A pastor friend recently told me a story of how he used story feasting to attack disunity and dissension in the board of his church. The church itself was suffering the growing pains common to a seventy-year-old church attracting new and younger members. The makeup of the ruling board was changing; now it was composed of men from different eras and diverse backgrounds. Like many such governing bodies, these men had lost sight of their chief calling to war against evil as a body united and had turned to warring against one another. Individuals settled in camps, and at meetings, shots were fired – there were worship wars, gender role wars, catechism wars, even a skirmish about a steeple broken by a hurricane. The preacher, a seminary friend of mine, prayed, pleaded, and paced, but to no avail.
One day, as he was praying, he remembered a story. It came from an assignment in a seminary class in which we gathered together in groups to tell stories of rescue. During the storytelling, he had come to see something new about a woman he had considered an adversary throughout their years in school. As he heard her story, he came to see that they were more similar than they were different, and his heart softened toward her. The kind of transformation that had occurred in his heart was what he hoped for in his splintered board.
At the next meeting, he announced to the group that there would be no minutes nor motions taken that evening. Instead, each man would have twenty minutes to find a quiet place and write a story of rescue. Then they would return to tell these stories. For the first time in one of these meetings, there was complete silence. The men just stared at my preacher friend, who smiled, handed them the assignment, and sent them off.
Twenty minutes later, they returned. William, at eighty-one, an original board member, and one of the wisest and gentlest, spoke first. He had tears in his eyes as he thanked the pastor for reminding him that he was a redeemed man. He went on to tell the story of how he became a Christian during World War II.
Rod, the youngest elder who had settled in a strict conservative camp where there was little room for the gospel to breathe in any of the “hot button issues,” softened as he heard William’s story. For the first time in a while, he thought of his deceased grandfather, who had led him to faith. His grandfather had been a kind and gentle man with a “homegrown” Christianity. As Rod had begun studying theology, he found himself silently critiquing his grandfather’s simple understandings. Listening to William, a man from his grandfather’s era, Rod began to realize both his own arrogance in criticizing his grandfather and the arrogance with which he sometimes approached his work on the board.
At that moment, Rod decided to tell a different story than he had written. He told a rescue story of being raised in a home ravaged by an alcoholic father and of a grandfather who cared for him. Early on hot summer mornings, his grandfather would come calling at his house and together they would walk to the nearby pond and fish for bream with cane poles. As they waited for fish and swatted flies and mosquitoes, his grandfather would tell him about the ‘fisher of men’ who loved him and died for him. Though they never caught many fish, it was in these times that Rod’s heart was deeply hooked by his grandfather’s beloved fisher of men.
From there, the stories took off, and before long, at least four of the thirteen men in the room had tears in their eyes as waves of understanding washed over them. With each story, each man was reminded again of his own rescue by a loving God who had pursued him to the ends of the earth. A gospel shift occurred on the board that evening, as many men, not all, came to grips with their sinner-saint status.
Julie Kristeva says about the foreigner, “By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.” It is exactly this sort of recognition of strangers that occurred in the board meeting that night. It will not surprise you to learn that as the board began to grow in love and body life, the church became an authentic, loving community which reached out and in with the love of the gospel.