This week on The Ministry Growth Show, we’re joined by Rick Sessoms, Founder and CEO of Freedom to Lead international and the author of the book Leading with Story. In this episode, Rick and I discuss the power of story, we share our thoughts on the implications of storytelling for the Church in a digital age, and we spend some time discussing orality and reaching unreached and unengaged people groups that are primarily oral tradition cultures. If you’re interested in story and storytelling, you won’t want to miss this episode. Enjoy!
Relevant Resources:
Freedom to Lead
Lifeway Mission
Lausanne Movement
Iain McGilchrist
Mike Metzger
Leading with Story by Rick Sessoms
Transcript:
SPEAKERS: Rick Sessoms and Zachary Leighton
You’re listening to the ministry grow show brought to you by reliant creative, the creative agency for gospel centered ministries. Find out more at reliant creative.org.
Welcome to the ministry grow show, a podcast dedicated to helping churches and ministries grow and make more effective impacts for the kingdom of God, and an ever changing digital world. Whether you’re building and growing a gospel centered ministry or leading a church, if you want insight into the strategies, struggles, challenges and successes of other ministry leaders, you’ve come to the right place.
Zachary Leighton
Welcome back to the ministry growth Show. Today on the show, I’m going to be talking with Rick Sessoms from freedom to lead international. He’s the founder and CEO. Rick, thanks for being on the show. Thanks so much great being here. Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about your ministry, freedom to lead international? Why do you guys exist? What do you do?
And then if you can include some thoughts on your your focus of unreached, and underserved areas of the world, that would be great.
Rick Sessoms
I’ll try to do this briefly. Freedom and lead began in 2009. We were responding. I’ve been in leadership development for a lot of years, decades. But we were responding to the 90% of leaders around the world Christian leaders, Minister leaders that are
that are basically untrained. The statistics show that about 5% of leaders that are serving in ministry have been to some sort of a formal education, Bible College seminary, what have you, another 5%, roughly have had some sort of non formal training, but roughly about 90% have had no training whatsoever. So we were, we saw this incredible need around the world and said, Well, we we’d like tackle that is, you know, with our small you know, just few of us. But but we we believe that that, that God wants to jump in this space. And as we began to look at that, we began to realize that a Christ centered leadership model was very, very important in these contexts, and we also realized that most of these people learn best and are most likely to be influenced through story. And images and music and trauma and dance, as opposed to the wet more Rhett Western oriented, literacy based models of learning, conceptual frameworks, abstract theology, and so forth. And so we developed this ministry called freedom to lead that start in north India and work with a collaborative with a group of people there, they were working in these spaces among the unreached people in North India. And for three, four years, five years, even we, we just kind of, were grinding it out in that context, and came up with a program that is a four year program called the garden project that uses these methods of story symbol and song to develop leaders. And since then, we’ve expanded into, I think, more than 50 countries throughout South Asia and Africa, and are looking right now in the Middle East and Central Asian, South Pacific and Latin America. So, anyway, that’s why we exist. We, we, I’m, I don’t claim to be an expert at this story. Issue, as some people call it a reality. We tend to call it story centric, simply because orality sometimes has the the notion that people can’t read. Whereas story centric, I think so communicates that people look learn best, they prefer to communicate in these story sort of frameworks rather than through one to three point sort of approaches. And we found that the vast majority of people we associate with resonate with that, and particularly the people in these unreached areas around the world. So we’re seeing a lot of response to to this. We have really targeted places that are difficult to reach people that are working among the unreached in order to advance the kingdom in that in those places and around the world.
Now throughout your site, you As use terminology like reproducing, multiplying movement terminology, Are you guys familiar with and working with DMM CPMT 40 type models within your ministry strategies paired with what you’ve learned about orality or story centric approaches.
