Imagine working with someone to move one of those large racks of folding chairs that populate church basements and school gymnasiums. It takes a theory (“I think this will work if you’re on one side and I’m on the other”); you have to share at least elements of a vision, to be of “one mind” on the nature of the task and its execution.Even so, as vital as it is, imagination does not move the chairs. Action — walking, pushing, pulling, steadying — is required, too, as are mid-course communication and correction. The whole thing is common work in which people with different functions share, if only for a few moments, the same mind.
Such shared imagination-in-action does not ignore the difficulties of living with others. Chairs fall off of racks and tempers flare. Paul knows the difficulties of living in community, and yet he refuses to try to solve them by ranking some in the church basement as more important than others, or by imagining that “gifted” in such a context means the same thing for everyone. In fact, it does not; by design, the body includes members with different gifts.
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