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A Resource from the Episcopal
Diocese of Dallas http://www.missionalchurchnet.org This Month’s Recommended Book
Beyond Business as Usual –
Vestry Leadership Development By Neal Michell Ancient Wisdom How Jesus taught I . . . “Jesus told the crowds all these things in
parables; without a parable he told them nothing.” —Matthew 13:1 How Jesus taught II . . . C.S. Lewis says of our Lord, “He preaches but He does not lecture. He
uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no
disrespect) the ‘wisecrack.’ He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs,
if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching
therefore cannot be grasped by intellect alone.” —C.S. Lewis The importance of preaching. . . First I would reaffirm the importance of preaching. A few notes
scraped together on Saturday night are not enough . . . hurried, shabby work
is . . .evident. —Sam Shoemaker Delivery . . . Fine content can be wholly lost by poor delivery. Say your prayers
before you go into the pulpit, and God may say
something of real importance to you at the moment. —Sam Shoemaker The parson catechizing . . . The Country Parson values Catechizing highly: for
there being three points of his duty, the one, to infuse a competent
knowledge of salvation in every one of his Flock; the other, to multiply, and
build up his knowledge, to a spiritual Temple; the third, to inflame this
knowledge, to press, and drive it to practice, turning it to reformation of
life, by pithy and lively exhortations.” —George Herbert Effective preaching. . . [P]reaching means more than handing over a tradition;
it is rather the careful and sensitive articulation of what is happening in
the community so that those who listen can say, ‘You say what I suspected, you express what I
vaguely felt, you bring to the fore what I fearfully kept in the back of my
mind. Yes, yes—you say who we are, you recognize our condition . . .’ —Henri Nouwen The peril of preaching . . . As soon as I learned from the Holy Scriptures how
terror-filled and perilous a matter it was to preach publicly in the —Martin Luther
Lighten
Up (A true true
story) Bishop Alexander
Garrett on Texans in the late 1800’s. “If you
insist upon gambling, and try to cheat in doing so, it is likely you will get
shot. If you drink whisky with the
drunken and become quarrelsome in your cups, it is possible you will get
shot. Hence it is well for men to
remember that |
For Missional Leaders
in the Episcopal Diocese of February 1, 2008 The Four Truths of the Storyteller Canon Neal Michell This
is a longer newsletter than I normally send out. The content was too great,
and I felt inspired by the topic.—Neal About
five years ago I led a church through the initial stages of developing their
strategic plan. During our review of the history of the parish, we all had an
“Aha moment” that transformed our strategic planning process and that many of
those leaders remember and talk about to this day. In reviewing the history of the parish, I
decided not to focus our narrative on the usual history of the succession of
the rectors, or of the second-most-typical history of the buildings. Instead,
I asked them to recount the history of the parish based upon the history of
the new ministries that had been started. As these long-time leaders and
parishioners began telling their stories, a perfunctory conversation turned
into an electric one. They discovered about their congregation
that their congregation was really an innovator in the diocese. This
congregation had been functioning for several years on initiatives that had
been started years before. Their
programs were generally running smoothly, but, if truth be told, there was
not a lot of passion among this congregation—until this moment. This story came to mind as I read recently
an article in the December 2007 Harvard
Business Journal, “The Four Truths of the Storyteller.” This article
struck a responsive chord in me as I reflected on what Peter Gruber was
saying about storytelling. Peter Gruber says that the “stories that move and
captivate people are those that are true to the teller, the audience, the moment, and the mission.” Here are
my reflections based upon his outline. The Power of Storytelling Let me say at the outset that if as a
preacher or teacher you are not telling stories, you are missing an awful lot
of your would-be listeners. Storytelling is a primary medium for people
affected by postmodernity—which is all of us. This is true for the preacher
and teacher as well as the leader of any organization. Anyone involved in
vision-casting and vision-reinforcing must be a storyteller who tells stories
in service of the vision, to help articulate the vision and to confirm the
vision (remember the saying, “what gets rewarded gets done”? Storytelling is
a way of rewarding those who are living into the vision of the organization). Recall the story of King David and the
prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12:1-13. David had sinned with Bathsheba and had
had Uriah her husband killed in battle. Nathan had a word of conviction from
the Lord, but Nathan also knew what King David did to people who brought good
news to the king¾recall
where the origin of the phrase “don’t shoot the messenger” came from (2
Samuel 1:1-16). So rather than just telling David that God
knew that he had committed adultery with Bathsheba and had Uriah killed,
Nathan told his king the story of a man in his kingdom who had taken the
single ewe lamb of a poor man in his kingdom. Nathan asked his king what
should be done. Outraged, King David said, “the man who did this deserves to
die!” Then, Nathan said to his king, “You are the man!” When confronted with this story, rather
than have Nathan killed to cover his sin, King David was enabled to repent. That is the power of storytelling. Four
Truths of Storytelling To repeat: stories that move and captivate
people must be true to the teller, the audience, the moment, and the
mission. If you are going to move
people from one place to another—and isn’t that what leadership is about?
