EMQ » January–April 2024 » Volume 60 Issue 1
Summary: Do we know the story of what God is doing today? Often, we know how God has worked in the past and we have hope for what God will do in the future. But do we really know what God is doing here and now in the present? Across America, giving to missions is declining. And across the West, missionary attrition is rising. I believe one reason for this is that we have not done well telling stories of what God is doing around the world today.
By Grant Klinefelter
Did you know that across Europe, thousands of churches are sitting empty? Buildings once home to vibrant Christian communities are left vacant and decaying. I’ve stood in monumental churches that birthed radical revivals. But now, many require a fee to enter or charge you to take photos as they struggle to make ends meet and simply stay open.
I came across an article a couple years ago showing the stark reality of Europe in its headline: “Europe’s Churches Go on Sale.”[i] Under the headline was a picture of a church converted into a skate park and a teenage boy performing a kickflip off a ramp.
Did you know that many church buildings in the UK are being turned into mosques? I’ve heard this from Muslim friends and seen it with my own eyes. Often, as I drive through our neighborhood, we will see Muslim men filing out of an old church building after Salat.
Did you know, just one century ago, Europe had the highest percentage of Christians of any continent, but now is considered by many to be the most unreached continent in the world?
“What does this have to do with storytelling?” you might ask. I’d respond, “Everything.”
The Forgotten Virtue
In the past century, Europe has gone from being the epicenter of Christianity to now being a secular society marked by post-Christianity. But this move away from Christianity is not just happening in Europe, it’s happening in North America, too.
A new study released last year shows that for the first time ever, church attendees are now in the minority.[ii] More people in the US have no religious affiliation than all people who regularly go to a church, synagogue, or mosque. In the West, we are increasingly living in a post-modern, post-Christian, post-truth world.
But what does this have to do with storytelling?
If you’ve taken introduction to philosophy in college, you may remember learning about a concept called “transcendentals.” Transcendentals are the virtues all humans recognize – across cultures, time, ethnicities, and religions. The three transcendentals are goodness, beauty, and truth.
Christians love talking about transcendentals because we believe goodness, beauty, and truth all find their fullest revelation in the person and work of Christ. Jesus is the perfection of all goodness, the reality of all truth, and the wonder of all beauty. This is the mystery of God. Or, as the apostle Paul puts it, the mystery of Christ is that “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in him” (Colossians 2:3).
All humans know realities that are good, true, and beautiful. Whether it is the goodness of helping the poor; the truth that humans must find purpose to make sense of life; or the beauty of a child running into his mother’s arms.
Historically, Christians have used each of these virtues to speak about, write, and depict God. But when it comes to Western traditions of Christianity, Protestants have relied heavily on two of these three virtues to speak about Christ.
We have held high the truth of God’s word and the goodness of God in our proclamation of the gospel. And for a long time, it worked! If you just got people into the stadium to hear Billy Graham proclaim the truth of the Bible, then people would respond. If you just remind people of the goodness of God, then they will be moved to give their life to Jesus.
But the world is changing. In a world where truth is seen as one’s own opinion, and morality has been thrown out the window, how do we connect people to Christ?
Enter beauty.
Whispers of God’s Presence
Sadly, Christians in the West have all too often forsaken beauty. In our quest to hold high the goodness and truth of God, we have done so at the expense of minimizing Christ’s beauty. Increasingly, people don’t care what you think is good; they don’t want to hear what you believe is true. But every one of us knows beauty when we see it.
Author and pastor Brian Zahnd, in his book Beauty Will Save the World, puts it like this: “To a generation suspicious of truth claims and unconvinced by moral assertions, beauty has a surprising allure.”[iii] It may be the wonder you feel gazing at Van Gogh’s A Starry Night, the transcendence of a sunrise over the peaks of the French alps, or the stab of joy in reading Les Misérables for the first time. These aches in our soul are whispers of God’s presence in all that is beautiful.
When our apologetic defenses for Jesus end at the goodness of God and the truth of Scripture, we will fail to capture and challenge a dying world still moved by beauty. I firmly believe we have overlooked the beauty of God for the goodness and truth of God. Of course, we need the goodness and truth, but if we divorce the two from the beauty of God, we will fail to enrapture those on the fringe of faith in Christ.
