A few months ago I was invited to give a series of talks at a Christian conference. This doesn’t happen to me very often, and I’m still not sure how these people heard about me in the first place! The event was the summer school of the Society of Contemporary Evangelists, which is part of the Through Faith Missions organization, and I was asked to give some teaching on storytelling.
The conference finally took place in July, and after all my nerves and trepidation, my talks were very well received. It seems that most people, including those taking part in the summer school. love to listen to stories, to tell stories themselves, and to explore ways of doing it better.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, after all. From childhood we enjoy hearing stories, and as adults we are no different. Yet it seems there is a common view that stories are “kids’ stuff”. Consequently adults are all too often starved of stories: how else can we account for the unfathomable popularity of soap operas? The absurdity yet predictability of their plotlines reminds you of parents who improvise bedtime stories about what’s happening in their children’s lives, but subtly transformed to teach a lesson, or comfort a child who is troubled about something in the real world.
Stories are powerful. They interest, amuse, and entertain us. They open our eyes to new possibilities, giving us an insight into different ways and customs. They can teach us truths we could not learn in any other way. They can challenge us by touching our imagination or forcing us to think differently. Stories can change lives.
And this is true whether they are fictional stories, about completely made-up characters, or stories about real-life situations. Our own stories can be particularly powerful: just think how compelling any account can be, when it’s told by someone who has witnessed or lived through what is being described. You might disagree with someone’s ideas, or want to dispute their opinions, but you can’t argue with their experience, when they say, “This is what happened to me; this is what I have lived through, and seen, and felt.”
Most powerful of all, of course, is God’s Story. The Christian faith is not primarily about dogmas and doctrines, nor even about ethics, and the right way to live our lives. First and foremost, it is about the Story of how God loved the world he made, and what lengths he went to, to do something about it. Like all real stories, it starts with a situation into which there comes an element of crisis, a threat or a danger. The action then involves how that crisis develops and is dealt with, leading (after inevitable setbacks and false hopes) to a final resolution.
In God’s Story, the initial situation is the creation of a world peopled with beings made like God, to enjoy his friendship and his gifts. The crisis results from what went wrong with that creation, causing it to fall away from God’s plans for it, into the grasp of evil and failure. God’s chosen way of dealing with the crisis was to get down into the world himself, in the person of Jesus Christ. In the Gospels we see how Jesus came to show us and teach us what God is like, and (as it seems, inevitably) to be misunderstood, hated, rejected, and hounded to his death. But his death on the cross is both the ultimate expression of God’s far-reaching love, and also the way in which the wilful failure of the creation is overcome. When Jesus rose from the dead, he broke the age-long power of death, and brought new life to the creation.
This is the Story that the Church tells week by week in its worship, by song and prayer, reading and preaching, and the celebration of the Sacraments. It is an unfinished Story! because the ultimate resolution, in which God finally deals with evil and its effects, and brings the universe to its fulfilment, has not yet taken place. Yet its unfinishedness is the great attraction, because it invites us to enter the Story ourselves, to become part of it, to take sides with God in helping to work out the purposes for which Christ came.
This is what makes being a Christian so exciting, and so worthwhile.
Published in the Marston Times, August 2009