Leading people from a less-preferred present to a more-preferred future? To
ask people to sacrifice requires passion in the leader as well as passion in
those the leader is trying to move into the future. Well-told stories that
fit these four criteria have the capacity to incite people’s emotions to get
them to move forward. The Leader as Storyteller One of the problems with most
organizations, ands churches especially, is that they often have no corporate
memory. Most people don’t know what happened among the congregation until
they got there. The problem with this is that the vision for the congregation
does not really change when a new rector comes; rather the true vision of the
congregation resides in the soul of the congregation. It up for vote from
rector to rector. It was implanted on the soul of the congregation by those
who planted the church. Storytelling is about more than
entertainment and funny stories—although funny stories do help. The stories
the leader tells must be rooted in truth: truth about the congregation or
organization, true to the teller, and true to the values of the organization. Telling true stories, that the
congregation recognizes as authentic allows people to “connect the dots” and
be able to understand and articulate the larger identity of the congregation
and give permission for the appropriate amount fo
change to take place—in service of the vision. The past is the key to the
future, and the leader as storyteller holds the keys to the future. Truth to the Teller The story, as noted above, must first be
authentic to the teller. He must embrace the story as conforming with his own values so the audience can have a peek into
the storyteller’s soul. Recall the uproar several years ago when it was
discovered that President Clinton used poll research to help him establish
certain policies. People were outraged that he seemed to have no core value
other than to get in front of the crowd and give them what he thought they
wanted. The most powerful story of truth to the
storyteller is the story of Johnson & Johnson and the Tylenol scare of
1982. At the time Tylenol commanded 35 percent of the pain reliever market
and represented 15 percent of Johnson & Johnson’s profits. When one
person succeeded in lacing a bottle of Tylenol with Cyanide; seven people
died as a result. What was J&J to do? To recall all of
the bottles of Tylenol in that market alone would be enormously expensive and
decimate the bottom line. James Burke, the CEO made the first priority, “How
do we protect the people?” This was in keeping with their core values of
honesty, integrity, and sustainability. They acted quickly: they would pull
ALL of the bottles of Tylenol off every shelf in Truth to the Audience All listeners have an internal
conversation going on within them; it is often a conversation between the
mind and the heart. The powerful storyteller is able to enter into that
internal conversation and communicate truth that is true for both the heart
as well as the mind. Henri Nouwen describes this aspect in his book The Wounded Healer. He says that the
power of a preacher is when the listener listens to him and say, “You know
what I know; you feel what I feel.
Yes, you can speak into my life!” (my
paraphrase from memory). Additionally, the storyteller must know
when and how to be transparent. The speaker is allowing the audience or
congregation to take a glimpse into his soul so they can identify with him
(Psalm 42 talks about “deep calls to deep.”) Gruber’s article quotes a leader
who said, “Make the ‘I’ in your story become ‘we,’
so the whole tribe or community can come together and unite behind your
experience and the idea it embodies. Truth to the Moment One of the most powerful tools of the
storyteller is taking advantage of teachable moments. This has a couple of
implications. First, the storyteller must be listening
for cues that will allow her to speak directly to the moment when people are
most responsive. For example, on my second Sunday in a new congregation I was
preaching on stewardship. In trying to show the relationship between the church’s
budget and ministry I set up my sermon with a story: I said, “Imagine that a
cargo jet was flying overhead into Second, the storyteller must know her
story (stories) so well that she can be flexible to the needs of the moment.
In other words, different details may change in the telling of a story to be
more tailor-fitted to the audience. You can leave some details out in one
telling and add other details in, depending on the needs of the audience. For
example, I told a small group in our church of how I woke up on Christmas Eve
when I was six years old, only to be told that my father had died in a car
accident the night before. I related how Christmas is sometimes a bittersweet
time for me and how important the incarnation and resurrection are to me as a
result. A parishioner emailed me about how his own wife had passed away
several years earlier and that he had had to remove her life support on
Christmas day several years earlier. Later, in speaking about Christmas
during a sermon I shared about how Christmas can be a not-so-happy time for
people who were lonely, or people who had no family around or for people had
lost loved ones at this time of year and then told my own story. I soon
received an email from this man thanking me for speaking directly to him
during the sermon time and how much he appreciated all I was doing in the
parish during this challenging time. Truth to the Gruber says, “A great storyteller is
devoted to a cause beyond self.” In the church we are devoted to the greatest
of all causes: fitting people for eternity¾life
eternal and abundant life now through Jesus Christ. In preaching the
storyteller is always telling stories in service of drawing people into the
larger mission beyond themselves. The pastor of a congregation needs to be
the storyteller of the congregation, the corporate memory who tells stories
that both articulate the vision of the congregation and that serve to
reinforce that vision. In my introductory story the mood in the room became
electric when we discovered the value among the history of the congregation
of being an innovator. That they continue to relate that story six years
later is evidence of the power of relating the story to the truth to the
mission. The next rector was able to begin three new initiatives because of
the work of this committee. Storytelling is at the Heart of the Christian Community Both the Old Testament communities of ‘Till next time, Neal+ |
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Copyright © 2008 Neal O. Michell, all rights reserved |
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We believe in the Power of Jesus Christ to Transform lives. We are Resurrection People! |
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