We are in fact dmn is been one of our partners. We have worked closely with DMM partners in Africa. You Nusa Zhao is the leader of DMM. And in Africa, up in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, we work with Aichi VNA. And in Ethiopia, we’ve been working most recently with Isla Tasi. And, and the network he works with across the East Africa. That’s, that’s based in Nairobi, Kenya, with Lifeway mission. So there’s a lot of people that we are working with that are, we’re trying to help them to maintain the movement is Isla would say, he’s deeply involved with DMM is one of the leaders in that part of the world. But he would say that, that leadership development leadership is, is absolutely essential to maintain a movement. And so this leadership component is huge in their model of moving this forward. So we do work with those we’ve, we’ve worked with other lesser known groups, like the bridges train network in South Asia, there’s also a movement oriented thing that is focused on multiplication, our model our, our model, our strategy is very much a multiplication strategy. So yeah, these movement models are very important to what we do.
Okay, cool. Now, what I’m really interested in because we are interested in passionate about story is that story centered piece that you talk about, you’ve mentioned it already in this conversation. I’m in the middle of like I said, offline, reading your book leading with story. And so this idea of story centric, a story centric approach is really fascinating to me. So can you share what makes freedom to lead different from other mission organizations? And specifically talking about that story centric approach, how you guys started employing this story center tool in the disciplemaking or DMM, type models and leadership to using it within within the leadership development context?
Yeah. Well, as many people know, there are many ministries that are focusing on oral strategies. You can there, many of them are dealing in that areas. In the area of evangelism using evangelism Jesus film is classic example of orality approach to telling the story through the eyes of Luke. There are other groups that are doing great discipleship work in using story. There are others like a scriptures in use out of Arizona that are using story orality to plant churches. But we jumped into this because a study was done in 2007. I happened to be on the board of the Luzon movement at that time, and we were doing a doing a survey to find out what the big issues of for world evangelization were the time. And we found out that this orality thing was a growing phenomenon around the world. But we also recognize that while people were coming to Christ through story, they were being discipled. through storytelling, their churches were being planted out of these storytelling groups. Today, there was no one that was really developing leaders using story. In other words, those people that came to Christ and were discipled had to go back into sort of a literacy based framework in order to learn to be trained to be leaders. And so we said, Well, why would that name be necessary? Why Why shouldn’t we continue to help these people not to have to be extracted from their cultures and their context in order to learn leadership? Why don’t we help them lead where they are because they’re already leading? There’s a there’s an interesting phenomenon that in the West, like for me when when I came to Christ and and gave myself to him, back when I was a teenager, I felt called to the ministry. No church ever came and endorsed me. I just decided I wanted to go to Bible college. So I went to Bible College. Got my piece of paper the end of four years. and suddenly I’m considered a leader. So it may is based on what you know, in our background. In these oral cultures, people are identified as leaders by their, by their communities. And so they come to Christ. And that’s why 90% of them don’t have training is they’re already determined to be leaders by their community. And so part of the orality strategy is, we don’t want to extract these people from their communities where they’re already leading and serving, but we want to come alongside of them to help them become better leaders, where they’re already leading. And so that’s a difference between the Western and the eastern approach, or the majority world approach to, to leading and to a strategy of leadership development, that I think is effective. So that was part of what we were trying to do. To understand the story piece a little bit better from me personally, maybe I can tell you a little bit of my own story, maybe that would help. Yeah, I grew up in the South. And you can probably tell by my accent that I’m, I’m southern. And, and so I grew up in a family that my parents were educated, I grew up in a family that went to college, and so forth, but, but we love stories, who I kind of grew up in, I’m in a family of storytellers. So I grew up loving to hear good stories. I mean, it’s part of our southern culture thing. And so fast forward to my wife, and I went to Indonesia as missionaries, in 1982, over four years ago now. And when we got finished with language