The pastor who carries imagination

Why explaining better won’t be enough. Part 4 of 6 six shifts shaping the next decade and the kind of pastor each one is asking for.

The world's changing, and this series looks at what type of pastors the future is going to need.

Confession time. This article cuts to the heart of an area of growth for me in my preaching, and a daily prayer point.

For most of Western history, the cultural imagination ran in roughly Christian grooves. Even people who weren’t believers knew the story. They knew the shape of fall and redemption. They recognised the figure of Christ. The basic vocabulary of faith, sin, grace, mercy, soul, heaven meant roughly the same thing to a churchgoer and to a sceptic at the pub.

That world is largely gone.

We are now pastoring to people whose imaginations have been formed by an entirely different liturgy. TikTok. Netflix. Instagram. Gaming. The algorithm. They have, on average, no functional memory of the biblical story. They’ve never heard of Pharaoh. They don’t know what Easter is for. They couldn’t tell us what the cross means.

And here’s the thing, they’re not hostile. They’re just unformed in that direction.

Their imagination has been shaped, faithfully and well, by something else.

By the numbers

Average screen-based attention has collapsed from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds in 2024.

Americans check their phones approximately 205 times per day. Knowledge workers face around 275 interruptions per workday — one task switch every 51 seconds.

The proportion of young adults (18–29) identifying as Christian has fallen from 68% in 2007 to 45% in 2024–25.

77% of US teens say they’re at least somewhat motivated to keep learning about Jesus. Only 1% of Gen Z adults hold a biblical worldview. The hunger is up. The formation is in collapse.

A generation is being raised with no functional memory of Genesis, Exodus, the Cross, or new creation.

I’ve checked my phone 6 times while writing this.

What it’s exposing

That most of our preaching has been propositional. It’s 3 points, it’s information.

We’ve often been giving people answers to questions they’re no longer asking, in a vocabulary they no longer share, on top of an imagination they no longer have.

It’s possible to preach a perfectly orthodox sermon and have it bounce off a mind shaped by TikTok and self-optimisation algorithms, not because the sermon is wrong, but because the imagination underneath it has been retrained.

The information lands. The imagination doesn’t move. Our worldviews need imagination and information, but it seems to be stories that shape us more than data.

And here’s the deeper exposure. We have often confused teaching with formation. We have assumed that if we explain it clearly enough, people will be transformed by it. That’s never quite how human beings work, but it is especially not how distracted, post-Christian human beings work.

Now, please don’t hear what I’m not saying. Clear teaching matters. Doctrine matters. If you know me, you know I’m that guy more than most. The next decade will need pastors who actually know the Word and can teach it, we covered that in Part One. I’m not arguing against clarity. I’m arguing that clarity alone isn’t enough.

If our answer to a distracted, story-starved generation is just “better explanations,” we may be giving them the right information at exactly the level their imagination can no longer receive it.

What they need is not more content. They need an imagination repaired.

Information lands in the mind. Imagination lands in the soul. And it’s the soul that changes a life.

What’s required

A pastor who carries imagination.

A pastor who tells stories. A pastor who paints pictures. A pastor who can make the unseen feel suddenly real.

A pastor whose own imagination has been formed by Scripture so deeply that the world starts to look different when they walk through it, and who can carry that re-formed seeing back into the room.

This is not entertainment. It’s not gimmicks. It’s not stand-up comedy with a verse attached.

It’s the old, old work of reframing the world. Of putting back together a coherent picture of what a human life is for, what God is like, what the kingdom looks like, what love costs, what death is, and what hope means.

Such a pastor reads widely. Watches carefully. Notices what their people are watching. Knows the films, the music, the influencers, the algorithms, not to imitate them, but to understand what’s already forming their congregation. And then to offer something better.

They don’t just explain. They show.

They use images. They tell stories. They linger in a parable until the parable cracks open and starts preaching itself.

They are unafraid of mystery, of paradox, of poetry, of silence. They know that the deepest truths can’t be reduced to bullet points without being killed in the reduction.

