What if, instead of trying to drown out the competition with comfier chairs, cooler leadership structures, fancier social media strategies, and better coffee or beer, we just got really good at telling our story? What if instead of throwing down thousands of dollars on strategic planners or social media workshops, churches hired theologians to help them think through the complexities of retelling the story of God and the world in the 21st century? What if we had honest conversations about the way our story challenges our current political structures? Or how the story itself is challenged by modern science, pluralism, and the pervasiveness of religiously sanctioned injustice?

What would it look like if we began to think of theology less as dusty books asking the same old questions about God, and instead—to borrow a turn of phrase from the theologian Charles Winquist—as “the desire for a thinking that does not disappoint” (Desiring Theology, 218). What then could a theology do? Such a theology, it seems to me, might genuinely change the world.