Story-telling

Evangelism is a story-telling task, notes author Andrew Kirk. [What Is Mission?, Fortress Press, 2000] It's the story of Jesus Christ -- his life, his ministry, his victory over sin and death. It's the story of God's amazing grace, made known supremely in Jesus, for those who trust in him. And it's the story of the intersection of our own life experience, and the experiences of others, with the grace of God in Christ.

The Nobel prize winning writer and holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once remarked that God made humans because he loves stories! Certainly the Bible is chock full of stories. If you love stories, the Bible is for you. Jesus Christ was a master story-teller, as the parables reveal. Where else in literature are there such succinct and powerful sideglances of the human situation?

Our Christian witness has elements of story-telling to it. The circumstances of our lives that have brought us to a deeper awareness of God's love shape the stories we can tell. As with any good story, there's conflict in our witness-story as well as resolution. Our struggle with faith in the midst of difficulty, our sense of lostness at times when we've seemed distant from God, our frustration that things did not turn out as we had hoped and prayed -- all this, too, is part of our story with God. And it may be that someone else is feeling a similar thing. When we speak about it, and how God is helping us through it, that may be the very story someone needs to hear.