study there, we were assigned to go to the seminary on the island of Sulawesi. And when we showed up at the seminary, we were told that we were supposed to teach. And I remember when the teachers got together and said, Who’s going to teach what, I got what nobody else wanted to teach, because I was a new kid on the block. And one of those courses was preaching. And so I prepared my lessons and, and, you know, I had been doing some preaching and, and I had been trained to preach, and a typical Bible college where, you know, the preaching was you exegete the scriptures, and then you come up with your three points in a poem sort of thing. And you might sprinkle some illustrations in there. But the, the important stuff was the three points. And, and so I began to teach it that way. And the Bible college or in the seminary, where it was, and everything was going along well, and I was attending the church that was down the street, where most of the seminary students and the professors would go, and it was kind of a formal church. And I would go every Sunday, and I didn’t pay attention to the fact that the preachers were all preaching three points in a poem, sort of approach, and it was a big church for 500 people and, and I sat there every Sunday dutifully, and listen to this, and, and, you know, didn’t pay much attention. But then, from time to time, I was invited out into the villages to, to visit and you know, do things. And I noticed that in the villages, they had a completely different way of communication, than in the villages. Once when the government or anybody wanted to teach something, they would use these why on these leather puppets. And they would wait until nightfall and then they put up a big bedsheet, and they take a light from behind, they would throw the silhouette. So these puppets, and they would do these puppet shows. And people from anywhere from seven to seven years old would sit there and then watch these shows, these stories being told. And they were teaching the lessons. And by the way, they would never come to the end of it and say, Now, these are the three points you need to learn from these lessons. But they would just tell the stories. And I thought, well, that’s weird. And so I went back to the seminary and at the same time, I was listening to a series of lectures from a guy named Fred Craddock, who was teaching at the time and camera School of Theology in Atlanta. And I was receiving his tapes. My mother and dad, were sending me these tapes. And he was doing this guest lecturer ship at Princeton University, on preaching and storytelling. And I listened to this and I thought, this is incredible. And, and so I got a crazy idea, Zach, that one Sunday, when they needed a guest preacher, the church. I said, well, they came and asked me would you fill in? And I said, Sure. And so I said, could I tell a story? And they sort of shrugged their shoulders they thought was kind In a weird from a white guy, you know, so but they said, Sure, that’s fine. And so I did, I stood up and told this story about a guy who died and went to hell. And of course, it was all based in scripture. But I never stopped and said, Now John 15 says this, you know, I just told the story. And at the end, I close the story without any, any explanation, no, three, no three points, nothing. And this, as I told you, this church was full of Bible college and seminary students and professors and stuff. I’ve never seen any kind of response in this, this church at all. And by the end of the sermon, I just said, if, if you’d like to respond to Christ this morning,
would you respond by raising your hand? I think probably 40 or 50. People responded that morning. And I was scratching my head because I knew I didn’t, didn’t even tell the story very well. It was in broken Indonesian, you know? Well, I went on from there. I went back to class the next morning, and the next morning, when I got on campus, the elders of the church showed up. And they said, we we appreciate, you know, in their Indonesian sort of gentle way, they said, we, we appreciate you preaching as the morning, but whatever you did that that wasn’t preaching. And, and I said, Well, okay, so I noticed that they didn’t ask me to preach again for almost two years after that. And I kept, you know, teaching preaching at the seminary. And then two years later, they, they had another, you know, cancellation. So they were desperate, I guess. So they asked me to preach again. And so this time, I’m a little bit hard headed I, I, I, I decided I tell the story of Caleb and Joshua, they went into the promised land, and said, We can do this and went back and they said, No, there’s giants. And so you know, the whole story. And the message of the story, even though I didn’t say this was the message was it. Caleb was faithful as a young man, the choices he made his young men. So when he became old, God blessed him, and he had a wonderful ministry in in due time. And I finished the sermon, and I was, I was praying at the end. And I don’t, I’m not exaggerating, there was an old man. And he was sitting about halfway back in this large church. And he threw up his hands in the middle