Alban Weekly for Monday, 13 April 2015 "Finding Your Spiritual GPS" by Bruce Epperly
"Finding Your Spiritual GPS" by Bruce Epperly"I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired," Julia confessed. "For the past seven years, I've careened through Advent and Christmas, flying by the seat of my pants, trying to visit all the shut-ins, prepare for worship, go to church parties, and preach a knockout Christmas Eve sermon, only to get sick on Christmas Day. This can't go on. I want to enjoy Christmas next year. I want to remember the holidays and spend time with my family rather than racing non-stop toward the Christmas Eve finish line. I feel pulled in a million directions and can't seem to find my way."
Julia's litany of stress and sickness is repeated in thousands of ministerial households across North America. The holiest times of the church year - Advent, Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter - are often times of hurry and anxiety rather than reflection and prayer. We lose our way and forget what's important when we place everyone else's spiritual lives ahead of our own.
Stress and busyness are signs of faithful ministry for many pastors. At ministerial gatherings, it is commonplace to hear pastors complain of long hours, inability to take time off, the impact of their work family life, and the loss of overall well-being. Pastors often vie with one another for being the most stressed-out or brag about how many family activities they miss as a result of the demands of ministry. A calm, non-anxious pastor, who takes time for rest, recreation, study, and family, is often viewed as a slacker, who is unwilling to commit everything to the cause of Christ.
In contrast, I believe that both stressful and healthy ministerial lifestyles are a matter of choice. Faithful excellence in ministry is often as much a result of discovering a healthy and effective ministerial style as long hours and multitasking. It involves the discovery that we have many vocations, not just our pastoral vocation, and need to set our spiritual course on a day to day and weekly basis. Healthy ministry is grounded in finding your spiritual GPS, a spiritual center that enables you to discern the important from the unimportant, prioritize activities, balance action and contemplation, and relationships and work. Jesus regularly needed to check his spiritual GPS through times of contemplation and solitude.
Matthew 4:31-42 describes a "day in the life" of Jesus. He teaches, heals, casts out demons, eats with colleagues, and goes to a lonely place for prayer. The passage ends with townsfolk anxiously searching for Jesus in hopes that they can compel him to stay in Capernaum as resident teacher and healer. Jesus, however, surprises them by saying he needs to move on: "I must proclaim the kingdom of God to other towns also, for I was sent for this purpose." (Matthew 4:43) Jesus had a vision that enabled him to navigate the many demands of ministry.
When I invited a group of pastors to reflect on this passage in the spirit of lectio divina, prayerfully identifying the words or images that particularly "spoke" to their spiritual state, Evan noted, "I have trouble dealing with the conflicting demands of my congregation and family. I need to find a quiet place to discern what's important and how I should proceed." Susan added, "I felt like I was a ship without a rudder until I began the practice of daily prayer and meditation. I don't always get it right, but I now remember my true calling as a pastor, parent, and partner more often, and am able to get back on track more easily after difficult weeks at church or home."
I believe that Jesus needed to take time for stillness to experience the rest of placing his life in God's care and rediscover his priorities. Perhaps Jesus was tempted by the adulation inspired by his success as a teacher and healer to stay in Capernaum. He needed to still every voice but God's voice speaking within his own experience to discern the next steps of his journey. Jesus needed to realign his spiritual GPS.Jesus’ commitment to solitude provides one model for faithful excellence and well-being in ministry. After a busy day, filled with multiple interactions, Jesus finds a solitary place for prayer and meditation. Even extroverted pastors need moments of quiet reflection. An activist pastor, Kathy, admits that without thirty minutes for journaling each morning, she is rudderless throughout the day. “The journaling gives me time to see what’s important, chart my day, and adapt flexibly when I need to change course.” Mark’s gospel notes explicitly that Jesus was praying in solitude. While there is no one formula for prayer, suitable to all persons, the pattern I practice most days involves saying a brief prayer of gratitude upon rising, taking about twenty minutes for meditative prayer, and then looking at my schedule for the day. As I go over my schedule, I assess my sense of physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness to help me discern if I have too much or too little planned or if I need to spend more time in study or in activity.
Throughout the day, I recheck my spiritual GPS and renew my energy by taking a few prayerful breaths upon arrival at my study, pausing for a moment of prayer before going to a meeting or pastoral visit, and taking a moment to breathe deeply when shifting from one pastoral task to another. This practice enables me to see if I’m on track with today’s vocation or if I need to change course to be faithful to my spiritual, relational, emotional, and professional well-being.
Healthy ministry is a choice, resulting from our commitment to practices of prayerful solitude. God’s wisdom is always a moment away and when we pause to notice God’s movements in our lives, we will discern the direction we need to go and discover the energy to be faithful to each day’s calling.
[Bruce Epperly is pastor of South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Centerville, MA. He is the author of over thirty books, including the Alban/Rowman Littlefield texts, A Center in the Cyclone: Twenty-first Century Clergy Self-care,Tending to the Holy: The Practice of the Presence of God in Ministry (with Katherine Gould Epperly), and Starting with Spirit: Nurturing Your Call to Pastoral Leadership.
Bruce Epperly is pastor of South Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, Centerville, MA. He is the author of over thirty books, including the Rowman & Littlefield texts,A Center in the Cyclone: Twenty-first Century Clergy Self-care, Tending to the Holy: The Practice of the Presence of God in Ministry (with Katherine Gould Epperly), and Starting with Spirit: Nurturing Your Call to Pastoral Leadership.]
Monday, 13 April 2015
Buy the book
Buy the book
"Experiencing Religion through Stories" An interview with Sandy Sasso, Senior Rabbi Emerita of Congregation Beth-El Zedeck in Indianapolis 
That doesn’t mean stories -- even stories for children -- are superficial or simplistic. Indeed, she said, writing children’s books about faith requires deep study and reflection.
“I think children struggle with the large questions of life, and we don’t often give them credit for that,” she said. “We assume that they’re not capable of engaging in conversations that we assume are more philosophical and abstract. I don’t think that’s the case.”
She has written a number of books for children and adults, including “God’s Paintbrush,” “Midrash: Reading the Bible with Question Marks” and the forth coming “Anne Frank and the Remembering Tree.”(link is external)
Sasso’s career has been marked by a number of firsts. She was the first woman to be ordained as a rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement, the first rabbi to become a mother, and the first woman to serve a congregation as rabbi in partnership with her husband.
Sasso spoke to Faith & Leadership about her work as a rabbi, leader and writer. The following is an edited transcript.
Q: What is the value of storytelling in religious education, especially for children?I think that the closest thing to the religious experience is the story. First there is an experience, a spiritual, religious experience, and then the next thing you do is tell a story about it in order to hold that experience in some type of container that can be passed on from generation to generation and can be shared in community.
