Posted by Helen on: 01.29.2007 /
Everyone seems to like a good story. I certainly do — I learned to read early and have been an avid reader ever since.
I think one reason stories work so well is that they don’t demand that we understand them a particular way. They come alongside us, gently inviting us to find meaning in them and parallels with our own lives.
This leaves us wonderful room to find our own connections with the story. Since our brains love to find connections, we do and are often shocked at how powerfully a story touches us.
This works best when the story is new. Sometimes a story strikes us as a sequel: we’ve already met some of these characters before. We’ve already decided whether they are good or bad. We’re locked into a certain meaning by our previous experience and associations.
Or maybe not completely locked; but to accept a new meaning we need a very compelling reason to put aside the old one.
According to the Bible, Jesus told a lot of stories and he often didn’t seem to want to explain them. Why? Could it be because Jesus wanted to leave room for people to make their own connections and find their own meaning in his stories?
I think it’s fun to explore a story together and share the connections and meanings we find in it. My sense is that Jews have always done that with their sacred stories (the Torah). I like how they traditionally made up stories (called “midrash’, I think) which expanded on what the text says. I don’t think anyone pretended these additions were true – rather, they were devices to bring out meaning and discuss it.
Conservative Christian Bible teachers and preachers are often good at taking a story (usually from the Old Testament) and exploring meaning and connection in it. However, this is not a mutual exploration. The teacher or preacher is the Leader of the Expedition, cutting a new path through uncharted territory. The job of everyone else is just to follow along. It may be a meaningful path to many; after all, we’re all human and what connects with one of us will connect with others too.
But what about those expedition members who get excited about what they see in another direction and start cutting their own path? Instead of that being valued, they’re told it’s “wrong’ and that they need to get back on the “correct’ path instead. What if the Expedition Leaders were to say to those people “here, take my cutting tool — you have a go at making the new path now and we’ll follow you!” They generally don’t; they tend to hold pretty tight to their leading tools. After all, they are the ones qualified to use them — not their team members.
Now I understand why I feel resentful when the teachers and preachers talk about what hard work it is being Leader of the Expedition. It’s because I know they love it and find it exciting. And I don’t think it’s fair that they don’t share the fun around. If it’s that hard work why don’t they take more breaks and give other people more turns at it?
Is it safe to tell stories and let people find their own meanings and connections in them? What if the people get it wrong? What interests me is, Jesus didn’t seem worried about that. I wonder if he would have explained any of his stories if people hadn’t asked him to. Why wasn’t Jesus worried about people getting the wrong end of the stick because they came up with their own meanings for his stories? Maybe because he figured that God was big enough to handle whatever people would come up with. Maybe because “getting the right answer’ isn’t actually what life is all about, much of the time.
I think the power of story telling is often lost by methods used in evangelism. A big problem is that people already have bad associations with “Jesus’ or “Christianity’ or “the gospel’. Telling those people that this is the only story and they need to change their associations has not proven very effective.
Why not find new ways to tell the story, without the bad associations? I’d like to think there’s a story which works for everyone, if only we could find the right way to tell it.
Comment by: ncxian
1I understand what you are saying here, Helen. Certainly the four steps, pray this prayer aspects of evangelism are not very story-ish. However, one “method” of evangelism that seems to be pretty universal amongst Christians, and is very prevalent among conservative Christians, I think, is the “testimony”–a person says “what Jesus has done in my life”.
Over at the Discussion Board, Karen asked, what good is belief (or something like that). Within a day, most of the Christians active there had posted something akin to a “testimony”. And all the participants, of whatever persuasion, responded positively to that revelation of personal experience. While some folks were, I’m sure, skeptical of the underlying facts, I think most people do honor, even value as useful information, how other people perceive reality. And that is what “story” is, don’t you think? Reality as filtered through somebody’s (or some community’s) perception or interpretation of it? “Point of view”?
Perhaps that is why fundamentalist religion (or fundamentalist non-religion, for that matter) feels offensive. It ignores the fact that your perception of reality belongs to you, and is ultimately of as much importance (to you, at least) as the underlying facts. That the story is, in some way, MORE real that the facts.
Comment by: Paul
2Hi Helen this is cheating since you already gave me an advanced preview of your awesome post…
but in the spirit of sharing/learning/growing as a community i’ll throw open my thoughts…
that’s an interesting view – i usally find if the story is worth reading again that i get a deeper view or a different view – which could also be in part that i might have changed in the interim since i last read the story, or interacted with someone who had another view or read a related book that cast a new light on what I had read etc…
i think i disagree here, whilst i like your point about people free to consider the story as they liked i wonder if maybe as with the disciples, Jesus wanted people to interact with him, to ask him Qs, to arouse their curiousity, to create a dynamic where those who were interested, humble, curious would seek him out to find out more whereas those who were impatient or thought they knew better would not bother? Other times Jesus stories seem to be all too clear and exposed motives that were hidden – such as the anger of the religious establishment that their authority was being undermined…
I would leave out the conservative point as i am not sure this is a phenom that is restricted to just them – i think it is more a style/role phenom which might well have to do with the modernity of teacher/class or expert/novice
I wonder about the cutting a new path – i guess the danger is that people react and say hang out that way leads to heresy or to some breach of a tightly defined orthodoxy. I do like your image of expedition leader who equips those on the trip to take some time at point – i think it adds to the richness of learning as a community rather than the risk of wandering off alone…
maybe it is hard work if you feel you always have to be the one hacking away at the front – maybe it started out as a passion but has ended up as a chore – maybe they feel some sort of responsibility/charge on them to keep on doing it until they drop and as the best qualified might feel that this is their duty… the Q is of course can they pass that on, can they find some liberation themselves?