of my prayer. And he said, Oh, God saved me. And he ran to the front of the church, and he threw himself down in front of the pulpit, the stone floor, I’ve never, I’ve never seen anybody respond. And suddenly, there was this dash of people who were responding after him. And they just came in, they came in, they came in, and I just sat there sort of stunned, honestly. But I realized through that, that something was going on. And I was a bit of a slow learner, but but we began to realize that that God was using this story thing. And before I left in a nasia, they were inviting me to do these stories all over the place, to large, large groups of people, five and 10,000. People were gathering for these stories. And I’m not kidding, yeah, I am not a great storyteller. But just the fact that somebody was attempting to do it in their culturally appropriate way, set me in motion that when I came back to the states and began became a pastor, and I really wanted to understand this whole thing that at the time was called Narrative preaching. And so I did some lectures on that, but story has always been very close to my heart. So when I got into the leadership development full time, back in many years ago, when this whole issue of orality started to arise, I think God used all that history in my life, all that background, to tap me on the shoulder and, frankly, when he did my first responses, you gotta be kidding me. At the time, I was an executive coach, I was working with C suite leaders, I was teaching in a doctoral program, you know, all these systems theory and the abstracts and all that stuff. And so I’m probably not the most obvious candidate to be doing something like this. But and I’m sure that other people can and will do it much better. But, but it’s, it seems to have taken hold. And so today, we’re, we probably got, I don’t know 20,000 and leaders around the world that are engaged with this program that we’re doing. So we just are trying to keep up. And the Lord is has blessed this in amazing ways.
That’s incredible. What the stories you were telling, in both of those, those instances where you were asked to preach, those are just stories you just pulled from the Bible, or, or iteration.
Stories, just told from the Bible, and, you know, told them use a little bit of creativity, but I try not to, you know, be fanciful about it, because I think there’s a difference between imagination and fantasy, right. But I, you know, I tried to try to use some, but I stuck very closely to the text and, and tried to retell the story as best I knew how. And, and people just, it’s amazing that, that they didn’t have to, I didn’t have to explain it to him. And that’s what that’s what started to help me to, to realize that this story can indeed carry the gospel. It doesn’t necessarily always have to just explain the gospel when it can carry it. embody it, actually. So if that makes sense, we can unpack that. But that’s just
know that does. That’s good. So as we as we begin our discussion to that, and before we get into much of the story stuff, I want to give maybe a little guidance and framework for our listeners, as we are going to spend most of this discussion on story. How do you define story? Like what is a story in your mind?
Well, a story is in effect, I would call it a think I call it maybe I didn’t call it into the book, but I would call it a scaffolding, if you will, when you think of a of a building, the building is not the scaffolding, the scaffolding is there to build the building, in order to create the building in order to provide a frame a structure, if you will. And so it’s a scaffolding, if you will, if you can think of that image upon which the content is built. So the story is the content. And the start the content course is, is to provide meaning and learning. And good stories. Also feet always feature character characters, there’s usually a hero in the story can be a reluctant hero, oftentimes, but an antagonist, the antagonist can be another person or it can be the environment or it can be, you know, whatever. But there’s a hero and there’s an antagonist. And there’s a struggle. There’s a struggle of external circumstances that are circumstances external to the, to the hero or can be internal there can be a hero, like the Butan. The story of the beautiful mind. Wonderful story with Russell Crowe, where this the struggle is internal, the person have a mental issue that was an internal struggle. And, of course, the story has to be going somewhere there has to be tension in a story, it is moving toward a desired outcome and as a goal. But once the tension is satisfied, the story’s over. So the tension is what makes the story is the is the platform and once the story travels, and once that tension is satisfied, the credit should have to roll because it’s over. So those are the pieces that I understand any good story to contain. And that story can be a true story, a made up story, it can be science fiction, it can be drama, can be comedy, we can be whatever. But it can it has, I think it has to pretty much contain those elements in order to be a meaningful story.
Yeah. Are you familiar with Robert McKee?
