“It was a dark and stormy night…” We hear these words and find our­selves intrigued. We want to know what hap­pened on that “dark and stormy night” and so we read on and enter more fully into the story. In fact, a good story invites and entices us to enter into and become part of it. Still, one might ask just how capa­ble are we of truly hear­ing a good story – let alone “the grand story” – in this fast-​​passed, har­ried, tech­no­log­i­cal age where tweets tell the tale? (140 char­ac­ters, really?)

Nicholas Carr, in The Shal­lows: What the Inter­net is Doing to Our Brains, argues that we have cre­ated our tech­nol­ogy and now it is cre­at­ing us, or at the very least it is greatly affect­ing the way we think. In his words: “Some­times our tools do what we tell them to.  Other times, we adapt our­selves to our tools’ require­ments” (Carr, 47). Or as Shane Hipps suc­cinctly states; “The tools we use to think actu­ally shape the way we think” (Hipps, Flick­er­ing Pix­els, How Tech­nol­ogy Shapes Your Faith, 45). Carr would con­cur and con­tends that “When we go online, we enter an envi­ron­ment that pro­motes cur­sory read­ing, hur­ried and dis­tracted think­ing, and super­fi­cial learn­ing” (Carr, 116). In light of these com­ments, and their impli­ca­tions, one faces the ques­tion: Are we to con­clude that the day of the story-​​teller is over?

Get­ting Back in Touch

It is impor­tant to state, before address­ing this ques­tion, that this arti­cle has not been writ­ten by some rad­i­cal neo-​​luddite. Some of the tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments that we are exposed to are truly amaz­ing, and let no one deny me of my techy toys! How­ever, tech­nol­ogy pales in com­par­i­son to what a story can, and con­tin­ues to do, for us. Stated dif­fer­ently, my grand­fa­ther was a big and pow­er­ful man but his sto­ries were even big­ger than he was and have had a far more pow­er­ful effect on me than any “app” on my iPad. My grand­fa­ther died many years ago but his sto­ries con­tinue to live on and have their impact on me. Sto­ries do that; they live beyond the expe­ri­ence of when they occurred. They have the power to make us sad, angry, dis­ap­pointed, and joy­ful. Sto­ries can make us weep or laugh, and they can deflate or inspire us. Yes, sto­ries must be told, and if told well they can still be heard. Eugene Peter­son states it this way:

“Telling and lis­ten­ing to a story is the pri­mary ver­bal way of account­ing for life the way we live it in actual day-​​by-​​day real­ity. There are no (or few) abstrac­tions in a story.  A story is imme­di­ate, con­crete, plot­ted, rela­tional, per­sonal.  And so when we lose touch with our lives, with our souls—our moral, spir­i­tual, embod­ied God-​​personal lives—story is the best ver­bal way of get­ting us back in touch again.” (Peter­son, Eat This Book: A Con­ver­sa­tion in the Art of Spir­i­tual Read­ing, 42)

Can we even imag­ine a world with­out sto­ries? What kind of world would it be like? Where would one find the poetry with­out the prose? Where would one find the mean­ing with­out the mes­sage of a story? How empty would this world be, and our lives, if we only com­mu­ni­cated through ges­tures, state­ments, and com­mands?  Yes, one could say that even in such a world there would at least be one col­lec­tive story of a peo­ple who only knew about such lim­ited expres­sion, but would not such a world and its col­lec­tive story be a tragedy? Our world, our lives, becomes smaller and empty with­out sto­ries. Fredrick Buech­ner would concur:

“My story is impor­tant not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it any­thing like right, the chances are you will rec­og­nize that in many ways it is also yours… it is pre­cisely through these sto­ries in all their par­tic­u­lar­ity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes him­self known to each of us more pow­er­fully and per­son­ally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our sto­ries is to be pro­foundly impov­er­ished not only humanly but also spir­i­tu­ally.” (Buech­ner, Telling  Secrets, 30)

Buech­ner offers an impor­tant mes­sage about life; namely, that God is actively involved in our lives and helps us to write each chap­ter in our story, and yes, with­out that under­stand­ing we are “pro­foundly impov­er­ished.” He is also mak­ing an impor­tant assump­tion; in the words of G.K. Chester­ton, “if there is a story there must be a story-​​teller” (Chester­ton, Ortho­doxy, 61).

The Bible as Story

The Bible sup­ports these con­clu­sions. The Bible is not just the law, or just an his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ment or the­o­log­i­cal treatise—it is a story about the grand nar­ra­tive. The Bible is the telling of the story of God and his cre­ation, or at least the early chap­ters of this amaz­ing rela­tion­ship. The many sto­ries about sin and redemp­tion, rebel­lion and wor­ship, bondage and deliv­er­ance, despair and hope, death and res­ur­rec­tion, inevitably reveal vol­umes about the author, God. 

