Competent to Implement, Unable to Imagine: Prophetic Ecclesiology, Institutional Investment, and the Ecclesial Futures of North American Churches

The Lilly Endowment's Pathways for Tomorrow Initiative represents the largest institutional investment in North American theological education in living memory. This paper argues that its structural limits illuminate, with unusual clarity, what Walter Brueggemann means by prophetic imagination. Drawing on Charles Taylor's account of the secular age, a proposed mixed-methods research agenda measuring Lilly's outcomes across denominations, with my own denomination as a primary ecclesiological case, the paper contends that the ecclesial futures North American churches most urgently need cannot be funded into existence. They require a prior act of prophetic imagination — one that institutional investment is structurally incapable of producing. That imagination, the paper argues, is most powerfully provoked by communities the North American church has persistently positioned as recipients of mission rather than as teachers: Indigenous and other marginalized communities whose wisdom has never been organized around the assumptions of Christendom.