Then that story becomes ritual and liturgy, in many cases. So that experience is ritualized. For example, in Judaism there was an experience of the exodus, and then a story was told about it, and then we have a Passover Seder that becomes part of a ritual tradition, and then ultimately we reflect upon it, and that’s theology.
So theology is the furthest from the experience. Not that it’s not important. Of course it’s important, but it’s furthest from the experience.
The story is what attempts to capture the feelings and the emotion and the power of that moment.
Q: Your work bespeaks a certain kind of respect for children. Would you talk about that?I think children struggle with the large questions of life, and we don’t often give them credit for that. We assume that they’re not capable of engaging in conversations that we assume are more philosophical and abstract. I don’t think that’s the case.
What they don’t have is the language. It’s our obligation as educators, adults, clergy to give them the language. My feeling is that language is story, and so through story they are able to deal with these larger theological questions.
In many ways, adults also can better understand and grapple with those questions through story. I cannot write for children unless I really understand the concept. It’s much more difficult in many ways, because I think we hide behind philosophical language.
I don’t write to give answers. I really don’t feel that I should be preaching. I feel I should be telling a story. I’m a storyteller.
Each child will develop his or her relation to the story based on where they are at that point in their lives and their experiences. So many times when we tell stories, we want to tell people what the story means. What the story means to us -- not what the story means to someone else. When I ask people where they are in the story, the responses are incredible, and I learn something about the story that I didn’t know before.
When I talk about religion and stories, often kids say, “Is that story true? Did that really happen?” I make a distinction between true stories and truth stories.
And I say that some of the stories may not be true in the sense that we can actually document that these events happened or these people lived, but they are truth stories that teach us something about human nature and the world.
You know, children are really able to deal with that. I’ve seen that when I talk to kids. They say, “Oh, I get it.” But when they grow up, they grow out of it.
I want to give a kind of story that can grow with children. I think that has something to do with children sometimes leaving a tradition. Because we haven’t really addressed them seriously and taken a deeper look at belief and connection and community and meaning.
Q: Your forthcoming book is a children’s book about Anne Frank. That really is giving children a lot of respect to be able to handle a difficult topic. Did you struggle with that at all?The Holocaust is a particularly difficult topic for young children, but I told this story from the point of view of the tree that was behind the secret annex. It’s the tree that Anne and Margot Frank wrote about in their diaries.
When the tree was at a point where it couldn’t live anymore and was going to be cut down, saplings from the tree were saved and then planted all over the world -- 11 in the United States.
The first one happened to be planted at the children’s museum in Indianapolis, which is where I learned about this story.
So I tell the story from the point of view of the tree, and I think it makes it much more accessible to young children. And it ends with hope, because the tree is planted in 11 places around the United States, and every time someone sees it, the story is remembered. It makes a very difficult event accessible for younger children.
My other belief is that children struggle with difficulty, and we need to honor that. Look at all the fairy tales. Some of them are quite frightening, you know. The big, bad wolf, a lot of Grimm tales -- I mean, they’re grim.
Children love them, and why do they love them? Because it addresses some of their natural fears and ultimately says you can overcome them. Because the endings of the stories are always hopeful. And I think if we ignore that, then we’re ignoring a very important part of a child’s life.
Q: I want to shift topics and talk to you about your own life as a religious leader. You have a long list of firsts. What advice would you give to other religious leaders, whether male or female, based on your experience?First of all, I would say you have to really love what you do. You have to have a passion not only for teaching but for being with people in community, because it’s a hard career choice. There are lots of demands and lots of expectations, and they are not uniform.
Very few people have to be able to work with people of all ages -- some who are more academic and some who are not, some who are looking more for entertainment, some who are looking more for scholarship -- and also to be a good speaker and a great pastor.
It’s something more than a profession; it’s a lifestyle. It’s who you are as a human being.
Remember that the personal is important as well as the public presence. I think particularly with clergy, that’s significant. There is a public presence, and there’s also an opportunity to connect with more people because of your role.
I have made connections in this community that I would never have made if I were, let’s say, a lawyer or a doctor. You represent your tradition, and you have a responsibility of doing that in an honest and genuine way, and that helps create greater understanding and tolerance in a world where there’s not a whole lot of it.
Q: Do you consider yourself a leader?Yes. One of the roles is to build community, to bring diverse people with different interests and different inclinations together to form a community for a common search for meaning and for creating a life that makes a difference in the world around us.
If I were to talk about my own theology, I think of it as a theology of encounter. I feel that I experience the divine and the sacred in the connections with other people.
It could be a connection with a text, but it isn’t a connection with a sacred text alone. It’s a text in conversation with another person.
One of the things that I’ve done after retirement is create a religion, spirituality and arts program at Butler University. I bring together 12 artists from all artistic disciplines to study one biblical text through the eyes of art, music, literature and religion. The result has been incredible. I mean, just beyond my imagination.
We studied Genesis 22 for the first year, and it’s been extraordinary. I’ve studied that text in seminary and as a rabbi for years and years, and the artists just opened up a new way of looking at it. And I think looking at it also with somebody who has studied it for a long time allowed for some new inspiration for art.
There are photographers and visual artists and sculptors and writers and drama people and architects, and they come together from all different kinds of religions -- and people who don’t consider themselves identified with a particular religion -- but they’re all spiritual seekers, and they create something from this conversation.
I feel like I’m building a community that did not exist, because these people don’t know each other, and they don’t usually work across artistic lines and religious lines at the same time. As one of the artists said to me, “I can talk about my art with other artists. I talk about my spiritual life in my religious community. But I’ve never been able to bridge the two.”
So this opportunity of building this new kind of community allowed that to happen. It was so successful, the artists didn’t want to stop, and many of them are meeting on their own now and have continued to form a community that continues this conversation.
Q: That’s fascinating.Yes, it’s been so exciting. It’s something I wanted to do but had no idea whether it would work or not.
In leadership, there’s always a little bit of risk taking. If you just stay on the path that’s already been paved for you, not very much creative happens, but if you’re willing to go off the path a bit and take some risks, then there are myriad opportunities.
"The Weight of Stories" by Brian Volck, pediatrician and writer
Ten minutes ago, we were strangers. Now the woman soothing her crying baby looks to me for reassurance. The little I possess seems, for now, more valuable to her than all she knows or can do. I briefly hold the key to her happiness, and she’ll reveal nearly anything to help me say the words I, too, hope to speak: Your baby will be fine.
For years, people I hardly know have told me stories of great intimacy in the hope it will help their child get or stay well. I’m a pediatrician, and my position carries a certain authority. The initials after my signature and the stethoscope around my neck -- I choose not to wear a white coat, another symbol of authority -- suggest specialized knowledge, skill and resources. I’d also like to believe that families tell me astonishing things because they trust me to be open, helpful and genuinely concerned.
