Have we made an idol out of “telling our story?”

My name is Tim and I am a Kindle addict. I love my Kindle. Carrying hundreds of books around with me with an easy-on-the-eye screen, and a hyper-long battery life in one little package is just awesome. Being a ‘book purist’ I avoided getting one for years, but once I took the plunge, I never looked back. I am a Kindle convert!

The weird thing is even though I bought the Kindle, it’s still insists on being a constant advertisement. When I’m not using it there is always some product, or book, or subscription service flashing up on its screen with a ‘find out more’ button. Although its main function is an e-reader, its main activity seems to be trying to sell me stuff.

There is an uncomfortable overlap here between my Kindle, and the Christian evangelistic experience of young people.

When I became a Christian as a young person, I was told that one of the most fundamental things I needed to do next was to tell all my friends and family the story how it happened. We were encouraged to finetune our ‘before and after’ storylines and given examples of how to explain the ‘moment of conversion.’ We were even taught how to tell our story with enough pith and interest to hold the attention of those who listened. We were given matchsticks and challenged to practice telling our stories before the flame burnt down to our fingers.

Looking back now I notice that there was a very subtle narrative shift: Before I became a Christian, I was told the most precious thing I could have was a relationship with Jesus. After I became a Christian, I was told the most precious thing I had was the story of how it happened. Even much later in my youth groups, I found that deepening my relationship with Jesus still played second fiddle to ‘telling my story’.

Whose story is it?

The problem for me is the pronoun ‘my.’ It’s not my story. Assuming that how I came to salvation is fundamentally my story is to actually displace the main character. Let’s put this another way:

I am a character in Jesus’s story, He is not a character in mine.

The focus on telling my story is me. Jesus plays an important part, but He’s not the central focus. It becomes about what I was like before, and who I am and how I feel now. Jesus becomes a supporting cast member, but I’m getting all the screen time.

The subconscious subscript here is that the universe orbits us and so we have to reorientate our faith-experience around a new narrative which is different to the one that we accepted when we first met with Jesus. The story we stepped into was His – so why would we need to learn a new way of interpreting that in order to ‘do evangelism’?

It’s not my story. We are a scene, or a player in His story.

Aren’t we told in the Bible to ‘tell our stories’?

Well, no. Not really anyway. There is certainly a huge emphasis on storytelling in the Bible, but none of that is telling our story in place of His story.

In the Old Testament stories were passed down generationally and people prayed to ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ The Jews made regular reference to being freed from Egypt or brought to the promised land – but the focus was always on God and His promises. Each of these stories expounded a trait of God or celebrated His goodness – they all pointed back to Him as the main character.

I think that our philosophy on storytelling today comes instead from misreading a couple of revelatory-conversion stories in the new Testament. Most notably John 4 and Acts 9.

John 4

When Jesus appeared to the woman at the well in John 4, she went back to town to share what happened and many Samaritans believed (v.39). But she told them about Jesus (v.29). They became believers when they heard His words (vv.40-41). They specifically tributed their salvation not to her story but Jesus’ salvation (v.42). The story of the woman at the well is not about the woman at the well – it’s about Jesus being the Christ (vv. 25-26).

Acts 9

We do similar things with Paul’s conversion story in Acts 9. He had a dramatic before-and-after story, but when he started to preach that wasn’t his focus at all. In v.20 he began teaching in the synagogues ‘that Jesus is the son of God.’ Out of all the masses of teaching material that we have from Paul, we only ever find him ‘telling His story’ twice. Once in Acts 26 as part of a legal trial – where his focus was still on Jesus as the messiah (v.23), and once in Galatians 1 as a way of defending his apostleship to a really awkward Church.

The stories told in the New Testament of conversations are always overwhelmed by Jesus Himself. He is clearly and absolutely the main character.

So, what’s the problem?

The problem is that somewhere along the line (I’m suspicious it was largely because of the Church Growth Movement that started in the late 1950s), we started to educate evangelical converts how to tell their stories in order to ‘make more coverts.’ Telling our story with a clear before and after narrative that focused primarily on us rather than the Gospel story of Jesus was seen as the easiest way to do this.

What we do when we take the focus off Jesus and place it on to ourselves is we make Jesus a supporting character, not only in our storytelling, but in our whole lives.

From a mission perspective, people start saying ‘I want to be like them’ or ‘I want that kind of change’ rather than ‘I want to know that Jesus.’ So they begin their Christian walks with an expectation of a functional transformation, rather than a transformative relationship. It becomes about us.

From a prayer perspective, Jesus becomes someone who provides and fixes things, rather than a partner to walk with and learn from. It becomes about us.

From a worship perspective, Jesus becomes the person that makes us feel good, rather than the one we celebrate for being good. It becomes about us.

From a teaching perspective, Jesus becomes the mechanism by which something ‘speaks to me’, so that we decide how good a message was by how much we ‘got out of it’ rather than opening ourselves up to the transformative power of the Word of God outside the realm of ‘application time.’ It becomes about us.

From a discipleship perspective, we don’t go any deeper with Jesus, because we’re always expecting Him to go deeper with us. It becomes about us.

Making Jesus a supporting character is kinda a really big deal! When every part of our faith becomes about us rather than Him, we really are in deep water. Speaking of…

The baby and the bathwater

I’m a storyteller through and through. In my heart of hearts, that’s what I am. I don’t for one second, believe we should devalue our storytelling.

Instead I’d like us to be better story tellers. We need to tell the story of Jesus and be so overwhelmed by that story that our personal experiences become the supporting characters. We need to move the focus back off of ourselves and back onto Jesus. We need to give Jesus more screen time in our testimonies! We will then tell the story of Him from a personal perspective. That’s where healthy empathy is found and the true art of telling ‘my’ story lies.

Storytelling is a beautiful art. All art tells stories. The best of it describes a scene in God’s story. We all tell chapters of that story, and those chapters all point to the same single story. We actually confuse the plot when we twiddle the knobs and rearrange the focus to be on us rather than Him.

Instead, let’s unleash the story of Jesus.

This means we need to know Him far more deeply so that every story we tell becomes a story about Him.

Knowing the story to tell the story

If I want somebody to know how amazing my wife is, I don’t just tell the story of how we met, and if I do, I don’t just focus on me. I tell of her; her gifts, her talents, her virtues, her values. I tell stories of what she has done. I talk about my long-term relationship with her and how that changes me every day. I talk about her.

I can’t tell this story unless I know my wife deeply. I can’t speak with that level of insight and passion without having first taken the time to know her.

We have to spend time relating to Jesus, growing in depth and understanding of who He is. We have to know Him, live with Him, celebrate Him daily, and then we can tell His story.

Teaching someone how to tell their conversion story is a cheap substitute for teaching someone how to know Jesus better. I guarantee you that if your young people grow in depth of relationship with Christ, healthy and fruitful evangelism will certainly follow. You don’t have to teach kids how to talk about things they are passionate about.

All the best!

Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash