In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
Tom: Oh no, here we go: Immanuel Can has been getting email again.
Moody Publishers and Justin Buzzard have this to share:
“Everybody in your city has a story. Preaching is your opportunity to share the Bible in a way that engages each one. But how do you do this with both Christians and non-Christians at your service?
Effective preaching is preaching directed at both the people who are already part of your church and people in your city who are not yet part of any church. Story is the key to engaging both of these audiences well. If you can connect with each person’s story, challenge it, and recast it with your preaching, your Sunday gatherings will be increasingly filled with people who are following Jesus and people who aren’t.
Step 1: CONNECT WITH THEIR STORY
It is natural for most pastors to connect their preaching with other Christians, but they must also connect their preaching to the very different storylines inhabited by the non-Christians in their community. If you’re not yet doing this, now is the time to start. Start preaching each week as though there are non-Christians in the room, even if there aren’t. You will learn to do this better by having non-Christian friends and by knowing the pulse of your city. Eventually, non-Christians will start coming — the Christians they know will invite them because they know your preaching will speak to them.
Step 2: CHALLENGE THEIR STORY
After you connect to the storyline non-Christians are living in your city, challenge it. Use your preaching to show how the story has a bad ending — how faith in atheism, success, power, etc. — leads to disappointment instead of freedom and joy. This isn’t just a technique. This is a way of preaching that grows from a heart that wants to know and love the diverse people in your city who are far from God.
Step 3: RECAST THEIR STORY
After connecting with and challenging the non-Christian storyline, retell people’s story with the happy ending found only in the gospel and the particular text you’re preaching. For example, if you’re preaching John 10:10 in Los Angeles, a city obsessed with image and fame, you can show people that the abundant life, love, and excitement they’re searching for is found only in Jesus — the One who laid down his life and fame in order to give us true life. Such preaching is relevant to non-Christians, but it also equips the Christians in the room to better understand their faith and how to thoughtfully share it with others.
Everyone on the planet believes some sort of story to make sense out of their life. Only the story of the Bible is big enough to make sense out of both the beauty and the brokenness in people’s lives.”
Immanuel Can: This is sane in one way, and interestingly insane in another.
The Narrative School of Thought
This guy has obviously (but maybe unconsciously) bought into the Narrative School of thought, promoted by folks like philosopher Paul Ricoeur, which argues that we experience life by making “stories” about where we are now and where we are going in life. So now evangelism is about “connecting” with people’s “stories”.
You don’t make these sorts of mistakes if you’ve read a little philosophy. You’d recognize the source, and take a hike.
Tom: The concept is not completely awful if you distil it down to: 1) listen; 2) figure out what the other guy believes; and 3) point out where it deviates from scripture and therefore fails to deliver for him.
But I find the pitch to be both pretentious and even a bit patronizing, which are two fairly serious crimes against communication. I can’t say whether the book takes the same tone. Let’s hope not ... I mean, I don’t want to be “recasting” anything, thank you very much. The thought kinda creeps me out. And those poor non-Christians “inhabiting” a storyline. Is there any way we can break them out of there?
Self-Absorption and Subjectivity
IC: No, I agree. If it means “Listen to the other person and find out where he is in his journey to meet Christ, and help him make the next step if you can”, then I’m all for that. It’s just that the guy seems so in love with the metaphor of “story” that he’s forgotten that it is essentially a fictitious thing … or at least a potentially semi-fictitious interpreting of partially-known events. He seems to put a lot of weight on the idea that the “story” we are telling ourselves about where we are in the present moment is really the place we are in the present moment, and that helping along that “story” is the same as helping the person in question.
Tom: We have plenty of self-absorption and subjectivity in the world without encouraging more of it. I have told myself all kinds of stories about my own life over the years. Hopefully the narrative I now embrace is slightly closer to the one God observes than the nonsense I told myself in my twenties.
“There are eight million stories in the naked city” ... but when you get down to it, the only one that matters is the Lord’s version.
IC: Right. And we’re not really competent to tell that one, are we?
Spotty Insights Loosely Connected
Thus, instead of having some sort of complete narrative view of ourselves, what we really have is spotty insights loosely connected in ways that seem plausible at the moment. But as Paul said rightly, “I do not even judge myself …”. He was striving to be worthy of the prize, not convinced on the basis of his personal narrative that he inevitably would be. I think we’re all like that.
Tom: And to meet someone’s perceived needs falls far short of meeting their actual needs.
IC: Our self-judgments are, we might say, necessarily provisional — both necessary, that we may be humble, moral and obedient, but admittedly provisional, since we have no complete or certain text from which to “read” our own story.
Tom: This is where the work of the Holy Spirit is such a critical part of witnessing. If we cannot read our own “story” rightly, where do we find the sensitivity and experience to read and address the “story” of others, especially those who are culturally or experientially different? It is the Spirit, through the Word, who is always competent to effectively challenge the stories we tell ourselves. I have often said things to people that I later found affected them in a major way, but at the time, I had no clue that was happening.
I was just quoting scripture, that’s all. I didn’t know from “stories”.
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