Ministry

Why I Tell Stories When I Preach

~ Mike Skinner ~ 1 Comment

2015_03_17-Storytelling-For-Startups

“Profound truth, like the vocabulary of virtue, eludes formulation. It quickly becomes rigid, gives way to abstraction or cliche. But put a spiritual insight to a story, an experience, a face; describe where it anchors in the ground of your being; and it will change you in the telling and others in the listening.” – Krista Trippett, Becoming Wise

If you’ve heard me preach, you’ve probably heard me tell a few stories. Some of them are funny, some of them are personal and vulnerable, and some of them are drawn from history or current events. If you’ve heard me preach at a larger retreat or conference, you’ve likely heard a collection of my very best stories – narratives that I have told hundreds of times and customized in millions of ways until the story is exactly as funny and useful as needed.

At my last retreat, I was getting mic’ed up in the back of the worship hall before the third session began and a group of students walked up to me asking me what fun stories I would be telling that night. I gave them a grin and simply said, “I don’t know, I might have a couple good ones.” Far from feeling like I was just entertaining a few hundred young people with funny stories, that experience affirmed for me that I was connecting with the audience and that as a result I would be able to drive home powerful truths with even more effectiveness.

I believe firmly that the art of story-telling is a crucial skill to learn and practice for the purpose of preaching more powerful sermons. I believe this so strongly that I listen to a new stand-up comedian (I prefer narrative comedians over those who specialize in one-liners) in the car or airplane as I head to my next speaking gig. I do this for many reasons. It’s an entertaining way to pass the time, it builds a fire in me about how powerful the spoken word can be, and it’s a great way to develop speaking skills of timing, tone, and story-telling. Good comedians are experts at these skills and I’ve found that great preachers often have similarly developed instincts for public speaking.

So why do I tell stories?

1) Stories capture attention. 

What I’ve found as a public speaker is that a story doesn’t even have to be all that funny or presented in an organized way to captivate an audience. Those things certainly help, but there is something deeply human about our love for stories. It’s not just children who crave to hear a good story, either. When I’m weaving a good story together I’ve seen hundreds of adults listen with mouths agape, just as entranced as any child has ever been reading a children’s book at night. Stories capture attention, and as a speaker, once I have a group’s attention it is that much easier to drive home transformative truths.

2) Stories build empathy.

Stories connect a speaker far away on big a stage under bright lights – often unknown to the listeners – to the audience in an intimate way in just a manner of minutes. Speaking truth into people’s lives requires that they trust you. Identifying with the audience with a funny or relatable story allows people to tune-in not only to your presentation but also to you as a person. A good story, told correctly, will connect something I have experienced or learned in my life and allow me to pass on that wisdom in the role of a trusted friend, not a irrelevant stranger, boring lecturer, or a heavy-handed moralist. In this way, audiences are able to more deeply receive words of encouragement and challenge.

3) Jesus told stories.

I think it’s a remarkably over-looked fact that the majority of Jesus’ teaching consisted of parables. These powerful narratives were easily relatable, often funny (Jesus is quite the comedian in the Gospels, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear), and consistently challenging and subversive. These stories changed lives. They convinced people to leave their homes and follow Jesus on his path throughout Galilee and towards Jerusalem. We often whitewash the counter-cultural messages in many of Jesus’ parables, but I find it likely that his story-telling was a key contributor to his eventually crucifixion. Jesus told stories because he knew they were powerful and transformative ways to communicate the good news of the arrival of the Father’s loving Kingdom. I’m more that happy to humbly follow in his footsteps.

Mike Skinner
http://www.mikeskinner.org

If you’d like to inquire about booking me for an upcoming speaking event, please email me at booking@mikeskinner.org. I’m currently focusing my speaking events around the following three topics: Christianity, Mental Health, and Education. These topics can easily be combined as well to serve the needs of your group! I look forward to speaking with you about how I can help you and your organization make a greater impact in our world.

New Position and New Reading Material

~ Chad Chambers ~ 4 Comments

On January 1st, I am starting as the Executive Director of CHARM Prison Ministry.

 
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The ministry was started by my good friends, David and Kaye Trickett, and God has blessed the ministry by growing it to the point of needing a full-time director. (For those familiar with CHARM David is not going anywhere, I am only stepping in to run the day-to-day operations so he can be freed up to do the ministry God has called him to do.)

I will share more about CHARM and the prison system in the coming days and weeks, but as I prepare for my first week in full-time prison ministry I did what most academics do…I ordered a few books relevant to the subject.

1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness – I am only a couple chapters into this book, but it has already begun to open my eyes. Transition homes is the area CHARM has grown the most in the past few years, and her thoughts on the prison label clearly identified an issue I knew was there but couldn’t explain. She writes, “So long as large numbers of African Americans continue to be arrested and labeled drug criminals, they will continue to be relegated to a permanent second-class status upon their release, no matter how much (or how little) time they spend behind bars. The system of mass incarceration is based on the prison label, not prison time.” I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

2. Beyond Prisons: A New Interfaith Paradigm for Our Failed Prison System – This book lays out a 12 points for changing the current prison system.

3. The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race – Dr. Jennings’ book has been on my radar for a while now, excited to read it in conversation with these other books.

4. The Cross and the Lynching Tree – I am not sure what to expect of this book. I admire James Cone’s works (and usually enjoy reading them because he is a gifted communicator) but never been able to jump on board with his theology. Wanted to save this book to read with other voices like those above.

