It was thought prophets were lone voices, standing against everyone who didn’t “get it” – usually everyone.

The new thinking** has the voice of the prophet as representative of people who hope for something different.  Their imagining and words and enactments express alternative worlds.

“The part is a place for the presencing of the whole.”*

If this is so then a group I’m part of are imagining prophetically at the moment.  Our concern to provide a space for nurture and empowerment for people who are disenchanted with their work-spaces, in which others don’t appear to care as much as they do.

‘Your purpose is not what you do but why you do it.’^

You are being prophetic when you hope on behalf of others for something which does not exist, and when you imagine it into being you are leading.

(*Henri Bartoft, quoted in Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers’s Presence.)
(**From Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination.)
(^From Bernadette Jiwa’s Difference.)