"Surely we need theologians with humility and imagination, and poets with the discipline and intellectual integrity of scholars."

I like the way you phrased this :) Those of us who are gifted as stewards of faith communities in particular need to live out of both the head and the heart. This isn't an easy thing to do...

"What is a theologian supposed to do these days?"

You know, reading these posts I recognize the ambiguity of my own calling, really.. my ambiguous relationship to myself. I tend not to trust my left brain dominance, but in my insecurity I sometimes live out of that place. I've wondered whether my own journey on the road to wholeness will empower me to greater faithfulness, or whether greater faithfulness is really rooted in stronger connections.. a more faithful community. In other words, perhaps my own completion is more bound up with a local expression of the body. Perhaps the complementarity and wholeness that is really necessary for any local church is just that.. a corporate wholeness. "If all were an eye.." If all were left brained or right brained, if all were head or heart.. if all were poets, or theologians.. We really do need one another, our strengths and our weaknesses, but we all tend, as john pointed out, to think "that is the true bug" or "this is the true bug." Its tough for the left brained people to really value the more process intuitive, more process oriented left brained ones. But until we walk in that kind of love and mutual honoring, I wonder if there is really hope for change..

"Is it the role of the theologians to keep us rooted in the Big Story while the poets shape 'new stories in faithful missional communities'?"

Maybe .. but I suspect its the role of all us to stay rooted, and shape those stories together as we live in the life of Jesus day by day. "To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except through the spirit of the body, and for the body." Pascal