PREACHING SKILLS
Creating a Culture of Belief Through Personal Stories
A practical look at how one church uses the power of testimonies
Bill White
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Meet regularly with the worship planning team. Each Tuesday the preacher of the week meets with the various worship leaders and coordinators to lay out the Sunday service. The meetings usually run an hour. The preacher regularly asks if anyone knows of a story that would help illustrate the message. More often than not, a good story surfaces. In fact, all three of our 2008 Mother's Day stories came from this team.
Create a "story team." We've just started to take this approach at Emmanuel, but it's quite promising. Each Friday, someone on the administrative staff sends an e-mail to all the ministry leaders asking for one good story from their ministry that week. On Tuesdays, a group who cares for the spiritual well-being of the congregation reads these stories to keep abreast of what God is doing through our church's ministries. As a byproduct of this process, the best stories are distributed to the preachers.
Use the bulletin when you hit a dead end. When we hit a dead end while searching for stories, we'll put the word out in the bulletin. For example, when preaching a series on angels and demons, the preaching team couldn't find any stories about angels from our congregation. Convinced that Scripture is still true today, we issued another invitation in our bulletin for people to share their stories. The response was stunning—and each story lined up perfectly with the texts we were going to cover!
Poll your audience. Sometimes we want to hear the "big story" of our congregation. For example, as we prepared for a series on marriage, we wanted to know where exactly our congregation as a whole landed on related issues. To achieve the "big story," we polled our members and their friends after church. We actually borrowed polling booths from a local school so that hundreds of people could answer multiple choice and essay questions. The stories and statistics that came out of those surveys riveted the congregation. In fact, the resulting series broke all of our attendance records because people were so interested in hearing what they themselves had to say.
Collecting stories is hard work at times, but I'll say it once more: the weekly injection of stories has created a culture of belief that God is actually using ordinary people like us to bring his kingdom to earth.
Bill White is outreach pastor at Emmanuel Reformed Church, Paramount, California, and a regular contributor to PreachingToday.com.
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