What they may not know is how privileged I feel to receive their stories, how long they linger with me. I’ve wrestled with several for years, bearing them like half-welcome burdens. Perhaps no one else has noticed, but some of these wrestling matches left me limping: the determined mother raising triplets in the wake of her husband’s cancer death, the bewildered parents of a son trapped in a maze of drugs and violence, and the children throughout my career who died before my eyes.
Doctors aren’t alone in occupying such fraught places of approachable authority. Pastors and therapists, teachers and business executives, lawyers and legislators all have power to make (some) things happen and alter in varying ways the circumstances of a life. People approach like suitors, anxious to woo, while their targets warily assess the situation.
But the rewards generally outweigh the risks. Most suitors know that a powerful story trumps mountains of information. Stories are part of being human. Children crave them; adults demand them.
Tales do more than convey information; they teach, delight, mystify and challenge. Difficult and unwelcome lessons are more readily absorbed through narratives than through arguments or decrees. Jews gather each year at Passover for the story of their liberation from slavery, reading from the Haggadah, Hebrew for “telling.” Jesus changed his listeners’ hearts through parables. Many of us have read or heard stories that literally changed our lives.
Child psychiatrist Robert Coles tells of Ruby Bridges, a then-6-year-old African-American girl he counseled as New Orleans city schools began court-ordered integration. Walking to school each morning with federal marshals, Bridges received taunts, insults and death threats from angry white protestors lining the school entrance.
Intrigued by the young girl’s consistent composure, Coles sensed a therapeutic breakthrough when Bridges stopped one morning, apparently to address the crowd. When Coles questioned her, however, Ruby explained that she’d stopped to talk to God, not the screaming protestors. “I asked God to forgive those people,” Ruby said, “because they didn’t know what they were doing.”
In considering how this 6-year-old girl met hate with forgiveness, Coles began to listen to Ruby -- and other children -- in a new way.
The encounter changed Coles and prompted him to write about this and other epiphanies. His books and the stories in them inspired a generation of doctors, teachers and therapists, including me. I, in turn, find myself writing about patients in an attempt to understand, for example, how an African-American boy and his wise adoptive mother helped me rethink matters of race and tolerance, or how a Navajo family flourishes despite a child’s chronic, life-threatening immune deficiency.
Powerful, transforming stories beg to be retold. Through baptism, Christians become part of the gospel story, a narrative central not only to our lives but also for the life of the world. It’s the story we live out and live in. If we learn to listen well in the course of the day, we may hear others say things that point back to “the old, old story,” compelling us to hear it anew.
In those rare moments when someone confides in us, revealing a raw sliver of the human soul in all its wounded and redeemable glory, what are we to do? As a listener and, in my case, a writer, how do I honor what has been shared?
Stories told in explicit confidence, of course, are not to be shared at all, however much they gnaw at us in silence. Recently, though, I’ve been gathering stories from former patients and colleagues, stories my informants know I intend to publish. Before I began, I feared an understandable reticence would make whatever they shared with me dull and unrevealing. I was surprised, then, when parents wept in my presence as they spoke, when fears and angers were voiced, when barriers of class and ethnicity crumbled.
As I accumulate more of these stories, I feel their weight. The book I envision is no longer something I can walk away from, an interesting idea that may or may not be realized. I have to get these stories out and get them right. More importantly, the gravity of the stories insists that I tell them well.
I’ve taken to asking four questions of each piece I write: Is it clear? Is it true? Is it beautiful? Is it humble? Upon reflection, the first two considerations -- clarity and truth -- grow more complicated than they first seem, but their general meaning should, I hope, be understandable. Beauty requires attention to the wholeness of the work, care taken in every part of its execution. Humility concerns the complex relationship between author, subject, audience and the work itself. If I’m holding myself aloof, refusing to be implicated in whatever messy and flawed humanity the work engages, then fastidiousness, pride or worse separates me from subject, audience and work.
I’m happy to tell the anxious mother that her crying baby will, indeed, be fine. I may also tell her about my own children’s colic, how the pediatrician’s infant sons sometimes left him feeling helpless and more than a little angry. In sharing a little of the weight of each other’s stories, we may both walk away slightly changed, and perceptibly lighter.
"Reclaiming the Story: Reclaiming Narrative Leadership in Ministry" by Lawrence Goleman
Tales do more than convey information; they teach, delight, mystify and challenge. Difficult and unwelcome lessons are more readily absorbed through narratives than through arguments or decrees. Jews gather each year at Passover for the story of their liberation from slavery, reading from the Haggadah, Hebrew for "telling." Jesus changed his listeners' hearts through parables. Powerful, transforming stories beg to be retold.
As a pediatrician and writer, Brian Volck hears many stories and understands the power they have to inform, delight, mystify -- even to change lives.Ten minutes ago, we were strangers. Now the woman soothing her crying baby looks to me for reassurance. The little I possess seems, for now, more valuable to her than all she knows or can do. I briefly hold the key to her happiness, and she’ll reveal nearly anything to help me say the words I, too, hope to speak: Your baby will be fine.
For years, people I hardly know have told me stories of great intimacy in the hope it will help their child get or stay well. I’m a pediatrician, and my position carries a certain authority. The initials after my signature and the stethoscope around my neck -- I choose not to wear a white coat, another symbol of authority -- suggest specialized knowledge, skill and resources. I’d also like to believe that families tell me astonishing things because they trust me to be open, helpful and genuinely concerned.
What they may not know is how privileged I feel to receive their stories, how long they linger with me. I’ve wrestled with several for years, bearing them like half-welcome burdens. Perhaps no one else has noticed, but some of these wrestling matches left me limping: the determined mother raising triplets in the wake of her husband’s cancer death, the bewildered parents of a son trapped in a maze of drugs and violence, and the children throughout my career who died before my eyes.
Doctors aren’t alone in occupying such fraught places of approachable authority. Pastors and therapists, teachers and business executives, lawyers and legislators all have power to make (some) things happen and alter in varying ways the circumstances of a life. People approach like suitors, anxious to woo, while their targets warily assess the situation.
But the rewards generally outweigh the risks. Most suitors know that a powerful story trumps mountains of information. Stories are part of being human. Children crave them; adults demand them.
Tales do more than convey information; they teach, delight, mystify and challenge. Difficult and unwelcome lessons are more readily absorbed through narratives than through arguments or decrees. Jews gather each year at Passover for the story of their liberation from slavery, reading from the Haggadah, Hebrew for “telling.” Jesus changed his listeners’ hearts through parables. Many of us have read or heard stories that literally changed our lives.
Child psychiatrist Robert Coles tells of Ruby Bridges, a then-6-year-old African-American girl he counseled as New Orleans city schools began court-ordered integration. Walking to school each morning with federal marshals, Bridges received taunts, insults and death threats from angry white protestors lining the school entrance.