We must display the beauty of Christ again. And this is where storytelling comes in.
Heralders of Beauty
There is a lot we can critique about the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. But if there is one thing they understood that we have often forgotten, it’s beauty. From ornately stained-glass windows to meticulously constructed cathedrals, they believed the visible display of Christ’s church ought to mirror the beauty of Christ himself.
We may scoff at the decades these would take to build and the sheer amount of money put into constructing these edifices, but we cannot critique them for their desire to showcase the beauty of Christ to the world.
Look at our churches today. The cookie-cutter layout, warehouse-turned-sanctuaries with gray walls contain no wonder. They may look flashy, even cool, but they lack any sense of reverential awe. When did you last walk into a church and say, “Wow, I’m just enchanted by that welcome sign?” It’s silly to even say! We’ve forgotten to keep beauty at the heart of the gospel.
I don’t think the answer is to go back to the Middle Ages and build million-dollar churches or try to re-capture what the church did in the past. But I do think we have missed the mark for highlighting the beauty of the gospel to the world today.
In Psalms, David reminds us that “Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth” (Psalm 50:2). God’s sanctuary, God’s very presence, is the perfection of beauty. And from the beauty within God, it shines forth to all the world.
Similarly, Solomon tells us, “God has made everything beautiful in its time.” He goes on to say that God “has also set eternity in the human heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). There is a beauty beckoning to all of us, and God put it there for us to seek and find Christ.
In the book of Titus, the Apostle Paul tells us to “Adorn the gospel” of Jesus (Titus 2:10). What does this mean to adorn or beautify the gospel?
I believe capturing stories of God’s work in the world is a way to beautify the gospel. This is our role as Christians, as ambassadors, as storytellers. To say, as the Psalmist, “Come and hear, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me” (Psalm 66:16). Or, as another psalm puts it, “Publish his glorious deeds among the nations. Tell everyone about the amazing things he does” (Psalm 96:3).
We are called to be heralders of beauty.
Stories can be beautiful. Of course, not all stories are. It’s easy to find a story lacking beauty –whether it’s a cheaply made movie, music that profanes God, or art that objectifies people.
But stories can be beautiful. Have you ever finished a well-cast movie, seen a perfectly captured image, or read a beautifully written novel and wanted to give a standing ovation to the screen or a bearhug to the creator?
This is the power of story. Story has the power to do something a guidebook never could. As British children’s book writer Sally Lloyd-Jones rightly notes, “Rules don’t change you. But a story – God’s Story – can.”[iv]
Theology for the Middle
Stories are powerful. This is why so much of Scripture is narrative.
Jesus knew this. He knew the power of a well-told story. Did you know roughly one-third of Jesus’ teachings were stories? I love how Mark captures Jesus’ words as he looked out at a large crowd gathered to hear him. “Jesus said, ‘How can I describe the Kingdom of God? What story should I use to illustrate it?’” (Mark 4:30).
Jesus was the greatest storyteller to ever live. He weaved stories – grand and small – into the fabric of his teaching to connect with all kinds of people. He told stories of winemaking, sewing, farming, and baking, stories of grand feasts and stories of small seeds.
And if this isn’t incredible enough, Jesus didn’t just leave his story to be read about in a book. No, the book wasn’t fully formed for many years after Jesus, and the common person didn’t have access to a written copy of Scripture for 1,500 years. Instead, he told his disciples, “You will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8). They were the ones entrusted to carry on the beautiful story of love, sacrifice, forgiveness, and redemption that Jesus lived and taught.
And while today we have the book, the call is still the same – to be his witnesses.
To be a witness, a messenger, an ambassador implies a story we must know and tell. Do we know the story of what God is doing today? Many times, we know how God has worked in the past and we have hope for what God will do in the future, but do we really know what God is doing here and now in the present?
Writer Lauren Winner calls this gap our “theology for the middle.”[v] Storytelling is a way we fill in the theology of the middle of what God is doing here and now.
