Prophets both see the
present world from a different perspective and see a world that differs from
the one in which we live at present.
They are often concerned with social justice; often involved in the
creative arts; and may bring these two strands together as a way of fostering
the imagination of others.
Few prophets are
able, on their own, to galvanise a community for the change they envisage:
their role needs to combine with that of evangelists, who will carry their
message, and apostles, who are better equipped to make concrete the steps a
community needs to take from where we currently are into the new ordering of
our lives. It was prophetic imagination
that sowed the seeds of a community post-segregation and post-apartheid, but it
took the involvement of others to work that process through.
This
prophetic inability to galvanise a community plays out in the particular
potential pitfalls of both not waiting and waiting. Where the prophet fails to wait, they are
likely to end up merely grinding their own axe, rather than proclaiming God’s
hopes and dreams for our experience of life; and resenting the lack of uptake. But for many of us who are created primarily
as prophets – that is, as a share in Jesus, who was the only human to hold
apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher in perfect harmony in one life
– we need far more time waiting than others: we are wired for it, drawn to it,
refreshed in it. The key lesson is to
learn the distinction between solitude and isolation. Solitude is space alone with God, on the edge
of community; isolation is dislocation from community. The inability to galvanise community can be
exploited by the accuser to foster a false sense of isolation, along with the
temptation to actually withdraw into genuine isolation. And so the prophet must wait in a particular
way: seeking the balance between hours of solitude and searching out apostles
and evangelists in particular in the community to which the prophet is sent, in
order to invest in those relationships.
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