The Rev Roddy Hamilton explains why worship is an invitation to explore.

I’VE always found faith to be imaginative long before it is about proposition and concept.

In fact I’d say I am still far more in the imaginative camp than the propositional one. I find it hard to listen to every word in worship. I come to faith with my imagination first because what I believe is beyond propositions and knowledge. Imagination is perhaps the greatest gift I have found to engage with faith.

And that is singularly true in worship. I engage with worship using imagination long before I bring my reason and explore concepts and statements. Might it be what all of us bring first to worship is our capacity to imagine, dream and wonder? Some have said that imagination is one of the few almost uniquely human abilities we have and leads to spirituality, hope for the future, and a creative, living relationship with God.

It is also where we end up when all reason comes to an end, as reason always does. Once we have pursued a doctrine as far as it can go, what we have left lives in imagination. When we run out of words to explain God, or make sense of belief, or when we reach the limit to what we know, we find ourselves left with curiosity, creativity, and artistry.

With that in mind, when those who lead worship sit down and gather their thoughts, might we always ask: how does the worship I am designing or this sermon I am writing, release people to open up their imagination, and explore a spirituality that will take them beyond what I am saying?

And when we are in a pew encountering God in worship, might I invite us to dare to dream? Leave the space we are in and journey with our imaginations, sparked by something that invites us to veer off at a tangent contemplating a character, a phrase, an image.

We don’t get a row for daydreaming. The worship leader may be talking about one thing but our souls may wish to engage with another. Go with it.

This comes from the idea we curate worship rather than lead it. How we design worship comes from the richest of traditions, and there are many of them that come together in the worship we share each week. Regardless of the style we adopt, there is nothing there that is unique or new, but a tangle of a heritage of words, music, liturgy, pattern and creed.

“ When we run out of words to explain God, or make sense of belief, or when we reach the limit to what we know, we find ourselves left with curiosity, creativity, and artistry.

But each word spoken is an invitation to explore. As worship leaders we aren’t teaching or herding or controlling people, but inviting God’s Own to pause and wrestle, daydream and wonder, weave their own journeys through this encounter with faith in worship. We offer a plethora of moments, a gathering of ideas, a mine of stories that invite folk to go where the words don’t, and the explanations can’t, and the insights can do so only so far. A place where imagination and wonder comes alive. This is the gift of worship, curated, in order to let us dream and reach beyond the sum total of statements and creeds and sermon plans.

May we invite imagination to nudge us, dream in us, and encourage us to take diverse and creative routes through worship rather than believe we must listen to every word.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.