Mission agencies that write stories, capture photos, and make videos of God’s work in today’s world to share with their constituencies participate being “theologians of the middle” – publishing stories of God’s presence in the world. In fact, when any missionary shares their stories they play the part of a theologian!
Prioritizing Beautiful Storytelling in Missions
From the pandemic to the plethora of political unrest in various countries our world has seen in recent years, people are passionately making their voice heard. Often, it’s hard to hear God’s still small voice through the mayhem of noise. And sadly, the Church hasn’t always done well to rise above the rabble of polarization and tribalism to focus on the mind-bending story of a God who stooped down into the dregs of human despair to make a united family out of all the warring peoples in the world.
Isn’t this an amazing story? It is the most beautiful tale ever told – and it is true! So true, in fact, that across the world, there are groups – small and big – living out this story of God’s redemption. Yet many organizations do not prioritize gathering and telling these stories. People who feel called to help capture and share these missional stories have few options of places to serve.
The world is full of noise, but as Donald Miller notes, “Story can make music out of noise.”[vi] We need stories to help make beautiful music out of the clashing noise the world is making. What would happen if gifted storytellers pooled their efforts to powerfully tell beautiful stories of what God is doing in the world?
Across America, giving to missions is declining. And across the West, missionary attrition is rising. I believe a reason for this is because we have not done well at telling stories of how God is using kingdom resources to change lives and reporting stories that inspire people to say, “How can I get involved?”
I believe beautiful storytelling in missions could be the catalyst for a revival in world missions.
And even more than just inspiring those inside the Church, how can we use storytelling to reach lost people outside the Church? As Lincoln Brunner and Jim Killam say, when we do storytelling poorly and “people inside the church are uninspired by all this, how will it ever connect with anyone outside?”[vii]
Unleashing Kingdom Storytellers
It’s time for a revolution. The beauty of the gospel must become central again to the global mission of God’s people. Great storytellers help us remember what God has done in the past, equip us to be alive to what Jesus is doing in the present, and prepare us for what the Spirit wants to do in the future.
We live in the most technologically advanced age in the history of the world. The nations are literally at our fingertips. The massive gaps of information of how God is moving around the world have no excuse.
Missionaries who are writers, photographers, and filmmakers have an important place in God’s mission. As kingdom storytellers, they can capture the beauty of God to share with a world in need of hope. And mission agencies need these storytellers. People passionate about Jesus, passionate about people, and passionate about stories can beautifully share God’s amazing work with the world through words, pictures, and videos.
The gospel of Jesus is good. It is true. And it is beautiful. In a truth-diluted and goodness-neglected world, beauty truly has a way to sway hearts and bring people into the kingdom of God like nothing else. May this vision for beauty infuse our strategies and guide our future.
Grant Klinefelter (grant.klinefelter@gemission.org) is a global worker with Greater Europe Mission. Grant leads GEM’s Storytelling Team – a collective of creatives working to tell the story of Europe so Europeans can know the story of Jesus. The Storytelling Team uses written and video stories to connect Christians worldwide and provide ways for people to go, pray, and give. Grant, his wife, Naomi, and dog, Louis, live in Birmingham, England.
[i] Naftali Bendavid, “Europe’s Empty Churches Go on Sale,” The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/europes-empty-churches-go-on-sale-1420245359.
[ii] Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Church Membership Falls below Majority for First Time,” Gallup, November 20, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx.
[iii] Brian Zahnd, prelude in Beauty Will Save the World (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2012), xv.
[iv] Sally Lloyd-Jones, “Teach Children the Bible Is Not about Them,” The Gospel Coalition, February 21, 2012, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/teach-children-the-bible-is-not-about-them/.
[v] Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis (HarperOne, 2013), 129.
[vi] Donald Miller, “Story Makes Music out of Noise,” in Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen (New York, NY: HarperCollins Leadership, an Imprint of HarperCollins, 2017), 16–18.
[vii] Jim Killam and Lincoln Brunner, introduction in Go Tell It: How and Why to Report God’s Stories in Words, Photos, and Videos (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014), 14.
EMQ, Volume 60, Issue 1. Copyright © 2024 by Missio Nexus. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from Missio Nexus. Email: EMQ@MissioNexus.org.