I know the name yes, he’s
he’s in Hollywood would be considered like the storytelling guru, if that’s a term that you could give anybody but he does a lot of storytelling, storytelling structure, teaching, screenwriters and script writers and actors and directors. His definition of story that I really like it and maybe the most simplified definition that I’ve ever seen, is that his definition would say, conflict changes. Is life Right? Like the this idea that there has to be conflict within a story for that tension that you talked about in order for the story to be a story?
I see that conflict changes life a lot.
Yeah. And I see that play out within the entire biblical narrative when every single story in the biblical narrative in the Bible, there’s there’s constant conflict and, and some type of challenge or tension. And that is the story of our lives on repeat over and over and over again, right, this this constant cycle, and rhythm of conflict changes life, conflict changes life, especially for a Christian, right, like 18 years ago, I said yes to Jesus. And ever since he’s been transforming me and making me look more like him. And it’s been this constant conflict change his life, that’s
conflict all the time that that disruption is what creates the growth is the truth. So that’s part of our all of our stories, for sure. Yeah. Also, obviously, the word life is so important and McGee’s definition because story has to relate to your listener, and not necessarily that you have to tell him or her that it relates to them. But they have to figure that out for themselves for that’s why I use the word meaning. Because that’s what story has the power to do. That sometimes facts don’t is that story helps us to see ourselves within the framework of that story. And the most powerful stories are those that nobody has to tell us that.
Yeah. Well, you talked about in your, in your previous story example, where, for the first time you were seeing people react and respond to the stories that you were telling, because you were sharing something within the oral tradition, culture in which they communicated. Like we see this, I’ve been listening and being I’ve been fascinated by what I’m learning in an in a show a podcast called The Bay ma podcast, that talks a lot about chi, ASMs, and caustic structure within the biblical narrative, especially within the Torah, and how the, the authors of the Bible writing to an Eastern audience wrote in these caustic structures, to hide the central piece of the story within the narrative. Like our our tendency in the West is, like you said, like put it in a three act logical structure so that we can know what this means. Yeah, but but this caustic structure would make an attempt at hiding the key point of the story in the narrative. So that as the listener, or the reader walks through that story, and like digs for that piece of treasure, when they do find it, because they had to put in effort to figure out what was going on. And what the author was trying to say, was the central piece or point or theme of the story. Now I found a piece of treasure, and I hold on to that so much more significantly, and, and bury it deep into my heart. Because man, I had to work for that I had to go. Yeah, I found it. I dug deep, I just wasn’t there in a three part, bullet pointed, logical presentation. And so I think that there’s something like that that’s going on within, within story. And when we when we talk about story and story structure, and how we are wired to engage with with all of humanity’s wired in this way. There’s You see, there’s some truth to that within how scripture was written itself. So
yeah, I agree. I was recently with a group of global leaders, people we work with, and we’re trying to think through how would we were working on a overview of the entire scripture to try to figure out how do we tell this story. And I had written up an outline that I thought was brilliant. And so I presented and it was, it was all these themes, you know, it was the themes of glory and grace and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of those things aren’t important, please understand. But I’m a theologian. You know, I’ve been I’ve eaten a Bible college, I know this stuff.
Let me tell you what I know.
And so I’ve got these things, and I’m, you know, telling stories to explain these things. And they said, they were they were polite to him, they said Nananananana. The, the first of all, they send the Bible meanders. The Bible is not real obvious and the way it tells a story that’s foreign. And the second is is your pay In a tension rep to the begats, the gaps are important. Why? Because when we tell our stories in the tribe, we also, we always tell it about people, and our forefathers, and those forefathers struggles and how they pass it on to the next forefathers and their struggles and their struggles. And it’s about these relationships in these conflicts of relationships, and these interpersonal struggles, that is what creates, out of that comes the discovery of these themes. But it’s not saying the themes upfront and then using illustrations to explain the things, you follow me. So that’s, that’s critical to their understanding of how the story should be told. And that’s brand new to me. I mean, literally, that that was a new awareness, literally within the last 12 months.
