A Discipleship Guide for Lutherans
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When I wrote The Invitational Christian, I included a chapter on the importance of storytelling. When we invite someone into the life of the church we are inviting them into a narrative – they are becoming one of the players in the story of God’s people and playing a part in being the body of Christ for the world.
I have since been using that resource to help people learn to invite and helping leaders teach and equip the people with whom they serve how to invite. Response has been great and people are learning that we do not have to simply be the victims of social trends. We have something to offer and the ability to impact people’s lives and also impact our shared life together as the church. We can be effective! In fact, studies show that people who “drop in” on a congregation are not very likely to stay very long. It is too hard to work into the relational systems in place. But people who are invited are much more likely to stay. They have a trusted person to ask questions and an ally in getting connected. It makes a huge difference!
But as I do this work I am more and more convinced that helping people do the foundational spiritual work of reflecting on and learning to tell their stories is essential. Sadly, many people in mainline congregations hear the biblical story only in the past tense, don’t have a clear sense of their congregation’s shared story, and can’t easily share their own faith story.
So we need to work harder at helping people have the following skills:
1. Tell the biblical story clearly and with good basic theological insights that make it come alive in the present.
2. Understand the congregation’s shared story with good segues to help share how that story is relevant to our context.
3. Reflect on and share their personal faith story and how they have been connected to God in Christ as well as what difference being a person of faith has meant for them.
This is the next work that I am undertaking as I work on resources for the church in the 21st century – our people desperately need help with it. In the next three blogs I will unpack each of these kinds of faith stories and start to expand on these thoughts. I’d be glad to see some thoughts from you as readers in the comments section. Your ideas are welcome!
Dave - I always appreciate your insights. One of the things my parish is always asking, is how we do what you're talking about in ways that engage people across all ages and stages of life. I can easily translate what you're saying into my own middle-age adult context, but what would it look like to think about this within the context of family units, or children or young adults, etc? To some degree the idea is the same across the board, but I think there might be some differences that are worth exploring.
Amy - thanks so much for the comment and the thoughts about this. I agree that crossing generations is important and not necessarily something that happens much in our culture. But I do think Luther's vision of parents as the primary teachers for their children and doing that in the home is relevant. We need to help families find things to talk about that expand their relationships and illuminate how kids and adults see God. Both might learn much from each other. I also know that in our context, young adults enjoy hanging around older adults and that we have good cross-generational conversations and relationships between people in their late 20s/early 30s and people in their 70s/80s. So we are having some luck getting people to talk across millenials and their grandparents' generations. I think people benefit from prompts (good questions) that help them articulate their stories - that's a place to start. But then they have to be encouraged and even facilitated to share their answers wi