I agree in so far as I think that the story was often a way of evaluating the listener (will they or will they not to choose to engage with it), of opening up the opportunity to explore what a God styled full life looks like, but in order to do so people need to have the hunger to go behind the story, to ask what it means and then follow Jesus in learning from him how to live those stories?
…or at least is looking less likely now and in the future for this method to be effective for a lot of people who have access to a whole variety of competing stories – not least their own one which is how can i live happily ever after…
me too – got any ideas/examples of how to do this, especailly as you are holding the cutting tool in this post :)
Comment by: Helen
3Thanks NCxian. Yes, that’s an excellent point that when someone shares their ‘testimony’ they are are using a story and inviting us to respond. (As long as they don’t then demand it has a certain and particular meaning for us which includes “therefore you must…”)
I’ve been following that discussion on the discussion board and found it very interesting.
I’ll post about it so that people here can easily find it, read it and jump in here or there with their own thoughts, if they like – ok here it is:
What’s the good of believing?
Comment by: benjamin ady
4Helen, I like what you are saying. It connects to the postmodern idea that there no metanarrative, and it also connects to the idea that we have an (almost overwhelming) yearning for metanarrative.
It just makes way more sense operationally for me to dialogue than to speach–for us to write story as coauthors of our own narrative. I really mostly just can’t listen to sermons anymore. I mean wikipedia touches on this–it’s just so much better in every way than … brittanica, for instance. Sometime do a head to head comparison of a wiki article and a brittanica article.
Doug pagitt touches on some of the things you are talking about in Preaching Reimagined: for instance
Comment by: Karen
5A related thought:
We’ve had authors actually attend our book club meetings once or twice. They often ask something like, “Well, what do you think the book was trying to say?” or “What did you get out of the story?”
Invariably, people glean meanings and “messages” from the book that the author never intended at all! They’ll say, “Wow, I never thought of that when I was writing it, but that’s really interesting.”
Usually, the author’s “intended” meaning gets through also (though most books we read don’t have a heavy-handed “message”) but people bring so much to the narrative themselves that it means different things to different people. Which, of course, is what makes book discussions so rich and valuable – seeing the different perspectives.
Comment by: Helen
6Paul wrote:
I love when that happens :) I like to reread my favorite books.
Maybe it’s a both/and, not an either/or? Maybe Jesus had those motives too?
Maybe so – I was limiting myself to what I knew.
People often do get worried that ‘cutting a new path’ is going to lead to heresy.
I would like to see more role-modelling of sharing the exploring role around.
But I’m not comfortable making judgments about people, that they are not curious. All children are curious; if adults aren’t curious maybe it’s because they were taught it’s best not to be as they were growing up.
Yes, it would be nice to have the answer to that!
Paul, I think you alluded to it when you said people want to know “how can I live happily ever after?” The story people want to hear probably has their own name in it (this is something evangelicals get right about evangelism when they emphasize, Jesus died for you. A story that has me in it gets my attention much more than one which doesn’t.
Comment by: Helen
7Thanks Benjamin. I don’t know if there is a metanarrative or not. What I do know is: I don’t like other people dogmatically asserting to me that there is and what it is (in their opinion, but they don’t say that part).
I like that Doug Pagitt quote :)
Comment by: Helen
8Karen, I like the idea of people being free to share ideas and meanings they thought of, wich the author didn’t intend, and the author not getting really upset about it!
Comment by: ncxian
9I received a link in a newsletter this morning to a new article in Christianity Today by Scot McKnight. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/february/11.35.html
It is a primer of sorts on the emerging church, designed for the readership of Christianity Today, which I would guess is a broad range of evangelicals. He describes “five streams” of the emerging church. One stream he identifies is that the emerging church is Post-evangelical, which means in part that it is:
Notice the allusions to story, on-going story, dialogue about the story and so on. It appears that the emerging church, as McKnight sees it, has noticed the loss of story-telling in favor of correct doctrine.
Let me ask you all something that this kind of discussion often raises for me. A lot of the conversation here, and particularly over at the Discussion Board, is about rationalness, reason, evidence, proof and so on. Doesn’t a renewed interest in “story” create a tension with that? McKnight notes the tension between story and systematic theology, which is perhaps the theological equivalent of rational inquiry. In the process of telling our stories, or God’s story, or the story of humanity, or whatever story it is, and attributing value and respecting those stories, doesn’t that elevate our stories to the level of scientific inquiry, evidentiary proof and the like? And don’t our stories necessarily include a point of view–human perception, which has been decried repeatedly for being subject to error and no good as evidence? How do we reconcile these two; hmmmm, . . . can we call them the “objective” and the “subjective”?
Comment by: Paul
10thanks Helen, loving the unfolding story :)
Comment by: Helen
11NCxian – I agree; perhaps that’s one reason why extremists at both ends look like ‘fundamentalists’ – because to fundamentalists it’s all about who has the correct facts. I think that is the ‘modernist’ approach.
Based on my observations, it’s often not facts which motivate people to do great things and overcome great obstacles. It’s dreams and visions and stories.
When someone is inspired by someone else, it’s not so much the fact of the role-model doing something significant which is inspiring, but rather (imo) the story of the role-model, that someone just like me was able to do something amazing.
Paul – thanks :).
Comment by: Paul
12always a pleasure, never a chore ;)