The story
There’s wisdom in putting biblical storytelling at the heart of worship. We are formed by stories. I’m fond of the line by the poet Muriel Rukeyser embedded in the street outside the New York Public Library, "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
When you think about what makes up you, it’s not the cells of your body, it’s more likely a story of some kind. Asked, “Who are you?”, you would respond, “I was born in 1975 in New Hampshire, where I was raised by wolves,” or something. Stories take the discrete events of life and connect them to create art, movement, drama, pathos, and sometimes joy.
Stories do another incredible thing. They create moral order (an observation discussed by Christian Smith in Moral, Believing Animals). Stories in a culture define what, if anything, is sacred. Institutions grow up around the moral order defined by stories. Those institutions, more than anything else, shape who we are and the choices we are afforded. It is not too much to say, then, that the stories we tell—or the stories told to us—become us.
We live in a strange time, though. The way we tell stories and the kinds of stories we tell seem to be changing. I believe we live in "postmodernity." Mostly, I understand this to mean that the world has lost its unifying stories:
