As I continue to discuss what each word in the subtitle of my book, Tell Me A Story: Creating Life-Changing Ministries from Stories, it’s now time to discuss stories.
People love stories. It doesn’t matter if they are true or made up. It doesn’t matter if they are short or shaggy-dog. It doesn’t matter if they are entertaining or thought-provoking, suspenseful or upbeat, happy or sad, significant or insignificant, retrospective or prospective, to the point or have no point at all. A story captures our attention.
Good public speakers know the power of stories to drive home their points. Pastors, in particular, know that a good story will make their sermons convincingly applicable or bring the congregation’s attention back from the afternoon’s ball game. The greatest teacher of all, Jesus, used stories all the time. In fact, in many settings He used only stories and left it to His audience to draw out the meaning. And, in a broader sense, God gave us His Word, the Bible, in the form of a story of, first, His creation and, then, of His continued efforts to rescue a fallen human world.
It is this power of stories that prompted me to write Tell Me A Story as the story of a team of people who gather to design an evangelistic ministry.
But Tell Me A Story also treats stories in a different way. In the book a story is the description of what someone for whom a ministry is being designed experiences as they participate in the ministry. It is hypothetical, but it is also aspirational. If the ministry it describes were to exist (and it is our intent that it does), then the story tells how it would look, feel, and operate from the perspective of one for whom it is intended.
Why start with a story? Because stories are very familiar. Almost anyone can write about how people walk their way through a ministry – even one that does not yet exist, one that is present only in the writer’s imagination. And pastors, in particular, should be able to do this almost effortlessly.
But more importantly, a simple story of this sort packs a lot of information about a ministry into a small space. Tell Me A Story not only tells how to write a story like this, but also how to mine the story for the information it contains and turn that information into a functioning, life-changing ministry. The story starts the process and provides almost all of its content.
Ministry Design 