It’s All in How You Tell It

A young man went away to college, the first in his family to finish high school. His hardworking parents had never learned to read and were very proud of him. One day a letter came from their boy in college. Eager to get the news, the father waved down a neighbor on the road and begged him to read the letter from his boy away at the big university. The neighbor was impatient and rude and ran through the letter as if it had no punctuation: "Mom-and-Dad-School’s-hard-I’m-making-the-grade-Running-short-of-money….Send some! Your son, Tim."

The neighbor tossed the letter back to the father and hurried on his way. The old man shuffled slowly back to the house with his chin on his chest. "If that’s the way he talks to his parents now, I don’t know if college is such a good idea. Maybe I won’t send him any money." When he told his wife the gist of the letter, she too was hurt but thought there might be a mistake. She persuaded her husband to ask another neighbor to read it.

He made his way to a nearby farm where lived a more helpful neighbor. He read the letter in a slow and tender voice, pausing as the punctuation required. "Dear Mom and Dad, School is hard, but I am making the grade. Right now I am running a little short of money though. I would be very grateful if you could send some. Your loving son, Tim."

"Now that’s more like it," said the father, as he brushed away a tear. "When my boy talks that way, I’d give him my last dime!" In storytelling, too, it makes a difference how you tell it.

This article offers guidance on sermon delivery as it relates to storytelling. In a fine restaurant the chef gives diligent attention to presentation of the meal as well as to ingredients and cooking. Let the preacher take care to serve his feast in the most appealing way. Here you will find a suggested method for preparing a story for telling. Next you will find a number of suggestions that will help you with an approach to a storytelling style. Then arises the question of whether a certain story is appropriate for the pulpit. What enters into that decision?

Preparing for the Pulpit

The moment of delivery is the moment of truth. Part of sermon preparation is planning for delivery. As an old proverb says, a good story ill told is a bad one. Prepare the story well enough that pulpit notes do not become a barrier. Here is a deep mystery: a capable pulpiteer is not otherwise bound to sermon manuscript or pulpit notes except when he pulls out a clipping and reads a narrative to the congregation. A story is the easiest part of the prepared sermon to recall; why read it? An exact quotation of an important person might need to be read verbatim, but a narrative is too easy to learn to justify reading.

How does a storyteller prepare to tell the story? Advance preparation involves the selection of the story, even if it is a story of your own composition. It needs to be one that you are eager to tell. If you have put it into your sermon, may we assume you have the conviction that God wants you to tell it? Once you have settled on your story, there are basically five steps to getting yourself ready to tell it. The goal is not to memorize the story but to absorb it until you can retell it without use of notes.¹