The idea of crossing the continental divide implies entering new territory, encountering new experiences, expanding horizons. Many people would shy away from crossing this divide because of these implications.
When it comes to communicating technical ideas to some people, there is a similar divide, one we might call the cerebral divide. Many people shy away from crossing this divide because either they fear they will not fathom what they experience or, worse, because they don’t want to put in the effort it takes.
This cerebral divide is what I faced as I started to write Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories. As is apparent, I am an engineer, a technologist, some would say a geek. The audience I wanted to reach as I wrote was pastors, lay leaders, and leaders of parachurch ministries. Many of these people avoided what is now called STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) for as long as they can remember. My challenge was to translate technical ideas from my world to theirs. The fact that most of these ideas appear all over the business as well as the STEM world doesn’t matter. Eyes glaze over, distractions distract, the fly on the window is more interesting.
To make matters worse, I asked a couple of pastor friends to read the first draft of my book. To be specific, I asked them to be honest and constructively critical. In short, they were: they did not like the book. It was too technical – not so much in content but rather in terminology. And my attempts to explain the terms compounded the problem. Even though I had already figured out that I could solve the most complicated part of my message by asking my readers to write simple stories, it was not enough.
Then I asked my friend Tom Ferguson, who is a builder, to read the book. He got the content but agreed that my writing style was the problem. I was just too used to writing for business and technical audiences. Fortunately, he also gave me the solution. He had read early drafts of another book on design methods I was writing. I had decided after a couple of tries at other styles to write that book as a novel. So, Tom said (and I am paraphrasing), “Bill, if you’re talking about using stories to design ministries, why don’t you do what you did for the other book? Use a story to tell people how to design ministries. Let your characters struggle with the ideas; let their questions reflect what you think your audience’s questions will be, and let your story answer them.” So, I rewrote the book.
Fortunately, the next time around, as people from my intended audience read the manuscript, they liked it – or at least they thought it explained the Story Method understandably. I won’t say that a story is always the way to cross the cerebral divide, but it is at least one way. It turns out that stories are one thing with whom people on both sides of the divide resonate.
Ministry Design 
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