“Listening to stories can’t influence me”

Claire met a new Christian while shopping in the market. She said she’d stopped sharing Jesus with her friends because she was hopeless at it. Whenever her friends saw her coming they began to run away. When she explained her method, it was obvious why her friends were running! The method she was trained to use was confrontational, abstract and manipulative, and it made her friends feel like targets.

Claire asked this woman if she could demonstrate how she shared with others and launched into the first story. Within a minute, one of the friends the new Christian had alienated came over and asked if she could listen in. At the end of the creation story the friend said, “It’s just like watching television!”

Sometimes storying is the only way people are willing to listen to the gospel. They may have built up defensive walls against other evangelistic methods, had bad experiences in the past, or their own religious leaders have warned them against listening to the Bible.

James works in a country where it is difficult to share the gospel openly. But he has found that storying is not perceived as evangelism. Recently he’s been able to share the gospel with Buddhist monks in a monastery. These monks listened to a set of nine stories and loved them. A Bible study or more formal means of evangelism most likely would not have received a minute of their attention. It might even have been met with vigorous protest. In contrast, the stories seemed harmless. This ‘harmless’ approach allowed the monks to participate in storying groups, and the first one just became a believer after listening to weeks of stories and asking many questions.

Adapted from “Telling the Gospel Through Story”