Intrigued by the young girl’s consistent composure, Coles sensed a therapeutic breakthrough when Bridges stopped one morning, apparently to address the crowd. When Coles questioned her, however, Ruby explained that she’d stopped to talk to God, not the screaming protestors. “I asked God to forgive those people,” Ruby said, “because they didn’t know what they were doing.”
In considering how this 6-year-old girl met hate with forgiveness, Coles began to listen to Ruby -- and other children -- in a new way.
The encounter changed Coles and prompted him to write about this and other epiphanies. His books and the stories in them inspired a generation of doctors, teachers and therapists, including me. I, in turn, find myself writing about patients in an attempt to understand, for example, how an African-American boy and his wise adoptive mother helped me rethink matters of race and tolerance, or how a Navajo family flourishes despite a child’s chronic, life-threatening immune deficiency.
Powerful, transforming stories beg to be retold. Through baptism, Christians become part of the gospel story, a narrative central not only to our lives but also for the life of the world. It’s the story we live out and live in. If we learn to listen well in the course of the day, we may hear others say things that point back to “the old, old story,” compelling us to hear it anew.
In those rare moments when someone confides in us, revealing a raw sliver of the human soul in all its wounded and redeemable glory, what are we to do? As a listener and, in my case, a writer, how do I honor what has been shared?
Stories told in explicit confidence, of course, are not to be shared at all, however much they gnaw at us in silence. Recently, though, I’ve been gathering stories from former patients and colleagues, stories my informants know I intend to publish. Before I began, I feared an understandable reticence would make whatever they shared with me dull and unrevealing. I was surprised, then, when parents wept in my presence as they spoke, when fears and angers were voiced, when barriers of class and ethnicity crumbled.
As I accumulate more of these stories, I feel their weight. The book I envision is no longer something I can walk away from, an interesting idea that may or may not be realized. I have to get these stories out and get them right. More importantly, the gravity of the stories insists that I tell them well.
I’ve taken to asking four questions of each piece I write: Is it clear? Is it true? Is it beautiful? Is it humble? Upon reflection, the first two considerations -- clarity and truth -- grow more complicated than they first seem, but their general meaning should, I hope, be understandable. Beauty requires attention to the wholeness of the work, care taken in every part of its execution. Humility concerns the complex relationship between author, subject, audience and the work itself. If I’m holding myself aloof, refusing to be implicated in whatever messy and flawed humanity the work engages, then fastidiousness, pride or worse separates me from subject, audience and work.
I’m happy to tell the anxious mother that her crying baby will, indeed, be fine. I may also tell her about my own children’s colic, how the pediatrician’s infant sons sometimes left him feeling helpless and more than a little angry. In sharing a little of the weight of each other’s stories, we may both walk away slightly changed, and perceptibly lighter.
"Reclaiming the Story: Reclaiming Narrative Leadership in Ministry" by Lawrence Goleman
A new focus on the narrative work and leadership of ministry can challenge congregations to become the primary source for "place-forming" narratives that help people locate themselves within the changing, postmodern society. Narrative leadership by ministers, rabbis, and lay leaders in America has the potential to transform personal lives, congregational practice and mission, and even the wider social fabric. Jewish and Christian ministries have used stories of faith to form communal identity and mission since their beginning. Jews continue to celebrate the founding story of the Exodus in their homes each Passover, and the rabbis tell us that God created human beings, in part, because “God loves stories.” Christians started out as a band of storytellers who put the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus into narrative forms in liturgy, preaching, and a new genre called “gospels.” Storytelling and faith narratives are so much a part of Jewish and Christian practice, in fact, that most congregations take them for granted. We at the Alban Institute believe it is time to reclaim the power of these stories—biblical, personal, and communal—for renewing our faith traditions and transforming the shape of ministry and congregational practice.
Since 2005, Alban has been engaged in a three-year project called Narrative Leadership in Ministry, an initiative made possible by the Luce Foundation. We have talked with local pastors, lay leaders, seminary educators, and congregations to discover how they “story” their ministries, especially in times of renewal. We have mined the literature of theology, business, psychology, and education to discover how narrative work and leadership in those fields might transfer to congregational life. And we have tapped the growing expertise of Alban consultants in the use of narrative frameworks in their practice. Through it all, the power of storytelling and narrative approaches to leadership has convinced us that this is a ground-breaking arena for developing new forms of pastoral and lay leadership in ministry. In short, we believe good narrative leadership has the potential to transform congregational traditions, practices, and mission to be more engaging of the changing narratives of this postmodern, global age.
The Narrative Situation
The playwright Paul Auster wrote that “stories happen to people who are able to tell them.”1 Otherwise events come crashing down upon us at random, and we scramble to make sense of them. In other words, people who learn to shape life experiences into stories discover patterns of meaning and possibilities for proactive response. People who can reframe life events—especially those of hardship and tragedy—into stories of resilience, discovery, and growth can shape a life narrative that supports personal agency, faithfulness, and civic responsibility.
The prospects of building coherent, life-giving narratives in this day and age, however, are highly debated. Postmodern theorists like Jean-Francois Lyotard argue that the “master narratives” that shaped modern, Enlightenment society—like historical progress, the rational self, and the enlightenment of science—have eroded or collapsed.2 Parallel changes in religion—like the decline of biblical literacy, authority, and confessional traditions—confirm that the “grand narratives” of denominations and congregational life no longer hold the power they once did. Because these master, framing narratives are weak or missing, people are bombarded by an endless stream of images, vignettes, and emotional moments in this postmodern culture, to the point that many become “saturated selves” without agency or purpose, in the language of psychologist Kenneth Gergen.3 Others learn to juggle several identities—one at home, one at work, one while traveling—in a postmodern pastiche that often exhausts moral energy and focus.
As master narratives of religious tradition and modernity decline, local forms of narrative construction arise to fill the void. The moral philosopher Charles Taylor describes how self-narration began to rise in the modern period to reframe or even replace older, inherited schemes. He writes that we “can only find an identity in self-narration. Life has to be lived as a story…. But now it becomes harder to take over the story ready-made from the canonical models and archetypes…” of religious tradition or Enlightenment.4 To form a rich, personal, and life-giving narrative, Taylor claims, we must find a sense of “place” in the world, from which agency and purpose can spring. This happens primarily by mapping that world through our own stories.
At Alban, we believe a new focus on the narrative work and leadership of ministry can challenge congregations to become the primary source for “place-forming” narratives that help people locate themselves within the changing, postmodern society. Narrative leadership by ministers, rabbis, and lay leaders in America, we believe, has the potential to transform personal lives, congregational practice and mission, and even the wider social fabric. If a person’s location in the world can be mapped in and through a congregation’s story and practice, then his or her sense of moral agency to make a difference in that world can be empowered.