I am really looking forward to 2015 and all the new beginnings (also part of another new project – projectCURATE). And hopefully at least one happy ending (I am scheduled to complete and defend my PhD dissertation this summer).

projectCURATE

~ Chad Chambers ~ 2 Comments

 

UntitledprojectCURATE … The longterm goal is to open a Center of Reconciliation in Houston, TX. But in the short term, the UMC has stepped up and given us two grants (GCORR and The Center for Missional Excellence) to pilot the project with 6 congregations in the Houston Area. There will be plenty more about this project to come (also on its website projectCURATE.org once it goes live), to start you can read the initial info sheet we are sending out to the churches involved:

This project was born out of a deep hunger for a new Christian imagination to take root in our city. Houston is currently the most ethnically diverse city in the United States; it is also one of the nation’s largest and most rapidly expanding cities. As Houston emerges as a leading global city, economically, culturally, and even religiously, scholars project that Houston will be emblematic of what the rest of America will come to look like over the next few decades. We seek to discover and attend to the educational, spiritual and relational conditions that will allow the church to build bridges across divides that often occur with this growing diversity. We seek to cultivate deep kinship between the participants in an innovative learning environment that will spark and awaken new forms of redemptive action in our city.

As a project, we identified three key goals for nurturing this new Christian imagination in our city:

  1. Theological Learning in Context – Our goal is to bring together a cohort of 35-40 individuals from 6 racially diverse congregations within our city to learn from academics, activists and from each other. The cohort will meet monthly from February 2015 – April 2016 to worship, engage our communities, and enter into learning together.
  1. Theological Learning that is Practical – The cohort will work through 4 modules focused on contextual theology, scriptural imagination, peace-making, and specific intercultural issues related to our communities. In each section, renowned academics and local social activists will join the knowledge that the participants bring, to heighten our education and inform our innovative action in the city. Additionally, the cohort will come together for “Pilgrimages of Pain and Hope” within the different communities.
  1. Theological Learning that is Accessible – A MOOC (massive open online course) will be created to guide the cohort in the education process. The MOOC will be co-created by the participants and a broad range of communal and theological voices. This MOOC will be able to be assessed anywhere the participant has an Internet connection. Films, articles, forums will all be assessable on a computer or mobile device.

Our desire is to create an innovative learning process that spans the boundaries of our city, nurtures kinship among us and inspires us to learn from one another while we take creative action in our city towards redemption and reconciliation. We could not be more excited that you are joining with us!

Reflections after an Extra Spiritual Week

~ Michelle Mikeska ~ 1 Comment

The school where I teach just had their Spiritual Emphasis Week.  The week’s purpose is pretty clearly outlined in the title.  It is meant to be a week where the entire school attempts to slow down and draw close to God.

As a Bible teacher at a Christian school it is safe to assume that I am a fan of Christian education.  If I could afford it, I would want my future children to attend a Christian school.  Both my husband and I went to Christian/College Prep high schools, and we were both very blessed by the experience

But after this week I am starting to see some of the limits of Christian education.  And the limitation is mainly one of identity.

Our school is not a confessional school, which means you do not have to be a Christian in order to attend.  I think this is actually a good thing.  It provides a very interesting challenge in my classroom that I believe on the whole has been both very rewarding for the students and for me.  My class is unapologetically confessional, but since it is a classroom environment I am able to weave my confession into a conversation.  I am able to show my students that even though this is my confession it is okay to disagree with me.  My classroom is clearly not the church and there is no possible way to confuse it with one.  My classroom, put maybe too simply, is the world.

But the lines between the church and the world start to blur when we go to chapel on Thursday.  Chapel consists of the liturgical acts of worship, prayer, and reading scripture.  A message is preached and some kind of a response to the homily is expected.  This would be a wonderful thing if the school was actually a church.

The church consists of a community of believers who come together once a week to celebrate the same confession: Jesus is king.  The church by its very nature crosses boundaries of age, race, and socio-economic status.  The church is a sanctuary, a safe place for those who may have taken a beating during the week, and have come to hear God’s word read over their lives.  This word acts as both a balm and a fire so that they may then go out and be witnesses to the world once again.  This is what my church is to me, and while I love my school where I teach, it will never be able to do this.  Because a Christian school is not and can never be a church.

Chapel on Thursdays is structured like a church service.  It is structured as a confessional act.  But what happens when you bring non-confessors into a confessional environment?  Should we really be surprised when they don’t join us in a celebration that they do not even recognize?

This is why Spiritual Emphasis Week is traditionally a very hard week for me.  I feel like the worst Bible teacher in all of history because after almost every chapel I don’t feel like I have celebrated with my family.  I feel a little beaten up.  I look across the aisle and see students sleeping in their chairs or making a bee line for the bathroom.  I can handle this for one hour, once a week, but after four chapels my spirit has usually been broken.  Again, I’m not saying that I blame the students or that I’m surprised when teenagers act like teenagers.  But four consecutive chapels at a Christian school make one thing abundantly clear.  We will always become frustrated when we try to force the world to act like the church.

Spiritual And/Or Natural Gifts – Maximus the Confessor

~ Mike Skinner ~ 1 Comment

Christians need to be careful that they don’t treat the Spiritual gifts as simply a Christianized Myers-Briggs test. The empowering charismata of the Spirit shouldn’t be reduced into a baptized version of a personality analysis. Can our Spiritual gifts line up with and build upon our natural giftings? Sure. But the Spirit empowers believers to act beyond their natural inclinations and capabilities.

Maximus the Confessor says it well:

“The grace of the Most Holy Spirit does not confer wisdom on the saints without their natural intellect as capacity to receive it; nor does he give the gift of knowledge where there is not a natural rational ability to receive it; nor does he give faith without total certainty of intellect and reason regarding future realities; nor does he give charisms and healings where there is no natural love for our neighbor, note any one of the other charisms where the conditions are not right and there is no matching ability to receive them. In any case, no one will ever come to possess any of the gifts we have mentioned through any natural ability whatever, but only through the divine power that confers them.”

[Various Chapters, IV. 13 (PG 90.1308-9)]