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PreachingToday.com: Kevin, several years ago you did a very popular workshop on Preaching Today called 3-D Storytelling. We want to take that a step farther. Why don't you quickly summarize for us again the three points you had in that seminar.

Kevin Miller: I really enjoyed that workshop because those three principles are like the essentials or the core principles to be an effective storyteller in your preaching. And I called it 3-D storytelling because the three points all started with D.

1. The first one was to give people specific details in the story that they could see in their mind.
2. The second was to use more dialog in the story. Let us hear what the characters actually say or think.
3. And the third one was to delay the resolution until the very end. Don't give away the surprise ending.

So those three principles—detail, dialog, and delayed resolution—are powerful and they do work. We've gotten feedback from a number of our Preaching Today listeners saying it's really helped them.

And with good reason, storytelling being so important in preaching. Give us some more principles that will help us tell Bible stories well, to illustrate well.

Let's move on from Storytelling 101 and go on up to Storytelling 201 or even 301, because these are some of the more subtle and powerful techniques of storytelling that don't get talked about as much, but they can make a great difference in the stories you use in your preaching and in the impact you have on your hearers.

So the first principle I want to talk about today is to make characters in your story no more than 97 percent good or 97 percent evil.

We know that God, for example, is 100 percent good, and we know that Satan is 100 percent evil. But every other character in my stories or your stories is going to be a blend of good and bad, of purity and impurity. We need to remember when we're bringing to life a character in a story that even bad people have some good features.

I think about Darth Vader, who is sort of the epitome of evil, and yet even he saves the life of his son. Or Mother Theresa who is often held up as kind of the icon of moral goodness, and yet she talks candidly about times that she doubted that God was going to provide for her, that she was being led by God. Even she had weaknesses.

This kind of strategy is very important because no one in your audience knows anyone who is 100 percent good or 100 percent evil. And you want them to relate to the characters in your story. You want them to emotionally connect to the characters in your story and really see them as believable characters, and they'll only do that if the bad people have some element of understandable quality and the good people have some weakness or failing.

This is a real challenge when we tell Bible stories. Most of the time, for example, when I preach or anybody else preaches, the Pharisees, Judas, and Herod are all going to come across as 100 percent bad. And so you say How can I introduce anything good into a Bible character like a Pharisee. A Pharisee is a legalist. A Pharisee is opposed to Christ and his ministry. So what good is there going to be in that person?

I remember one Sunday I was preaching from the passage inLuke 5 where Jesus tells the paralytic, "Son, your sins are forgiven." And then the Pharisees accused him of blasphemy. And so it would be easy when I hit that part of the story to say, "There go the Pharisees again. They're getting on Jesus' case when all he did was forgive a hurting man." That's sort of a natural emotional response I might have. But I want people to enter the story, and so I want the Pharisees to seem like real people that they've actually met. And so what I decided to do in this case was to at least acknowledge that for any orthodox believing Jew what Jesus had just said really was unthinkable.

So here's the way I did it. I read that verse,Luke 5:21: "Who does this man think he is," the Pharisees and teachers of religious law said to each other. "This is blasphemy. Who but God can forgive sin?" And then I commented something like this, "When this wandering rabbi comes out with God-level talk, it is emotionally jarring. It would be like if I said to you I'm so glad you're here today because I remember when I created you. See? Now you'd all be thinking We got to get this guy out of the pulpit because he's gone from teaching about God to thinking that he is God."

And then I explained how every Jew was drilled on the Shema, these ancient words inDeuteronomy 6 that say, "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one." And that is a cornerstone of Judaism. And so this guy from Nazareth comes along and thinks he's God, thinks that he can do something, forgive sin, that only God can do, the unapproachable God who no one has seen or can see. That is worse than crazy. That really is blasphemy.

Now it took me an additionally 30-45 seconds to lay that out, but what happens when I do that is all of a sudden there's a new tension element in the story. All of a sudden the Pharisees seem like people who are trying to preserve orthodoxy about God. They have a sincere belief in God, and so they're trying to maintain that and this is being challenged. it makes you all of a sudden see Jesus' words in a more startling way, which is the way that he did come across.

I don't want to minimize the evil of unbelief, but any time you have characters in your stories you want them to be no more than 97 percent good or 97 percent evil.

What comes to my mind as you explain that principle, Kevin, is that it is in alignment with what the Bible itself does. There's only a few times when you see a character in the Bible who is 100 percent one way or the other. David's got good in him; he's got bad in him. Moses

Abraham.

You could go all up and down the list. We see both sides of people.

Right.

And the other thing that comes to my mind is that fairytales for children often have people who are absolutely good or absolutely bad. And that's what can give characters what fiction writers call a cardboard character where there's just no depth, there's no complexity.

In any story we want people to relate to the character. That's the make or break. So if there are people who have understandable weaknesses, flaws as well as nobility and morality, then they all of a sudden become live characters and the story becomes more interesting.

Okay. A good one. Give us another principle.

The second one is Walk into the scene of your story. Here's what I mean by this. I mean that you should see the setting of your story as you tell it. You should see the setting of this story so vividly in your mind that your body just naturally moves in a way that is appropriate to that story. If you visualize yourself as being in that story, if you kind of mentally walk into the scene as you tell it, your head is going to move appropriately, your hands are going to move appropriately, and you're going to add a depth of interest and realism to the telling of that story.

Let me give you an example.

Good.

