“Every good thing in this world started with a dream. So hold on to yours” says Willy Wonka’s mother just before her death.
Wonka, an orphan, shows up in town with twelve silver sovereigns in his pocket, and a hatful of dreams. The sovereigns don’t last long. Through his kindhearted generosity, Willy passes them out to everyone he encounters, including those in need.
Exhausted and penniless the winter night closes in. Sitting on a bench in the shivering cold, a stranger invites him to stay at a nice warm inn nearby, Mother Scrubbits. The inn is one of the biggest rackets in town, and Wonka is lured in and manipulated into indentured servitude. He finds himself in an oppressive system where he must “scrub, scrub” the days away.
In the belly of the beast, he befriends a bookish orphan girl named Noodle. His grand dream takes a backseat as he seeks to grow a relationship and invest in this disinherited and forgotten one who has never eaten a single piece of chocolate. Wonka’s compassionate care of Noodle becomes the singular obsession of his life, indeed, almost Christ-like.
Perhaps pure imagination is always other-oriented.
Together, Wonka, Noodle, and their circle of disinherited conspirators use the underground network and hatch a scheme to start a chocolate shop.
However, Mother Scrubbits is not the only shady dealer in this town. The church, overseen by a corrupt priest and 500 chocolate addicted monks, are in league with the three major chocolate dealers in this city. They form a “chocolate cartel.” Together they have a monopoly on the overpriced, low-quality chocolate they sell to the public. Secretly, hidden beneath the cathedral, they hoard a literal sea of fine chocolate for themselves.
Wonka’s plan to launch a new shop goes sour when the chocolate cartel poisons Wonka’s creations on opening day. Utilizing a corrupt law enforcement officer who is also addicted to chocolate, they attempt to assassinate Wonka and imprison Noodle indefinitely.
While all the people in the story represent a stingy, self-preservation focused way of life, Wonka, a seemingly naïve dreamer represents self-donation. He gives of himself and his innovations freely. He turns every facet of an evil system bent on his destruction in on itself.
In a social scenario marked by scarcity, imaginative gridlock, and commoditization, Wonka overcomes through the sheer power of pure imagination. Within an economic system that makes a small percentage of the population opulently wealthy, while the masses suffer in poverty, Wonka starts with the poorest of the poor. From the community of the oppressed, he presents a new imaginarium where there is enough for everyone.
Stingy Church
The messiah character in this story is not represented by the chocolate hoarding priest and his army of chocaholic monks, but this outsider, this imagineer, who through the sheer joy of creativity, kindness, and compassion pioneers a new way.
Today I can’t help but see a modern parallel with bankrupt religious systems who have forgotten to care for the vulnerable and disinherited. A church sitting on resources that could catalyze massive good in the world. A church caught in a self-preservation mode who claims to follow a messiah of self-donation.
Consider that Jesus arrives on the scene and begins to invest in one forgotten person at a time. He enters fully into the sin-warped system, turning it on itself. Moved with compassion, he gives himself away to the disinherited, the sick, the suffering. He takes their pain into himself, suffering with, and healing from the inside. He imagines and embodies a new way, truth, and life, that is not bound by the struggle for power and wealth.
Jesus is not in the church that is sitting on a literal sea of chocolate, withholding it from a hungry and hopeless world. Jesus, the outsider comes to set up a new shop right amid the chocolate cartel of the prevailing social and religious order. The authorities and the religious leaders collude to poison the well. Together they work to put Jesus out of business, and then to have him executed.
Jesus confronts the stingy church, then and now
In a religious system that sustains itself through the self-perseveration impulse and a conservative rendering of legalistic codes, Jesus lives a life of self-donation. In a social scenario that was fixated on who was “clean and unclean,” Jesus forms a community with the unclean ones. He starts with the excluded, the poor and oppressed. The ones who had never tasted chocolate before. He invites them into an eternal life, abundant life, true life.
The Wonka Way
For me the Fresh Expressions movement is the Wonka of the 21st Century.
In one of the final scenes of the film, Wonka opens a chocolate bar he had held onto made by his deceased mother when he was a child. The bar represents his dream, his mother’s love, and the tangible sign of their relationship. Materially, it is his treasured inheritance. Inside is a note from his mother that says, “it’s not the chocolate, it’s who you share it with.”
Wonka then breaks off pieces of the chocolate and shares a piece with each of his co-conspirators in holy mischief. A eucharistic moment if there ever was one. This sacrament we take, bless, break, and give freely to the world.
Wonka embodies a life of unbridled imagination, compassion, adventure, and self-donation. He is the Jesus character in the story, while the church and powers work together to silence and eliminate him.
This is the way of Fresh Expressions. It’s a movement that imagines new forms of church, for new people, in new places, and in new ways. It’s an adventure of figuring it out as we go along and having fun along the way.
It’s a way of being church that starts with one person, one relationship, one small community at a time. It’s a way of seeing the invisible and disinherited. A compassionate way of being with, that knows that love of neighbor is love of God. It gets us free from the chocolate cartel and their ever-expanding vision of bigger and better. It’s in some ways subversive to the religious machine, but also has the potential to be its redemption.
It is a way of self-donation. An ecclesiology of gift. We are breaking off pieces of the body of Christ and feeding a hungry world, with no expectation of a “return on investment.” It is a movement of pure imagination. Imagination through which we prayerfully access the imagination of God so that we are not confined by the barriers and limitations of our current reality. Imagination that flows from compassion, grounding our thinking, feeling, and acting in Jesus’s own sensitivity to suffering with a commitment to try and alleviate and prevent it. It is an adventure in following the Holy Spirit on a risk-taking journey into new possibilities.
These communities form around the simple practices that bind us together in a shared humanity, in the places where we already do life. Churches are springing up in burrito shops, EV charging stations, tattoo parlors, community centers, yoga studios, assisted living facilities, and the chemical dependency unit of a rehab. It can be as simple as a group of people who gather to share and delight in the beauty of a bar of chocolate (assuredly a tastier form of Holy Communion). Through delighting together in the many sacred moments and simple gifts of life, we can truly create “a world all our own, a place to belong to, where we can free.” A place where our isolation and loneliness can be healed.
Indeed, life is not about the chocolate, it’s about the people we share it with. This is the core motivation of the Fresh Expressions movement. We know that every person is a sacred gift. Following Jesus can be an adventure in imagination that brings hope, delight, and beauty to the world. Every one of us can turn imagination into tangible flesh and blood communities of healing for our friends.
Let’s begin with a spin, into a world of pure imagination, what we’ll see, will defy explanation.
(Interested in learning more about Fresh Expressions? Visit the bookstore here).
