HISTORY
The Center for Prophetic Imagination (CPI) was founded by Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk and Caspian Jensen in late 2016. At the time, the Mennonite Worker (an intentional community practicing hospitality, simplicity, prayer, peacemaking, and resistance) was drawing to a close. Ashe and Caspian discerned the need for a generative initiative that cultivated prophetic spirituality, celebrated the queer experience, and emphasized the role of creativity and the imagination in social and spiritual transformation. Thus CPI was born.
MISSION
The Center for Prophetic Imagination integrates spiritual formation, creative political action, and experimental education to nurture and guide leaders that call people out of empire to embrace God’s vision for the world. We exist to nurture prophetic witness.
VISION
We are working to live in a world where all walls of alienation are torn down and all people live justly with each other, with the land, and with the Spirit of Life.
CORE PRINCIPLES
1 Jesus Christ is our center and example for life.
2 By encountering the living presence of God in prayer and contemplation, we begin to experience the world prophetically, as Jesus does.
3 The prophetic imagination cannot be understood apart from the lived experiences of marginalized and oppressed people—including but not limited to those who are people of color, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, Muslim, formerly and currently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, disabled, undocumented, and immigrant.
4 Imperial structures and myths seek to alienate us from one another, from the rest of creation, and from our Creator.
5 Therefore, empowered by the Spirit, we will actively resist forces of alienation.
6 As we encounter God in the midst of this struggle, we find new ways of human flourishing, for deep praxis deepens our prophetic imagination and shows us that a new world is possible.
7 We become most like Jesus when we bring our full selves and deepening creative capacity into the task of co-creating the new world.