This is my own work on. I pray daily for God to increase my story imagination, not only so I will be formed, but so when I preach, I can preach the biblical story in a way that actually shapes.

A pastor who carries imagination takes their people's imagination seriously. They don’t dismiss what’s forming the people in their care. They don’t sneer at the playlist or the show or the influencer. They understand that every human being is being formed all the time, and the question is never whether you’ll be formed, only by what.

A pastor who carries imagination becomes, in their own small way, a counter-liturgy. A different way of seeing.

In an age of forty-seven-second attention, what cuts through is not louder noise. It’s a different kind of beauty. A story.

The ancient root

The Bible itself is the answer to this one.

Sixty-six books. The vast majority of which are story. Not propositions. Not bullet points. Not abstract theological treatises. Narrative. Poetry. Prophecy. Wisdom. Parable. Letter. Apocalypse.

The dominant mode of divine revelation is not a list of beliefs.

It’s the story.

And Jesus himself, the master storyteller.

“The kingdom of God is like…” — that’s how he taught. Not “the kingdom of God can be defined as a state of affairs in which the eschatological reign of Yahweh…” No. “There was a man who had two sons…” “A sower went out to sow…”“There was a king who threw a wedding banquet…”

He could have given lectures. He gave parables.

He understood, two thousand years ago, what we are slowly relearning, that the human heart is moved by image, by story, by lived encounter. Not by abstract argument. Not first, anyway.

The Gospel writers understood this too. They didn’t write systematic theologies. They wrote narratives. They told us the story of a man.

The whole great tradition has carried this instinct. Augustine wrote his Confessions as a memoir, not a textbook. Dante told the story of his own descent and ascent through hell, purgatory, and paradise. C.S. Lewis wrote children’s stories that have probably formed more imaginations toward Christ than all his apologetics combined. Tolkien insisted that fairy tales were not a flight from reality but a sharper telling of it.

The church at its best has always been a community of storytellers. Carriers of an imagination that runs deeper than the surrounding culture and lasts longer than its trends.

We were made for story because reality itself has a narrative shape. There is a beginning. There is a middle. There is an end. There is a Storyteller. There is a hero. There is a homecoming.

We are not propositions waiting for proof. We are characters in a story being told.

We need to tell and preach the biblical stories. We need to let the characters shape our character. We need to help people make the connection between the story and the worldview it is forming in us. What is this story telling us about where we came from, about the nature of God, about the human being, about the world? What is it telling us about relationships, about how we know, about where the world is heading?

A worldview is rarely caught by being explained. It’s caught by being lived inside a story long enough that you start to see through it.

People will not be changed just by being told what is true. They will be changed by being given a story of the world to live in.

A practical move

For one whole month, don’t start a sermon with just a verse.

Start with a whole biblical story. Then bring it to an image. A moment. A scene from your week.

Then, and only then, move to the details.

You will find the same truth lands twice as hard. Because the imagination is now open. The soul is now listening. The text now has somewhere to land.

If you can’t remember the last time someone said, “I’ll never forget that image you used,”that’s the developmental edge.

Not a homiletics course. A repaired imagination.

Read more fiction. Watch better films. Walk more slowly. Notice more deeply. Let yourself be moved.

We cannot give what we do not have.

What’s next

That was the fourth shift. The pastor who carries imagination.

(If you’ve just landed in the series, Parts 1, 2, and 3 are worth backing up for. They build on each other.)

Two more to go.

The world the clock has built is not only distracted. It is also profoundly disembodied. Our people increasingly live somewhere other than where they are, their attention, their friendships, their pleasure, their work, their sexual imagination, all of it increasingly mediated through a screen. The body itself is becoming a thing that gets in the way of the real life happening on the device.

Next instalment: the pastor who calls people home to their bodies, what the disembodiment of contemporary life is asking of us, and why the sacraments are about to become the most countercultural thing the church does.

If this is useful, subscribe so the next part lands when it drops. And if you know a preacher whose imagination still does the work, forward it to them. The storytellers need encouragement too.