Why storying works

(Highlights From the Past Year series)

My oldest son and I are coaching a fourth grade basketball team this year.  Some of the kids have never touched a basketball.  We had three practices before our first game.  The first one I was happy that most of the balls hit the backboard.  Layups looked like klutzy ballet moves.  So Brady and I had them work on footwork.  Then passing.  Then defense.  “Coach, when are we going to shoot the ball?”  Learn to dribble first.  “Coach, when are we going to scrimmage?”  Learn to pass first.  “Coach, when are we…”

At the third practice, we had them work on two things only.  When you’re on defense, keep your hands up!  When you’re on offense, spread out!  (There’s a herd effect in games, where the basketball has this sudden mysterious magnetism that pulls on the eyelets of basketball shoes and draws ten kids into a five foot square area and then causes everybody to yell, “Pass it to me!” even though they’re only six inches apart.) 

The guys didn’t like that practice.

In our first game, guess what?  We led at halftime 28-0.  It wasn’t that we were better.  It was that the guys were doing the simple things well.  All our points came because guys were spread out and passed on offense and we stole the ball on defense.

Recently I was thinking back over the past year and all the trips and training that took place.  (Hence this Highlights Of The Year series of catch up blogs!) There’s a human urge in almost anything we do to do more, better, faster, and with a bigger splash.  But I really am a believer in simple things done well.  This past year, we’ve been praying and going off the beaten path to difficult places to teach believers who are persecuted for their faith how to…tell stories?  There’s a human desire to say, “Coach God, when can we do something bigger and cooler and sounds more spiritually deep than telling stories?”  Learn the basics first.  They are important…

In an Asian country, seven people we trained last summer went to a remote jungle village.  For two days they shared stories in the village.  Twenty-eight Buddhists accepted Christ.

In a west African country, a group from a church that went through a one day training shared parts of the Gospel of Luke through stories.  Twenty-six Muslim men stood up to say they believed what they were hearing to be true about Jesus.

From a group in Asia along a closed border that we visited, I got an email.  “The brothers are seeing more fruit than we have seen in a long time.  When can you return and teach somewhere else?”

One friend asked me last month, “How do you make the ministry better this next year?”  There are plenty of things that can be improved, but we won’t lose this perspective – do the simple things well.

As a culture, we are afraid of the simple.

Maybe that’s an overstatement, but we tend to say we like simple more than we really do.  Think about it.  Our initial thought when something seems simple is that it can’t really be that way.  When something – an item, an idea, a project – seems simple, what do we usually end up doing?  We end up making it more difficult, adding to layers of complexity to it, as if that makes it better, more acceptable, or more effective.  Sometimes this is because we like a challenge and the simple wasn’t good enough.  Sometimes the more complex something is, the more “needed” it makes me feel.  Sometimes it’s because we just can’t accept something in its simplest form so it can’t be “right”.

Getting my girls to do 7^th grade algebra has been a nightly tissue-fest.  One opens her math notebook with a melodramatic sigh, resigning herself to the inevitable torture chamber she is about to enter.  The other sets the notebook on the table and starts crying as if it she were getting ready to read her own obituary.  “I CAN’T DO THIS!  It’s too hard!  I didn’t understand what the teacher said!  It’s all her fault! (of course)”

But once we sit down and I can get them to shut their mouths long enough to show them a couple lines, they kind of eek out a whimpy, “Oh, that’s all you do?”

I was speaking at a church and somebody came up afterwards and said, “Storying isn’t really all that difficult, is it?”  Nope.  There are many great ways to communicate about God, teach from the Word, and help people see God, but something that is very common to all of us has been forgotten to be an incredibly effective way of helping people connect with God.  Or to put it another way, sometimes we forget that the simple way that Jesus modeled doing ministry and try to make it more complicated.

Here are a few simple reasons why storying, whether it’s done cross-culturally or within a community or even with our own families, is a good skill to be familiar with.

1. Stories are natural.  There’s something that just seems normal about telling a story, not needing a high IQ or a title or a high theological education to tell something that is very powerful.
2. Stories are easy to reproduce.  They have images, characters, emotions, action, resolution.  If something leaves an impression on us, it’s easier to recall.  Can you give the three points from the last sermon you heard, or can you tell somebody the three stories used to illustrate those points?
3. Stories are simple.  How many stories have bullet points, lists, and subsets to remember?  They just flow.
4. Stories are done in community.  Unless you like telling a story in front of a mirror, when stories are shared it tends to deepen relationships.
5. Stories are journeying together.  So instead of arguing over theological points, we are discovering things together, walking through the story and it’s take-aways.
6. Stories lower the barriers that initially opening a Bible could bring with a person who isn’t a follower of Christ.  In some cultures or settings, this is a huge benefit to keeping doors open.
7. Stories can be shared anytime.  You can be at a dinner table, in a coffee shop, on a plane, in a small group, on the phone, driving, or sitting around a roasting goat.
8. For many people, the story you share might be the only Bible they ever encounter.  Maybe because there is no alphabet for their language, or maybe because it’s a risk in their context, or maybe because of past experiences have burned them on religion.
9. Stories can be told by anybody.  We all tell stories.  Some better than others, but we all can tell a story.  People with no reading ability can tell a story!
10. People like stories.  Simple enough.

I think when we look at Jesus’ ministry we see each of these.  Like I said before, there are a lot of great ways to help people connect with God.  Stories are one simple and powerful way.

I guess I could teach algebra with stories, but my girls hate word problems.

OK, so it’s been too long since we wrote a blog entry.  Much has happened, but much has not been communicated through here either.  I could make excuses and justifications, but it would be like my kids telling me why they didn’t get their rooms cleaned up – believable reasons, good reasons, even legit reasons, but the fact is the room still resembles a chemistry lab experiment gone bad.

Recently I’ve been reading Timothy Keller’s book King’s Cross and have several sections underlined. Very good stuff as the author walks through Mark’s account of Jesus’ life.  In chapter 2, Keller talks about what a gospel was in the times of the Romans, giving examples of it being “news of some event that changed things in a meaningful way…something that’s been done for you that  changes your status forever (p. 15).”

He then says,”Right there you see the difference between Christianity and all other religions…The essence of other religions is advice; Christianity is essentially news.”

When I read that, I immediately thought of the people we’ve been with this year.  A few months ago, I was in a part of India
that has much persecution for believers.  One of my best friends and I were able to spend two weeks with different groups of men and women who have committed their lives to seeing the gospel known among their people.  As we shared with them the natural  way that stories communicate, one man said to me that hehad been trained in many methods of ministry, but stories were simple enough that he could see people telling others once they hear it themselves.  I believe there’s at least one simple reason why.

Advice is something that you feel you have to have a degree of proficiency achieved before you are able to give it to others; why would anybody listen to you otherwise.  News is something that is shared because it has an immediate impression on us.  What do we text, tweet, and FaceBook?  News.  Why?  We want to leave an impression.

The gospel – the whole Bible! – is news, but many people in the world either don’t know it, or have reduced it to advice. By telling other people the stories of this news, they are seeing it leave an impression on those around them.  A friend in West Africa recently took some of the training we did together and shared it with twenty-five other believers living in an almost all Muslim region.  They have since started many groups in remote villages who gather to listen to stories underneath trees and by wells.  It is news that is leaving an impression and spreading.

Looking forward to doing a better job at communicating more news to you in the coming months.