The sto­ries, and col­lec­tively the story that is the Bible, also intro­duce the char­ac­ters that God allows to be part of his grand-​​narrative. Prophets, priests, shep­herds, farm­ers, fish­er­man, out­casts, wid­ows and war­riors, trea­sures and thieves, the fool­ish and the wise, the haughty and the hum­ble are all part of his story. In Bar­bara Brown Taylor’s words the Bible is “…an ency­clopae­dia of human life on earth, with a few saints but far more scoundrels who lied and cheated their ways into the annals of sacred his­tory” (Brown Tay­lor, The Preach­ing Life, 52). Further, she concludes:

“The Bible is my birth cer­tifi­cate and my fam­ily tree but it is more: it is the liv­ing vein that con­nects me to my maker, pump­ing me the sto­ries I need to know about who we have been to one another from the begin­ning of time, and who we are now, and who we shall be when time is no more.” (Brown Tay­lor, 52)

When we begin to under­stand the grand-​​narrative and learn that the theme of sal­va­tion is the thread that holds the whole story together, we can know God more inti­mately and have a deeper under­stand­ing of our lives as part of his story. Peter­son states it this way:

When we sub­mit our lives to what we read in scrip­ture, we find that we are not being led to see God in our sto­ries but our sto­ries in God’s.” (Peter­son, 44)

Jesus, who Serene Jones refers to as the “Word Event,” demon­strated this con­sis­tently in the way he intro­duced the good news of his king­dom (Jones, in Prac­tic­ing The­ol­ogy: Beliefs and Prac­tices in Chris­t­ian Faith, 56). Jesus told his lis­ten­ers (and con­tin­ues to tell us) through para­ble after para­ble that it is not our story; it is God’s story, and by his grace, we have been allowed to become a part of it.

Accord­ing to Jesus, we can learn about God’s king­dom from eccen­tric landown­ers, dis­hon­est man­agers, idiots who build con­dos on quick sand, demon-​​possessed do-​​gooders, a warm loaf of bread, a field full of weeds, and a lit­tle kid tug­ging at your pants legs ask­ing you to come out­side and play. The king­dom of heaven unfurled from his lips in story after story after story (James, Story: Recap­ture the Mys­tery, 83).

Fol­low­ers of Christ are peo­ple of the story and as Stan­ley Hauer­was points out the church should be viewed as a story-​​formed com­mu­nity (Hauer­was, The Hauer­was Reader, 71). The impli­ca­tions of such a posi­tion are pro­found. The Church is, as a story-​​formed com­mu­nity, cre­ated, sus­tained, and finds its mean­ing and pur­pose in God’s story, and by grace becomes a key ele­ment in the story. This “story-​​formed com­mu­nity” is called to share in the telling of the story.

Telling the Story

Chris­tians, mem­bers of this story-​​formed com­mu­nity, should there­fore be story-​​tellers as we tell the story that includes both the indi­vid­ual and a peo­ple in light of the grand nar­ra­tive. The call­ing upon Christ fol­low­ers is to tell the story that involves intrigue, adven­ture, guilt and grace, peace and light, a story that allows for those “dark and stormy nights” but offers the hope that “joy comes with the morn­ing” (Psalm 30:5 NLT).

It is tragic when the Chris­t­ian story is told and lived out as if it were some sort of bad sit-​​com (with laugh track thrown in). Instead, Christ Fol­low­ers must be great story-​​tellers! In order for this to hap­pen, how­ever, we must under­stand the power of the story that we are called to share—a story of death and res­ur­rec­tion, redemp­tion and restora­tion, repen­tance and salvation—the ulti­mate love story of God’s grace. In addi­tion, we may need to learn new vocab­u­lary and new metaphors that will, while not alter­ing the story, allow us to share it in such a way that it will be heard in this post-​​Christian era. In fact it can be argued that this renewed cre­ativ­ity in shar­ing the story is also a part of the grand-​​narrative.

The Mis­sio Dei, the mis­sion of God, pro­claims that as the Author and Sus­tainer of Life, God has, is, and always will be involved with/​in his cre­ation. Fur­ther, as the Cre­ator of the story, he crafts his nar­ra­tive with poetry and prose, with com­edy and tragedy, good and evil, life and death, despair and hope. There­fore, as Steven James astutely states:

When Chris­tian­ity becomes some­thing other than enter­ing into and liv­ing out the story of God, it becomes some­thing other than Chris­tian­ity. God’s story isn’t over; it’s still being told today. Each one of us has the poten­tial to become both a chap­ter of his­tory and his story. (James, 84)

The call is clear: tell the story and tell it well because it is a story that must be told, must be heard, must be lived…, and so, “There was once a man who had two sons and ….”

Bib­li­og­ra­phy

• Brown Tay­lor, Bar­bara. The Preach­ing Life. Cam­bridge, Mass.: Cow­ley, 1993.
• Buech­ner, Fredrick. Telling Secrets. San Fran­cisco, Ca.: Harper, 1992.
• Carr, Nicholas. The Shal­lows: What the Inter­net is Doing to Our Brains. New York, NY.: Nor­ton, 2010.
• Chester­ton. G.K. Ortho­doxy. New York, NY: Dou­ble­day, 1990.
• Hauer­was, Stan­ley, The Hauer­was Reader. Edited by John Berk­man & Michael Cartwright. Durham, NC.: Duke Uni­ver­sity Press, 2005.
• Hipps, Shane. Flick­er­ing Pix­els: How Tech­nol­ogy Shapes Your Faith. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009.
• James, Steven, Story: Recap­ture the Mys­tery. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Rev­ell, 2006.
• Peter­son, Eugene. Eat This Book: A Con­ver­sa­tion in the Art of Spir­i­tual Read­ing. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd­mans, 2009.
• Jones, Serene, in Prac­tic­ing The­ol­ogy: Beliefs and Prac­tices in Chris­t­ian Life. Edited by Mir­soslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerd­mans, 2002.
• The Holy Bible, New Liv­ing Trans­la­tion, Wheaton, IL: Tyn­dale House, 2004.