The Matrix of Narrative, Tradition, and Practices in Congregational Life
During our project on narrative leadership, we have discovered that the narrative work of pastors, lay leaders, and congregations is multifaceted and complex. By “narrative work” we mean the intentional retrieval, construction, and performance of narratives in all areas of ministry and congregational life: from preaching and worship, to education and pastoral care, to community outreach and governance. These refashioned narratives are drawn from biblical, personal, and communal stories, and when used well they help revitalize the traditions and practices of each church or synagogue.
Good narrative work revitalizes tradition by retrieving and reframing the sacred stories of a community for their new time and place. Tradition grows out of the tacit knowledge or habitus of a way of life, but gradually it becomes self-conscious as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument… about the goods which constitute that tradition,” as ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre puts it.5 In other words, the tradition that is embedded in the scripture, liturgy, and moral and theological claims of a religion becomes more conscious and powerful through narrative retrieval and reframing. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, takes on new meaning and relevance when extended to Southeast Asian or Muslim immigrants that move into the neighborhood, as it forces us to ask, “Will they be Samaritans to us?”
Religious practices, according to Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming Faith (Harper San Francisco, 2006), are things that congregations “do together in community that form them in God’s love for the world.”6 Practices in this sense are forms of social interaction that extend the values or goods inherent in the practice—like the openness to the other in hospitality, or the self-transparency of testimony—to higher levels of excellence and to more participants. Over time, religious practices form people into deeper patterns of service to God and neighbor. Congregational practices are newly directed, and sometimes created, as story retrieval of the tradition points the way to new forms of ministry in one’s context. We believe the narrative work of congregations—through sustained retrieval, construction, and presentation of the stories of faith—lies at the heart of a renewing relationship between tradition and social practices. As Bass writes, “Tradition is embodied in practices. And practices convey meaning through narrative.”7
This dynamic, mutually supporting relationship between tradition, narratives, and practices can be illustrated as a circle of generativity. As these interact, they begin to transform the life context of the faith community.
At the center of this generative circle lies the imagination—in both pastoral and congregational forms8—which crafts new narratives from tradition in ways that revitalize congregational practice. As Bass puts it, “Imagination is the stage on which narrative, tradition, and practice perform their dance.”9
Guiding Principles of Narrative Leadership in Ministry
Because good narrative work encompasses biblical, personal, and communal stories, we have drawn upon narrative research in several fields—psychology, education, leadership theory, and theology—to inform a set of principles for this complex work. Dan McAdams, psychologist at Northwestern University, has done extensive work on life stories to identify marks of “the redemptive self.”10 Jerome Bruner, education theorist at New York University, has developed a “social construction” view of narrative based on the interactions of time, genre, and canonical disruption.11 Howard Gardner, Harvard psychologist and educator, argues that careful narrative construction is key to effective leadership in public life and professional domains.12 Mary Doak, professor of theology at Notre Dame, argues for a critical correlation between particular, even local Christian narratives and larger public narratives about the nature and purpose of American life.13 While summarizing their contributions is not possible in this essay, we have identified four principles of narrative leadership that arise from their work in relation to our conversations with pastors and leaders in action.
Principle 1: Redemptive stories of faith place human relevance within divine time in ways that shape persons, communities, and public life and generate the norms they live by.
This is the “formative” aspect of narrative leadership that shapes individuals, communities of faith, and public life and the norms each of them lives by. Religious communities are unique in that they place human action, time, and purpose within a wider matrix of divine purpose and mystery. By doing so, they link the community’s faith claims with larger public claims about national and global life.
For example, Rev. Beth Braxton of Burke Presbyterian Church in northern Virginia reads about the AIDS orphan crisis in The Washington Post in 2003, including the lack of a concerted U.S. response. After hearing from others in the congregation about the same article, she fashions a Martin Luther King sermon about the Transfiguration (Matthew 17) to draw the congregation toward a “new vision” of an orphan ministry with long-term mission partners in Kibwezi, Kenya (see page 36). This church felt the “call” of God’s desire to find a home for these children as part of their global mission, a call they answered in ways that showed that American Christians can and do care.
Story retrieval, reconstruction, and presentation in faith communities often seek a theological horizon as the ultimate context for forming meaning, identity, and mission. By reclaiming “redemptive genres” of atonement, liberation, healing, and the like, narrative leaders in ministry draw their people and the communities they serve into revitalized identity and action. They also reshape the public mission of these communities to contribute to national and global priorities.
Principle 2: Narrative leaders in ministry use personal and symbolic intelligence to draw their congregations into story retrieval and construction, through a rhythm of collaborative interpretation, reflection, and response.
Narrative work in communities of faith is social and collaborative by nature. Effective narrative leaders draw their congregations into participatory practices of reclaiming, reconstructing, and presenting narratives of faith for their context. Part of this collaborative story-crafting extends the truth claims of the community of faith into the public arena for further debate and refinement.
Broadway Methodist Church in urban Indianapolis, for example, sends lay leaders and staff into the congregation and surrounding community to gather stories of “gifts” and “dreams” among the people, in order for the church to draw new circles of people together to celebrate these gifts and newfound relationships—often with public implications (see page 23). Cooks, artists, health care workers, and others are drawn into common fellowship in ways that deepen their shared gifts and concerns, and often issue in public contributions to the wider community, like new eateries or health initiatives for seniors.
Pastors and lay leaders must utilize symbolic intelligence to unpack meanings from sacred texts and community stories, and they must demonstrate personal intelligence to draw others into the process of interpreting those symbols for their lives. This collaborative process involves the ongoing negotiation of meanings, shared reflection, and common action.
Principle 3: The choice of genre or redemptive motifs for the stories of a congregation clarifies how the details of character and plot relate to a broader purpose, and it identifies what kinds of responses are available to that faith community in their context.
The genre or redemptive motifs that a leader chooses to form a story around a crisis or challenging situation can make or break the community’s response. After 9/11, political leaders in the U.S. chose the genres of heroic tragedy and martyrdom, which narrowed public response to fit a drama of good versus evil. Had they chosen the genre of irony or the redemptive motif of atonement, then the inconsistencies between American ideals and U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, might have shaped a more open, collaborative, and international response.
Likewise, the genre that congregational leaders choose to respond to a time of transition shapes how that time is interpreted, and what range of choices follow. Rev. Sam Lloyd, Episcopal priest and dean of the National Cathedral, helped that community shift its historic identification with the beautiful stones of their monumental, 100-year-long building process to become a community of “living stones” (I Peter) built upon hospitality and service to Washington, D.C. By discovering a new metaphor to live into, the Cathedral community is shifting its primary genre of self-understanding from that of heroic sacrifice and structural achievement to a redemptive motif of becoming a healing, reconciling community for the nation.
