affirming women’s ministry, pacifism, etc.) teach us about risking ridicule for the sake of truth today?
How do I bring both grief and hope into meeting for worship in ways that nurture the community’s imagination?
Looking Ahead: This Week’s Session
This Wednesday, August 27th, we’ll continue the conversation. And if last week is any indication, it will be lively, challenging, and full of Spirit.
We’ll start at 7:00 pm Eastern, but we’re opening the Zoom at 6:45 for a bit of social time. Come early if you’d like to chat and connect before we dive in.
What We’ll Explore
In our first session, we traced the prophetic pattern: reality, grief, hope, and new imagination. This week we’ll move into Brueggemann’s later work, connecting ancient Israel’s story with our own.
We’ll look at how the ideology of chosenness shaped Israel before the Babylonian exile — and how that same ideology shows up in the United States today.
We’ll wrestle with Brueggemann’s claim that this sense of divine chosenness allows us to live with inequity and oppression, because we assume God will fulfill God’s part of the covenant regardless of our faithfulness.
We’ll ask what it means for prophets to awaken us to reality and reject the dominant ideologies of our culture.
Jim will guide us into some powerful comparisons:
The destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE and the attacks of 9/11 in the U.S.
The Puritans’ vision of a “city on a hill” and the persistent ideology of American exceptionalism.
The ways racism, militarism, and oligarchy intertwine with chosenness — and the prophetic witness that confronts them.
Queries for Reflection
As Quakers, we’ll be invited by Jim to consider:
What are the dangers of an ideology of exceptionalism? How does it distort our reality and blind us to injustice?
Have Friends themselves fallen into a sense of chosenness?
How do we discern prophetic speech in worship, especially when it shocks, offends, or unsettles us?
A Quaker Connection
Jim reminded us that early Friends knew how to resist the dominant culture’s ideology. In the 17th century, Quakers testified to a new reality through radical practices:
Refusing titles and “hat honor”
Naming women and men as spiritual equals
Refusing oaths in court
Embracing pacifism in a violent world
As George Fox declared, “..live in the virtue of that Life and Power which takes away the occasion for wars.”
His culture thought he was living in a fantasy world. But Fox saw that the real fantasy was the culture’s justification of violence.
How does that challenge us today, when we are often more domesticated, respectable, and comfortable with social conventions?
Why It Matters Now
The ideology of exceptionalism is not an old problem. It is alive and well. Brueggemann warns that it leads to arrogance, racism, militarism, and oligarchy — all justified with religious fervor.
And yet, prophetic witness always insists: there is an alternative.
The prophets spoke in poetry — not programs or prose — because poetry cannot be domesticated by empire. It shocks, offends, transforms. It opens imagination. It makes space for God to act.
This week, we will listen again for that poetry. We will imagine together what it means to be a prophetic people in our own day.
You’re Invited
Whether or not you were with us last week, you are warmly welcome this Wednesday.
Date: Wednesday, August 27th
Time: 7:00 pm Eastern (Zoom opens at 6:45 for fellowship)
Where: Online (register below for the link)
Bring your heart, your questions, your imagination. Come ready to grieve and to hope. Together we will practice the prophetic imagination that Brueggemann so passionately described — and so desperately needed in our time.
Jim Webner holds a Master's degree in Divinity (MDiv) from Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, with concentrations in Biblical Interpretation and Christian History, Theology, and Ethics, and a Certificate in the Art of Spiritual Direction from the HeartPaths training program. He is a Quaker employee, spiritual director, occasional teacher, and former convener of the LGBTQ+ Visibility working group at Stony Run Friends Meeting in Baltimore. He lives in Ellicott City, MD with his husband and an irascible feline roommate.
For a 10-page study guide on our next session, please download Jim's attached PDF:
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