Storytelling has been my connection to preaching almost my entire life. Growing up, the pastor of my home church, always preached with a story. He may have used an illustration from a book or an experience from his childhood or even from the week before. Every sermon began with him reading the scripture dynamically and then he would begin the story and switch back and forth between it and his exegesis of the text. Basically, a three-point sermon, but through stories.
When I became a youth, I went on cool retreats
every winter and summer. You know the kind, a bunch of smelly teens crammed in
a gymnasium or auditorium jumping around to high octane praise and worship
music, live games on the stage and in the crowd, a drama to set the mood for
preaching and then the preacher delivered the message. As a United Methodist
youth in Western NC I grew up listening to the hilarious and poignant
Conference Evangelist at almost all of these events. Andy had a style of
preaching all his own. Switching between sermon and first person narrative with
props and voices usually queuing that switch with a phrase like, “It may have
gone something like this…”. The way he wondered through a sermon, asking
questions of the text and offering laughter throughout always hit me as a great
way to preach to teens. As an adult it still strikes me as funny, but I wonder
if it would get old 52 weeks a year?
The greatest preacher I know, my mother, took
a class at Pfeiffer University with Andy called “Preaching to the Pierced
Tongue Generation”. It was right as we had begun a contemporary service at our
home church and she was in the rotation to preach as the minister of Christian
Education. Her final project was a first-person sermon on the story of Mary and
Martha. She played the role of Martha and did it in the style of a Mary Tyler
Moore sketch. She did so great! It was the first time I had ever seen a sermon
in that style, she never broke character, hitting all her points and morals as
Martha.
As a youth minister myself, I attended many
retreats and heard many sermons, good and bad for better or worse in church and
at those retreats too. I would take my confirmands to a retreat at Lake
Junaluska every year, and hear the stories and folk sermons of a pastor named
Ed. These sermons had a different technique, as they were complete stories, but
they were told from the narrator’s perspective. What I enjoyed about this
technique was how he modernized them, the woman at the well was a teenager at
the soda fountain, Zacchaeus a back row of the Sanctuary blues singer.
These sermons inspired the way I spoke with my
youth on a weekly basis, but I never thought I would be a preacher, much less
be “graduating” (I put this in quotes because…corona) from Duke Divinity School
in less than a month. But one of my favorite styles of preaching is through
storytelling. While being in Div School I have explored my own style of
preaching and most recently, in this class, did a sermon in the style of a Jack
Tale.
Jack tales always center around an unbeatable
foe, but by his wit and sneakiness, Jack wins the day. Many of the stories told
about Jack center around his defeat of Giants. My great uncle, Ray Hicks told
Jack Tales in the style of Appalachian folk stories. Jack is a trickster,
always getting the best of the antagonist and coming out every time as the
unlikely hero.
Great Uncle Ray was a renowned Appalachian storyteller, who
lived his entire life on Beech Mountain, North Carolina. He was particularly
known for the telling of Jack Tales. The Hicks family lived in conditions of
extreme poverty in the relatively isolated mountains of North Carolina near
Banner Elk. The family got by selling carpets handwoven by his mother and
dulcimers crafted by his father as well as other work. In 1945, Ray’s father
committed suicide. His mother died in 1975 leaving him the family homestead and
child-raising duties.
In 1973 he went to the National Storytelling
Festival and became a headliner for many years at the event. Ten years later he
was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship with pictures and recordings of his
stories put on display at The National Museum of American History in the
Smithsonian Institute
Storytelling is not only something I
was formed by in the sermons I heard growing up, it also runs in my blood. I’m
not completely sure how to continue using these stories in sermons but I think
there is something to this style of telling that applies to preaching.
Especially in a Rural context. My worry doing it was that people may think I
was talking down or making fun of this style, but it is honestly me paying
respect to my family heritage and learning the phrases and motifs to tell the
stories on my own. I have been telling my 3-year-old Jack and the Giant stories
to teach her about telling the truth and being brave. She loves hearing them
and is repeating them back to me. In retelling scripture in the form of Jack
Tales, I think that there is a possibility to teach the stories in a way that
sticks in the minds of young and old. I only hope that as I continue to hone my
preaching style, I will feel confident to use all the methods we have explored
in this class to bring scripture and themes to life for the congregation.
Remember, God loves you and so do I
-j out