Life-story research tells us that one of the marks of generative adults, and by extension resilient communities of faith, is how they choose to interpret and overcome tragedy or loss. Is the chronic illness of a beloved rabbi seen as a tragic blow to the synagogue, or as the climax of a romantic tale of mutual affection and esteem? Is a level-four conflict in a congregation interpreted by the judicatory as a tragic and fatal illness, or as an ongoing comedy of errors with restorative hope? The genre and motifs one uses are more than “lenses,” as they actually arrange the facts and possible responses into new paradigms of meaning and action.
Principle 4: Reconstructive narratives appeal to a canonical understanding of tradition but invite its disruption and renegotiation as a sign of the tradition’s vitality.
Almost all narratives draw on an established body of storytelling, plot lines, and interpretations. Folk storytellers, for example, often draw on the plots and characters of the fairy- and folktales of their culture: brave princes, cunning villains, noble princesses, and the like. Good storytellers, however, often provide a new cadence, character details, or a turn of plot that makes each re-telling novel. Narrative leaders exploit the elasticity of stories—and the traditions they represent—by culling new details, values, and plot outcomes from them. Recasting David as a repentant, humbled leader rather than as a dashing hero opens up new avenues of response to him.
Likewise, congregations need to re-examine their established “canons” of tradition and custom so they can be challenged and renewed at points in their life. For example, in his article in this issue of Congregations (see page 30), Alban senior consultant Bob Leventhal likens the conflict in one synagogue to the story of Jacob deceiving his father Isaac for a blessing (Gen. 27:23). When the congregation was upset about the loss of a staff member, they “spoke in disguise,” like Jacob, until the consultant and leaders realized they had major issues with the long-standing rabbi. Their customary canon of loyalty and noncriticism of authority had to be reconfigured in order for the true issues and multiple perspectives to surface, so they could be constructively engaged.
Only as the canons of custom and tradition are broken open and reconfigured can religious communities revitalize their frameworks of faith for changing contexts. Furthermore, by opening these renewed traditions to public engagement and critical dialogue, the faith can gain a new voice and credibility in public life.
These four principles of narrative leadership in ministry, congregational life, and public mission provide a guiding framework for how narrative retrieval, reconstruction, and presentation in ministry unfold. Given these principles abouttime, collaboration, genre, and canon, what are the implications for identifying and nurturing narrative leaders in ministry today?
Intentions of Narrative Leadership
During the Alban project, we have watched narrative leaders at work and heard their stories in a variety of congregational contexts. Through our conversations with pastors, educators, and congregational leaders, we have identified seven key intentions that inform the narrative work of ministry and congregational life. Our thesis is that the more pastors, leaders, and congregations exercise these “narrative intentions” with care, the deeper and more renewing their stories of faith will become. The narrative intentions of ministry are:
Above all, we have learned two things so far in this project.
Since 2005, Alban has been engaged in a three-year project called Narrative Leadership in Ministry, an initiative made possible by the Luce Foundation. We have talked with local pastors, lay leaders, seminary educators, and congregations to discover how they “story” their ministries, especially in times of renewal. We have mined the literature of theology, business, psychology, and education to discover how narrative work and leadership in those fields might transfer to congregational life. And we have tapped the growing expertise of Alban consultants in the use of narrative frameworks in their practice. Through it all, the power of storytelling and narrative approaches to leadership has convinced us that this is a ground-breaking arena for developing new forms of pastoral and lay leadership in ministry. In short, we believe good narrative leadership has the potential to transform congregational traditions, practices, and mission to be more engaging of the changing narratives of this postmodern, global age.
The Narrative Situation
The playwright Paul Auster wrote that “stories happen to people who are able to tell them.”1 Otherwise events come crashing down upon us at random, and we scramble to make sense of them. In other words, people who learn to shape life experiences into stories discover patterns of meaning and possibilities for proactive response. People who can reframe life events—especially those of hardship and tragedy—into stories of resilience, discovery, and growth can shape a life narrative that supports personal agency, faithfulness, and civic responsibility.
The prospects of building coherent, life-giving narratives in this day and age, however, are highly debated. Postmodern theorists like Jean-Francois Lyotard argue that the “master narratives” that shaped modern, Enlightenment society—like historical progress, the rational self, and the enlightenment of science—have eroded or collapsed.2 Parallel changes in religion—like the decline of biblical literacy, authority, and confessional traditions—confirm that the “grand narratives” of denominations and congregational life no longer hold the power they once did. Because these master, framing narratives are weak or missing, people are bombarded by an endless stream of images, vignettes, and emotional moments in this postmodern culture, to the point that many become “saturated selves” without agency or purpose, in the language of psychologist Kenneth Gergen.3 Others learn to juggle several identities—one at home, one at work, one while traveling—in a postmodern pastiche that often exhausts moral energy and focus.
As master narratives of religious tradition and modernity decline, local forms of narrative construction arise to fill the void. The moral philosopher Charles Taylor describes how self-narration began to rise in the modern period to reframe or even replace older, inherited schemes. He writes that we “can only find an identity in self-narration. Life has to be lived as a story…. But now it becomes harder to take over the story ready-made from the canonical models and archetypes…” of religious tradition or Enlightenment.4 To form a rich, personal, and life-giving narrative, Taylor claims, we must find a sense of “place” in the world, from which agency and purpose can spring. This happens primarily by mapping that world through our own stories.
At Alban, we believe a new focus on the narrative work and leadership of ministry can challenge congregations to become the primary source for “place-forming” narratives that help people locate themselves within the changing, postmodern society. Narrative leadership by ministers, rabbis, and lay leaders in America, we believe, has the potential to transform personal lives, congregational practice and mission, and even the wider social fabric. If a person’s location in the world can be mapped in and through a congregation’s story and practice, then his or her sense of moral agency to make a difference in that world can be empowered.
The Matrix of Narrative, Tradition, and Practices in Congregational Life
During our project on narrative leadership, we have discovered that the narrative work of pastors, lay leaders, and congregations is multifaceted and complex. By “narrative work” we mean the intentional retrieval, construction, and performance of narratives in all areas of ministry and congregational life: from preaching and worship, to education and pastoral care, to community outreach and governance. These refashioned narratives are drawn from biblical, personal, and communal stories, and when used well they help revitalize the traditions and practices of each church or synagogue.
Good narrative work revitalizes tradition by retrieving and reframing the sacred stories of a community for their new time and place. Tradition grows out of the tacit knowledge or habitus of a way of life, but gradually it becomes self-conscious as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument… about the goods which constitute that tradition,” as ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre puts it.5 In other words, the tradition that is embedded in the scripture, liturgy, and moral and theological claims of a religion becomes more conscious and powerful through narrative retrieval and reframing. The story of the Good Samaritan, for example, takes on new meaning and relevance when extended to Southeast Asian or Muslim immigrants that move into the neighborhood, as it forces us to ask, “Will they be Samaritans to us?”
