Many, many years ago, I attended a special chapel service at a local Christian School at which a presentation was being made by a storyteller from Iowa.
A storyteller. That is not a career choice embraced by many of us. I’m not sure where one goes to get specialized training in it. All I know is that this guy was good.
For a long period of time, he kept all of us captivated with stories. Young and old listened through every dramatic pause and seeming diversion to get to the end of the story.
If at the time I’d ever heard of Garrison Keillor, it didn’t matter. Here before me was a man who with the mere force of his words and presence held us in his web. And I wanted to do that, too.
Like most ambitions for me, that one got sidetracked by life. I did ask the man for a book recommendation which would be of some aid in learning to do what he was doing. Though I bought the book, I was never able to persevere in this. I now see that to do what he did demands a large measure of acting talent of which I have none.
What, however, this experience demonstrates is the stunning power of a good story well told.
And I’m envious of those who are able to marshal such skill in the service of the preached word.
I am not an advocate of the style of preaching parodied as ‘the sky scraper sermon’ (one story upon another). Preaching is to be more than the telling of stories. There is a truth to be extracted from the Biblical text and applied meaningfully to the congregation.
However, that truth once isolated and examined will be more readily embraced when served up through the medium of a powerful story. The prophet Nathan was a wise communicator. Instead of laying out the truth of David’s unfaithfulness in stark propositional terms, he told David a simple story of a poor shepherd, a powerful lord, and a vulnerable sheep. He did not sidestep truth. Rather, he took a story as his arrow, tipped it with the poison of truth, and aimed it at David’s heart. Story carries truth home like nothing else.
They say that our media saturated culture may be immune to preaching. I think we can say that our media saturated culture is resistant to the theological lecture. But a media saturated culture may be even more vulnerable to the truth, if that truth is conveyed on the back of a story.
I still want to learn how to tell a good story. And when I do, perhaps it will be, as in the fun movie Bedtime Stories, that the stories will begin to come true.
Perhaps.