Man, that’s, that’s fascinating. So I have to tell you, I first learned about you and your work while doing some research for some coursework that we’ve been working on and developing within our ministry. More specifically, within the marketing space, but still relevant to what you talk about in your book and on your site, and what you guys are doing in your ministry. But I saw the quote that you said 80% of the world’s people belong to cultures that learn best through story, images and music. They’re most likely influenced through other through oral rather than literate means yet, more than 90% of Christian workers are literate, or using literacy based communication. After I read that, and I thought, I read that to myself, I said, and I’ve got to meet this guy first. Because obviously, as passionate about storytelling, as we are reliant, but with that quote, and that statistic in mind, can you share maybe some of the your high level thoughts on on the power of story, and maybe specifically, why the church could benefit from using this powerful tool more effectively than not just in or traditionally oral tradition cultures, because I believe we are living through with this digital world that we’re, we’re we’ve been entering to for the last two decades or so we’re living through the greatest communication shift in human history. And what in especially in the West, what used to be a literacy based culture is quickly moving to an oral tradition, culture. I mean, if said that, by 2025, Facebook will be will have no words on it, that it will just be icons, images, and videos. And we’re already seeing that move with most of the digital platforms. It’s just icons, and images and video and, and story. And so and how as the church, this is a big question, there’s a lot of questions. So well, we can unpack this and spend some time on it. But how do we prepare ourselves within the church for that shift that has taken place? And I think us specifically with what you guys are doing already having functioned in this area might have some really key insights?
Well, I don’t know. They’re, they’re unique to us, in fact that that quote that I shared is not unique. To me, that comes from some from some great folks with the International Mission Board that have cited some of that, that, that that have said that. So anyway, I think the place is start, Zach, for me would be to say that I grew up and I think it’s true for most people in in my generation. I grew up in a world that had a pretty strong bias against story. At least the way I was trained. I grew up with a systematics in theology and preaching and as I said, I expository preaching for you know in and to be a faithful divider the word of truth, you needed to go verse by verse and give, you know, the points and so forth. And a lot of the course a lot of the didactic portion of Scripture are not story, even though most of the Bible is, you know, when you teach in Romans, it’s, it’s tough to, you know, see that immediately. So I think that I grew up in a, in a, in a church culture, at least, that would that had a bias against story. And the reason is, I think, it came, it came to his Honestly, when I was growing up, for example story, for the most part of was, first of all, it regarded as a device to put a spin on something. It was used as a as a play to stretch Logic, if you will, it was it meant untrue. The words of my, my grandmother on the tongue of my grandmother, she would send me for a loaf of bread, and she’d give me money for the bread and, and I would go buy the bread. And you know, she’d say where to change? And I say, Well, I dropped it along the road or whatever. And she say, now, son, don’t tell me a story. And so story Oh, my tongue growing up meant untrue. And so the question really is, Can we can we commit our the gospel to something that is fundamentally perceived as untrue? That’s, that’s first question. That’s a critical question. And so that’s first, the second is that even if it’s true story was, I got the impression that story meant lightweight. You know, in fact, when I first started preaching, and I’ve done a bit of it through my lifetime, if you wanted to, somebody asked, how was the preaching, and if somebody said, Well, it was okay, he told a lot of stories. That meant there wasn’t much to it, there wasn’t much substance to it. You know, if somebody really wants to get serious about preaching, they might tell a story to give people a break, from the heavy stuff. But if they wrote a really good series, they get back to the must and should stuff, you know, the, the three points, the the propositional statements, that’s, that’s what serious and so those things, I think, have bias to the church, towards story in ways that we aren’t even conscious of. And then, of course, all of us have been to college. And higher learning is populated with, with, you know, with with white paper, if you you know, in order to graduate from college, you got to sit in a cubicle by yourself and take this test. And it’s based on what you know, and it’s the facts and, and so on, so forth. And, and so in order to really carry the freight, the facts, the the abstract theory, the, the concepts are the heavy part of what’s important. And so in that kind of a world, the question would come, can we trust