Religious practices, according to Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming Faith (Harper San Francisco, 2006), are things that congregations “do together in community that form them in God’s love for the world.”6 Practices in this sense are forms of social interaction that extend the values or goods inherent in the practice—like the openness to the other in hospitality, or the self-transparency of testimony—to higher levels of excellence and to more participants. Over time, religious practices form people into deeper patterns of service to God and neighbor. Congregational practices are newly directed, and sometimes created, as story retrieval of the tradition points the way to new forms of ministry in one’s context. We believe the narrative work of congregations—through sustained retrieval, construction, and presentation of the stories of faith—lies at the heart of a renewing relationship between tradition and social practices. As Bass writes, “Tradition is embodied in practices. And practices convey meaning through narrative.”7
This dynamic, mutually supporting relationship between tradition, narratives, and practices can be illustrated as a circle of generativity. As these interact, they begin to transform the life context of the faith community.
At the center of this generative circle lies the imagination—in both pastoral and congregational forms8—which crafts new narratives from tradition in ways that revitalize congregational practice. As Bass puts it, “Imagination is the stage on which narrative, tradition, and practice perform their dance.”9
Guiding Principles of Narrative Leadership in Ministry
Because good narrative work encompasses biblical, personal, and communal stories, we have drawn upon narrative research in several fields—psychology, education, leadership theory, and theology—to inform a set of principles for this complex work. Dan McAdams, psychologist at Northwestern University, has done extensive work on life stories to identify marks of “the redemptive self.”10 Jerome Bruner, education theorist at New York University, has developed a “social construction” view of narrative based on the interactions of time, genre, and canonical disruption.11 Howard Gardner, Harvard psychologist and educator, argues that careful narrative construction is key to effective leadership in public life and professional domains.12 Mary Doak, professor of theology at Notre Dame, argues for a critical correlation between particular, even local Christian narratives and larger public narratives about the nature and purpose of American life.13 While summarizing their contributions is not possible in this essay, we have identified four principles of narrative leadership that arise from their work in relation to our conversations with pastors and leaders in action.
Principle 1: Redemptive stories of faith place human relevance within divine time in ways that shape persons, communities, and public life and generate the norms they live by.
This is the “formative” aspect of narrative leadership that shapes individuals, communities of faith, and public life and the norms each of them lives by. Religious communities are unique in that they place human action, time, and purpose within a wider matrix of divine purpose and mystery. By doing so, they link the community’s faith claims with larger public claims about national and global life.
For example, Rev. Beth Braxton of Burke Presbyterian Church in northern Virginia reads about the AIDS orphan crisis in The Washington Post in 2003, including the lack of a concerted U.S. response. After hearing from others in the congregation about the same article, she fashions a Martin Luther King sermon about the Transfiguration (Matthew 17) to draw the congregation toward a “new vision” of an orphan ministry with long-term mission partners in Kibwezi, Kenya (see page 36). This church felt the “call” of God’s desire to find a home for these children as part of their global mission, a call they answered in ways that showed that American Christians can and do care.
Story retrieval, reconstruction, and presentation in faith communities often seek a theological horizon as the ultimate context for forming meaning, identity, and mission. By reclaiming “redemptive genres” of atonement, liberation, healing, and the like, narrative leaders in ministry draw their people and the communities they serve into revitalized identity and action. They also reshape the public mission of these communities to contribute to national and global priorities.
Principle 2: Narrative leaders in ministry use personal and symbolic intelligence to draw their congregations into story retrieval and construction, through a rhythm of collaborative interpretation, reflection, and response.
Narrative work in communities of faith is social and collaborative by nature. Effective narrative leaders draw their congregations into participatory practices of reclaiming, reconstructing, and presenting narratives of faith for their context. Part of this collaborative story-crafting extends the truth claims of the community of faith into the public arena for further debate and refinement.
Broadway Methodist Church in urban Indianapolis, for example, sends lay leaders and staff into the congregation and surrounding community to gather stories of “gifts” and “dreams” among the people, in order for the church to draw new circles of people together to celebrate these gifts and newfound relationships—often with public implications (see page 23). Cooks, artists, health care workers, and others are drawn into common fellowship in ways that deepen their shared gifts and concerns, and often issue in public contributions to the wider community, like new eateries or health initiatives for seniors.
Pastors and lay leaders must utilize symbolic intelligence to unpack meanings from sacred texts and community stories, and they must demonstrate personal intelligence to draw others into the process of interpreting those symbols for their lives. This collaborative process involves the ongoing negotiation of meanings, shared reflection, and common action.
Principle 3: The choice of genre or redemptive motifs for the stories of a congregation clarifies how the details of character and plot relate to a broader purpose, and it identifies what kinds of responses are available to that faith community in their context.
The genre or redemptive motifs that a leader chooses to form a story around a crisis or challenging situation can make or break the community’s response. After 9/11, political leaders in the U.S. chose the genres of heroic tragedy and martyrdom, which narrowed public response to fit a drama of good versus evil. Had they chosen the genre of irony or the redemptive motif of atonement, then the inconsistencies between American ideals and U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, might have shaped a more open, collaborative, and international response.
Likewise, the genre that congregational leaders choose to respond to a time of transition shapes how that time is interpreted, and what range of choices follow. Rev. Sam Lloyd, Episcopal priest and dean of the National Cathedral, helped that community shift its historic identification with the beautiful stones of their monumental, 100-year-long building process to become a community of “living stones” (I Peter) built upon hospitality and service to Washington, D.C. By discovering a new metaphor to live into, the Cathedral community is shifting its primary genre of self-understanding from that of heroic sacrifice and structural achievement to a redemptive motif of becoming a healing, reconciling community for the nation.
Life-story research tells us that one of the marks of generative adults, and by extension resilient communities of faith, is how they choose to interpret and overcome tragedy or loss. Is the chronic illness of a beloved rabbi seen as a tragic blow to the synagogue, or as the climax of a romantic tale of mutual affection and esteem? Is a level-four conflict in a congregation interpreted by the judicatory as a tragic and fatal illness, or as an ongoing comedy of errors with restorative hope? The genre and motifs one uses are more than “lenses,” as they actually arrange the facts and possible responses into new paradigms of meaning and action.
Principle 4: Reconstructive narratives appeal to a canonical understanding of tradition but invite its disruption and renegotiation as a sign of the tradition’s vitality.
Almost all narratives draw on an established body of storytelling, plot lines, and interpretations. Folk storytellers, for example, often draw on the plots and characters of the fairy- and folktales of their culture: brave princes, cunning villains, noble princesses, and the like. Good storytellers, however, often provide a new cadence, character details, or a turn of plot that makes each re-telling novel. Narrative leaders exploit the elasticity of stories—and the traditions they represent—by culling new details, values, and plot outcomes from them. Recasting David as a repentant, humbled leader rather than as a dashing hero opens up new avenues of response to him.
