Last week I began a series that outlined three faith stories that every Christian needed to be able to tell. Each of these stories has its own focus and each of them is essential to well rounded witness in the world around us. It isn’t enough to know any one of them well without some ability to share the other two stories too. The reason for this is because people around us don’t know the biblical story very well – they need us to be able to share it. Likewise, even many who do know the biblical story see it as irrelevant. If we don’t also share how it impacts us personally and how it calls us to participate in Christian community, even sharing the story of Jesus drops into a chasm that is hard for the hearer to cross on their own.

This week we will discuss sharing the biblical story. We’ll explore the other two kinds of stories in the next two posts.


Tell the biblical story clearly and with good basic theological insights that make it come alive in the present.


Biblical illiteracy is at an all time high. Even people who attend worship regularly (more than twice a month) often have little ability to articulate the biblical story well. Many who attend worship have come to rely on the lectionary and the preacher as their sole encounters with scripture in a typical week. The weeks they don’t attend often mean no intentional biblical or theological reflection at all.


So how can leaders help people know and articulate the biblical story more effectively?


First, consider how the lectionary contributes to the current state of affairs. An alternative lectionary like the Narrative Lectionary uses a through the Bible approach and a four year cycle for each year. Each gospel gets its own year and the flow is more narrative from week to week – this can help a lot.


Second, consider a campaign. The Essential Jesus and E-100, both from Scripture Union, can be good reading programs to help people work through scripture. You can use them as a reading program for your people or create a preaching/worship campaign around them to connect in worship too. Another resource, The Story, is a edited reading of scripture to help people read through the biblical story in 31 chapters and can be completed in connection with a preaching campaign in 31 weeks. It has some of the expected problems that the “harmony of scripture” approach always encounters, but it can be useful if done well.


What is essential is to help people understand scripture in the context of a clearly stated theology. Pastors and other teachers need to know the gospel and help people know it well enough to state it for themselves. They need to help people see how Jesus used the Old Testament (he mined it deeply in some places and almost totally ignored other sections). Jesus was about understanding the bible as a witness to the God who entered humanity, willingly suffered and died, and persistently keeps loving us as the risen Christ.

The bottom line is that all biblical familiarity needs to help people both know the biblical story well and also be able to share it within a theological context of incarnation, grace and new life.

One final reminder: any time someone can articulate what they know and believe more clearly, it is transformational for them as the speaker. If we want to help people deepen their faith, helping them articulate it is an essential service that we can provide to do just that.