the gospel to a story? And I think it really gets to be a question. For me, I don’t know, over time, I began to look outside the church and realize that for, for, for our culture, and many cultures around the world, they have taken for a long time story much more seriously, than the church has. They are way ahead of us on this. In fact, it I think it will be safe to say that with the use of story in film, story and novels, story on Broadway, story, Wherever you look, that that has been the the primary vehicle for changing our culture over the last 40 or 50 years. And we could use some specific examples of that. But I think that the church is way behind on that. Even today, I’ve had preachers say well, and stories, nice stuff, but when I really want to get serious, I got to I got to teach theology. Because, you know, if somebody shows up at a funeral, they gotta hear theology. And yet, I’m not sure that the preacher is listening to the fact that when people show up at sir, at funerals, they want to hear stories about the person’s life, and the witness of that person’s life that’s so powerful. When people are sitting listening in a sermon in a, in a funeral, or for my own case, you know, I’ve preached many, many, probably hundreds 1000s of sermons in my lifetime, but people walk up to me 10 years later, they don’t remember the sermon. But I remember that story you told that move me and and so there’s no question that this whole issue of story is is incredibly powerful in our own culture, and even more exponentially in other cultures around where that continues to be recognized as the as the main vehicle for communication.
And so in those international settings, where you guys do a lot of your work, there, you don’t find that there’s a Do you find that there’s any pushback at all? I mean, I guess you mentioned that the Indonesia Seminary where or church where seminary students were coming. Yeah.
Do it that way. Right. There’s pushback, because wherever they’ve learned from Westerners, they have learned that that’s the way to do it. And, and so yeah, the places that have been affected by Western educational models often have a bias against story. But but as you move into the culture itself, as you move into the places where the people actually live, you find increasing primary reliance on story in those contexts for sure. So if you’re gonna get to the people, it’s going to be story that does.
So with those misconceptions of story, that are run that run rampant throughout the global church, that sounds like what are they that are some of the things that we can do to what are some things you guys are doing to try to shift that mindset? Because it is it’s a mindset shift, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think I think the first is the ask the question is, is direct help the church to recognize in specific examples, and we’ve tried to use some examples in the book leading with story examples of, in many ways, examples of things that have gone right, some examples of things that have gone way wrong. But regardless, it’s story that has driven a lot of that. And so I think the first is to help the leaders of the church, the church to begin to understand the powerful vehicle, that story has been in our own culture, to begin to become aware of that, as they encounter people that are watching television, Monday through Saturday, as they’re reading books, as they’re listening to music. And, and begin to recognize that those are the media that are deeply impacting people six, and I have six and three quarter days a week. And to try to stand up on Sunday, and combat that, if you will, if that’s what it’s about. With a propositional statement. It’s just not going to get it done. It’s it’s, it’s, it’s a propositional statements. Do not move people. They may be true, but they don’t embody meaning for people. Stories that people listen to whether it’s, you know, wicked on Broadway, or reading a great novel by by, you know, whoever’s, and I started reading novels. So it’s just storytelling, which is fascinating. And some of it is interesting stuff, but, but all these media are, are moving people and influencing people in profound ways that we can combat we can’t compete with if we’re using propositional statements. And so a place to start is a recognition of that. A second place to start is begin experimenting with story. I think that’s I think we have conditioned our people frankly, to have a suspicion about story. But and so probably just going wholesale story is not going to work. So using story to communicate the truth is a place to start. We have people in I think in the pews have been used to being spoon fed the truth and with a few illustrations sprinkled in, so I don’t imagine it’s going to work just tell them the story and walk away like you do and, and, and majority world cultures. But begin began helping people to see the power of story and then talk about it, talk about what you do and do what you’re talking about. That’s what that’s what I was trying to do in the context where I was, and people began to expect story. In fact, as we began down that road, but it is a process. It’s not an overnight change that I don’t I don’t think an overnight change is gonna work. Yeah.
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