A God Who Is Free

A reflection on Walter Brueggemann's "The Prophetic Imagination"

LaSheena Jenkins pictured with Pastors Curtis Moore and Pastor Ira Acree at the Rainbow Push Clergy Breakfast and celebration.

There's a version of God that lives in the royal court. Beholden to the king. No court of appeal for anyone standing outside the palace gate. And there's a version of God that walks out of Egypt with Moses — free, unowned, and on the side of the people who have nothing.

Walter Brueggemann spends the first four chapters of The Prophetic Imagination naming the difference between those two Gods, and it's one of the most compelling theological arguments I've sat with in a long time.

I'll be honest about something first: Brueggemann is not an easy read for me. He writes from a strong conservative conviction, and he doesn't hide it — there are moments where his comments about "liberals," and what he seems to code as the impatience of younger generations, made me raise an eyebrow. He refers to God only as He. All of that told me early on exactly where he was standing. And still — his ideas are spot-on. That contradiction surprised me. I didn't expect to agree with him as much as I did.

Brueggemann earns that trust the hard way — by exposing his own position first, instead of hiding behind a false neutrality. And once you're past that, what he offers is this: Moses didn't just lead a movement out of Egypt. He dismantled a religion — what Brueggemann calls "static triumphalism," the gods of empire who had already been shown to have no real power. In its place, Moses introduced something Brueggemann names with real precision: the religion of God's freedom and the politics of human justice.

That pairing — religion and politics, always named together, never separated — is the engine of the whole argument. Brueggemann writes:

"We won't understand the meaning of prophetic imagination unless we see the connection between the religion of static triumphalism and the politics of oppression and exploitation."

Read that next to the history of the American church and enslaved Africans, and it stops being an abstraction. The right to freedom. The right to education. The right to dignity of mind, body, soul, and spirit — all of it stripped away, the same way the God of the marginalized got slowly absorbed into the God of the king's court. Brueggemann doesn't flinch from naming that evolution: "The God of the court, means this God is no court of appeal for the marginalized ones over against the king, for God is now completely beholden to the king."

I felt that sentence in my body. I think about the church, the royal palace, and the theater as three versions of the same room — who gets to speak in each one, and on whose authority. The French Revolution moved church and social action into the theater precisely because the theater could hold what the sanctioned institutions couldn't: improvisation, spontaneity, a community building meaning together in real time. That's the room where people who needed a God got to have one who was actually for them. A free agent. Not a God who had to clear it with the king first.

When I imagine Brueggemann's stern, certain voice — the parts that rub my inner revolutionary the wrong way — I hear something else underneath it too: the wisdom of my father and my grandfather. The God who walks with you through a transition doesn't always sound like urgency. Sometimes it sounds like patience. Change is good, especially when people are crying out for it. But transformation — real transformation — takes time, and it takes incremental steps from A to B, even when every part of you wants to leap straight to Z.

Here's why I'm telling you this.

This is the same question I bring into every room I consult in: whose God — whose mission, whose values, whose "the way we do things here" — is actually operating in this organization? Is it the version that's free, accessible, and accountable to the people it claims to serve? Or has it quietly, gradually, become beholden to whoever holds the most power in the room?

That question is at the center of the Ecowomanist Organizational Ecology framework I've been building through SheeCreates and through LTJ — the conviction that the health of a community is inseparable from the health of the systems and language that hold it together. Brueggemann calls it prophetic imagination. I call it finding the language problem at the center of the organization, and building something more honest in its place.

Freedom doesn't announce itself all at once. It shows up incrementally — the same way Brueggemann says it always has.

LaSheena T. Jenkins is the founder of LTJ LLC, offering Strategic Organizational & Prophetic Counsel to churches, nonprofits, and mission-driven organizations.