Likewise, congregations need to re-examine their established “canons” of tradition and custom so they can be challenged and renewed at points in their life. For example, in his article in this issue of Congregations (see page 30), Alban senior consultant Bob Leventhal likens the conflict in one synagogue to the story of Jacob deceiving his father Isaac for a blessing (Gen. 27:23). When the congregation was upset about the loss of a staff member, they “spoke in disguise,” like Jacob, until the consultant and leaders realized they had major issues with the long-standing rabbi. Their customary canon of loyalty and noncriticism of authority had to be reconfigured in order for the true issues and multiple perspectives to surface, so they could be constructively engaged.
Only as the canons of custom and tradition are broken open and reconfigured can religious communities revitalize their frameworks of faith for changing contexts. Furthermore, by opening these renewed traditions to public engagement and critical dialogue, the faith can gain a new voice and credibility in public life.
These four principles of narrative leadership in ministry, congregational life, and public mission provide a guiding framework for how narrative retrieval, reconstruction, and presentation in ministry unfold. Given these principles abouttime, collaboration, genre, and canon, what are the implications for identifying and nurturing narrative leaders in ministry today?
Intentions of Narrative Leadership
During the Alban project, we have watched narrative leaders at work and heard their stories in a variety of congregational contexts. Through our conversations with pastors, educators, and congregational leaders, we have identified seven key intentions that inform the narrative work of ministry and congregational life. Our thesis is that the more pastors, leaders, and congregations exercise these “narrative intentions” with care, the deeper and more renewing their stories of faith will become. The narrative intentions of ministry are:
- Living and Sharing God’s Story as Leaders: Are clergy and key laity aware of their own faith journeys, and do they use them intentionally and appropriately as a resource for the congregation’s own story of growth or change? How authentic, transparent, and fitting are leaders in using their story with God to unlock doors of possibility in the community’s story with God?
- Hearing People’s Stories and Linking Them with God’s Story: Do leaders help members see analogies between biblical stories of change and their own lives, in ways that unlock new insight and choices? Do they have a redemptive motif or consistent strategy that informs the various forms of narrative work with individuals in pastoral care, education, preaching, and liturgy?
- Creating a Community of Storytellers and Actors: What opportunities do congregation (and community) members have to tell their stories of faith in public, and to hear those of others? How can the congregation become a “listening post” for the stories and gifts of others so they can create a larger community of celebration and acting upon those passions?
- Reframing Traditions and the Past for a Healthy Future: How often does a congregation have the chance to re-examine its assumed traditions and values? When crises erupt, do leaders help the community “externalize the problem” in story form so they can make decisions about how to change or respond to that story with new or redemptive motifs?
- Engaging the World’s Stories with Stories of Faith: Which of the world’s stories—from consumerism to scientism to fundamentalism—do pastors, leaders, and their congregations “take on” as challenges (or as allies) to the faith? How do they marshal the narrative traditions of the faith to offer an alternative response to the world’s destructive claims?
- Discerning God’s Call to a New Story in this Place: Are personal testimony and communal storytelling used as resources to forge the “next chapter” in a congregation’s identity and mission? What strengths, redemptive motifs, and discoveries of faith in the congregation and community are being tapped by God toward a new future and mission?
- Embodying the Congregation’s Story in Renewed Practices: As new stories of change and future mission emerge, how well are established practices re-energized with the new narrative? What new congregational practices—of hospitality, healing, discernment, or justice, for example—are needed to embody this new story?This description of the narrative intentions of ministry begins with the person of the leader and moves outward toward the people—the congregation and public life—then back again to the heart of congregational vision and practices. Perhaps these intentions are best viewed as a series of concentric circles that flow outward, but in ways that reflect back upon the heart of congregational life and practice. Pastors, leaders, and their congregations may enter this movement, however, anywhere along the path, depending on the ministry situation or context they presently face.
Above all, we have learned two things so far in this project.
First, that the greater thesynergy created between biblical, personal, and community storytelling, the more these various levels of story work can be tapped for revitalizing churches and synagogues in America. It takes more than a “plan” or a “vision” to move a congregation. It requires instead a flow of conversations that allow a culture of storytelling and discernment to be created—a new kind of collective narrative imagination.
Secondly, the more intentional pastors, leaders, and congregations are about the kind of stories they tell, listen to, and act upon, the more power can be marshaled from these stories for new, strategic directions. Congregational practices and mission can be strategically engaged with clear motifs of redemption and renewal. But the narrative forms of such intent move well beyond “goals and objectives.” Instead, they allow the story of congregational life and mission to renew itself and its leaders to exercise adaptive change in ever new and shifting situations.
It is not enough any more, if it ever was, simply to “tell the Story” of God’s love and redemptive power. Instead we must let the Story loose to engage the stories of countless individuals, communities of faith, and public life, so that they and the Story itself can be renewed.
____________________________
NOTES:
Secondly, the more intentional pastors, leaders, and congregations are about the kind of stories they tell, listen to, and act upon, the more power can be marshaled from these stories for new, strategic directions. Congregational practices and mission can be strategically engaged with clear motifs of redemption and renewal. But the narrative forms of such intent move well beyond “goals and objectives.” Instead, they allow the story of congregational life and mission to renew itself and its leaders to exercise adaptive change in ever new and shifting situations.
It is not enough any more, if it ever was, simply to “tell the Story” of God’s love and redemptive power. Instead we must let the Story loose to engage the stories of countless individuals, communities of faith, and public life, so that they and the Story itself can be renewed.
____________________________
NOTES:
1. Paul Auster, The Locked Room (New York: Penguin Books, 1986).
2. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
3. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: BasicBooks, 1991).
4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 289.
5. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 207.
6. Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 11.
7. Diana Butler Bass, The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2004), 95.
8. Craig Dykstra, “The Pastoral Imagination,” in Initiatives in Religion, 2001, 9 (1), and Diana Butler Bass, The Practicing Congregation(Herndon, VA: Alban Inst
itute, 2004).
9. Bass, The Practicing Congregation, 98.
10. Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42.
11. Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
12. Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: BasicBooks, 1996).
13. Mary Doak, Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).
Alban
2. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979).
3. Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: BasicBooks, 1991).
4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 289.
5. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 207.
6. Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 11.
7. Diana Butler Bass, The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church (Herndon, VA: Alban Institute, 2004), 95.
8. Craig Dykstra, “The Pastoral Imagination,” in Initiatives in Religion, 2001, 9 (1), and Diana Butler Bass, The Practicing Congregation(Herndon, VA: Alban Inst
itute, 2004).
9. Bass, The Practicing Congregation, 98.
10. Dan P. McAdams, The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 42.
11. Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
12. Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: BasicBooks, 1996).
13. Mary Doak, Reclaiming Narrative for Public Theology (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004).
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