Storytelling as Spiritual Discipline

 (Someday, I will film myself talking in my PowerPoint about what storytelling does in the brain! Here is a great article about it.) 

STORYTELLING AS SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINE by Lloyd W. Rodgers January 2005

Biblical storytelling can be experienced as performing art (much as preaching or other types of public speaking incorporate performance aspects); as hermeneutics (the science and art of interpreting the biblical text; we make choices about how to tell a biblical story and so interpret it for the listeners); evangelism/discipleship (the teaching and training elements, which stories to tell, to whom, and with which visual aids); worship (the liturgical, “during church” element, responding publicly to God, both as tellers and listeners); and finally, as spiritual discipline. This is the element of biblical storytelling that I want to focus on. What can it mean to us as workers to experience biblical storytelling as a “spiritual discipline”?

Most Southern Baptists do not have a lot of experiences with the term “spiritual disciplines.” I was first introduced to the term during a 1993 Louisville conference at which Baptist layman and university professor Dallas Willard spoke on “The Spirit of the Disciplines.” The spiritual disciplines are traditionally defined as prayer and fasting, but in reality, can include nearly any activity done on a regular, consistent basis that brings us closer to God. Richard Foster lists twelve, including simplicity, worship, confession, and service. A spiritual discipline is a lifestyle choice, and once engaged will often change your life, and can certainly alter the way God works in your heart. As Foster has written, the spiritual disciplines “are meant to bring the abundance of God into our lives.”

Because Chronological Bible Storying is such an integral part of so many of our church planting strategies, most workers have experienced what it is like to memorize stories from the Bible, and then tell them to a small group of new believers, or unsaved listeners. Often a new story is told each week, and we serve as models for others as they listen and re-tell the story.

Last month I attended a workshop on biblical storytelling in Washington, D.C. My pre-conference assignment was to learn and later tell the story of Jesus’ encounter with the blind man (John 9). When the time came for me to stand up and tell the story before a small group of my fellow students, I did fine, moving right along through the story without any problems – until the very last scene. The Pharisees cast out the man who had been blind, and Jesus went to find him. When he did, Jesus asked him if he believed in the Son of Man. He replied, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus answered, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking with you.” And he responded, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped Jesus.

At that precise moment, as I was telling the story in front of the group, I was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion. My heart overflowed and tears filled my eyes. My voice cracked and I had to stop the story. The image was so intense and the meaning so profound that no words could express them. The story had moved beyond a performance or teaching moment, to become a very personal encounter with the Jesus who seeks and saves, heals and reveals.

I did finish the story, and while the feedback from the group was kind, they were mostly puzzled. “Where did that emotion come from?" they asked. I tried to explain, but was not sure even I understood the full impact. But the conference leader, a professional, full-time biblical storyteller who has performed literally thousands of times vast portions of the Bible, including the entire book of John, said, “After listening to you, I will never tell that story the same way again.”

If we are to be effective tellers of the biblical story, we must move beyond merely memorizing the text, to the more profound and spiritual task of learning it by heart. In my case, even though I had finished memorizing the story, I was still processing its message. The difference is fundamental to biblical storytelling as a spiritual discipline.

Deuteronomy 11:18 says, “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.” To learn by heart is to “lay up” in our hearts. And until we lay up in our hearts these stories we tell, not only will we miss a tremendous spiritual blessing, but our effectiveness in sharing it with others will be greatly reduced.

Our conference leader told a wonderful story that may illustrate my point. The Jewish community celebrates annually the giving of the Law with a joyous ceremony that includes publicly holding high in the hands of the leader a copy of the Torah. During WWII, a rabbi in a Jewish concentration camp felt the burden of not having a copy of the Torah to use for the celebration. He noticed a young boy who had a reputation for knowing the Scriptures. “Do you know the Law?” he asked the boy. “Yes,” came the response. “Do you know it well?” asked the rabbi. “Yes,” he replied, “I know it very well.” And with that, the rabbi took the boy in his arms, and holding him up, they celebrated God’s giving the gift of the Scriptures.

We are not simply repeating the words, but incarnationally living the Word. If the story does not first impact the teller, you are almost just as well off using a cassette tape or a video to present the story. Are you just telling facts? Or are you in fact sharing the gospel? The Bible story must become your story. Learning a story by heart in the way I am suggesting can be a huge investment of time. If you invest the time necessary to learn a biblical story by heart, if you exercise it as a constant discipline, if you repeat it and speak it and re-read it and think on it and dream about it and live with it – then you may find yourself making difficult choices. Merely memorizing a story is hard work; laying it up in your heart is a spiritual commitment of worker strategy.

Here are a few practical suggestions for making biblical storytelling a spiritual discipline.

1.     Eliminate the “M” word from your biblical storytelling vocabulary. Do not think in terms of memorization but in terms of learning the story. I memorized John 9 in two days; it has taken me much longer than that to learn it.

2.     Frame your learning in prayer.

3.     Tell the story to yourself, out loud, over and over again, not as careless repetition, but in careful concentration.

4.     Tell the story to someone else, before you tell it to the small group.

5.     As you learn and as you tell, try to visualize the story, and look for reactions and feelings within the story that reveal truth.

6.     Read a commentary on the story. Not so you can add anything to the telling, but so you can better understand what God wants us to hear, and so that the story itself makes sense to you.

7.     Set goals – and I understand that this is very hard – for learning stories that do not necessarily have anything to do with your church planting or discipleship strategy.

8.     Share with someone else your joys and insights from the process of learning biblical stories.

Finally, let me share with you a theory I am working on. Those of us who preach know how risky it can be to preach verses out of context. And yet, all of our Christian lives we have been told to memorize verses, by implication, completely out of context. Most of us can share the “Roman Road” with an unsaved person, but would only have a vague idea about the verses before and after. Memorizing individual verses of the Bible is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The reason we only memorize individual verse (and here is my theory) is not so much because of the extra work involved, but because we fail to appreciate the story-ness of the Bible, the meant-to-be-told-out-loud nature of Scriptures, even books like Romans and Galatians and Revelation.

Praying with you – and laying up stories in my heart, Lloyd W. Rodgers