Let's say I was telling a story and in the story I was in a ski lodge. I just picked that at random. And so I say, "Hey, when I walked into the ski lodge I saw this monstrous stone fireplace, and up above it there was this enormous moose head with a glassy eye the size of a tennis ball looking down at me." Now, when I just said that to you, what happened when I got to the point where I was talking about the moose head?

Your eyes went up.

My eyes went up. My head lifted up. My hands even came up a little bit. My neck kind of leaned back because I was picturing that moose head in my mind, and so without my consciously doing anything with my body I had that movement that reinforces the scene and makes it come alive for the listener.

Now when I preached, for example, about Jesus healing the paralytic that action, if you remember, happened in a small first-century home. And so I tried to see that house in my mind as I wrote my sermon, so that I could picture what was happening. My accounting of that story went something like this.

"Right in the midst of Jesus' teaching people begin to hear a scraping sound. Some sort of scratching above their heads. It's coming from the roof. Then a few bits of branches and some clods of dirt begin to fall. People look up, and the roof tiles are being pulled back."

Now I could go on and on, and I did in the sermon. I completely described that scene. Because when I was telling it; in my mind I had already been there in that house. Well, here's what happened. I looked up as the roof was being pulled apart. And then as this cot is being lowered down, my vision came down with the cot. And then when the cot landed on the floor and there's this paralyzed man looking up at Jesus, I'm looking down at him lying on the floor. So all of the motions of my head, eyes, hands, body reinforce what I'm saying, which all of a sudden captivates the listener. They are pulled in because they sense that I'm there, and so they want to kind of be there with me.

As you describe that it gives you the sensory details that get you into the story, but it also engages your emotions. It engages your mind. Everything just becomes more intense in your telling of the story.

Right. I want to walk into that story because then people are more likely to walk into it with me.

My third principle in the Advanced Storytelling is to select stories that you can connect with personally.

What I mean by that is story is a matter of the heart. And so there should be something in this story that I feel Ithat grabs me personally. I can connect with that at some emotional level. Because if the story doesn't have that—even though it may be a great story, even though it may go along with this Bible text very well—I can't use it because here's what will happen: It's going to come across flat. It's going to come across tinny because I don't have an emotional connection to it.

That is a powerful idea. The nature of storyit's a matter of the heart.

It really is. And so, for example, there are some great stories I just cannot use as a preacher. For example, some military stories. Because I have not served in the military, it's hard for me to understand and fully engage with the fears and the discipline and the difficulties of military life. Now sometimes I can tell them; sometimes I can't.

I was telling a story that I think is on our Preachingtoday.comwebsite. And it was about, leading up to the Sidney Olympics. They were holding Olympic trials for Tai Kwan Do, and only one person was going to make the team and be able to go to Sidney. In the final match, there were two athletes left in women's Tai Kwan Do. Esther Kim, and it turned out she was scheduled to fight her best friend, Kay Po. Kay was ranked number one in the world. Well, Kay had injured her knee in the semi-finals so badly that she could barely stand up. It was obvious that Esther Kim could easily beat her best friend Kay and finally reach her lifetime dream of reaching the Olympics.

And what happened, though, is that Esther thought, You know, this match is hardly fair. And so she decided to forfeit the match, which meant that her friend Kay automatically got the berth to go to the Olympics. The reporters wondered What were you thinking?And Esther Kim said, "I thought it's not like I'm going to be throwing my dream away. I'm just going to be handing it to Kay."

Okay now, I'm not a woman. I've never competed in Tai Kwan Do. I've never even taken a class in Tai Kwan do. But there's something in that story that does connect to me emotionally and personally, and that is I've been in situations where I wanted to win but I also didn't want to hurt someone else who was involved. Maybe I wanted to get the position but I didn't want to hurt somebody else who was in the running. Or, you know, there have been a number of situations where I felt that same wrenching decision that Esther Kim had to face. It was easy for me to tell that story because I had a personal connection to it.

So it becomes a more authentic presentation somehow when you tell that story because you can connect.

Exactly. Because if I don't feel the emotion of the story, I don't sense some sort of connection to it, it's going to come across flat and I want my stories to life and have power in the hearers.

Let's move onto a fourth point, which is important for all of us as preachers because when we tell stories we don't tell them just to tell stories. We tell stories because we are trying to educate and motivate and bring life change in the hearers. So there's a reason that we tell a story.

My fourth point relates to that, and that is trust the story to make your point but do connect it to your main concept. Now let me unpack that.

There are two extremes we can take when it comes to storytelling in a sermon. The first one is to make no link between the story and the big idea of the sermon. And when we do that sometimes our listeners scratch their head and think That was a great story, but what was I supposed to take away? What was the point of that?

Not everybody has the ability to make jumps from a figurative example to a point.

Right. And if we've spent eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours on a message, it's crystal clear to us but it's not always so clear to somebody who's hearing it fresh on a Sunday.

Then there's another extreme, and that is where we fear that the story isn't making the point well enough, and so we go back and we re-explain the story point by point. For example we'll say, "Hey, the Titanic lifeboats, those are like our church and we're hearing the screams of the dying, meaning, we know that there are non-Christians in our community who have needs but we're rowing right by the drowning." Nobody needed to have that fully explained point by point. That was very clear just by the analogy and metaphor.

Let me give you an example of how I think a story needs to be connected without over-telling it. I preached from the passage inIsaiah 42 in which Isaiah prophesies that a servant will come, an anointed Servant and a bruised reed he will not break. Then I started telling a story about a time when I felt completely broken and bruised. And at the end of that story I came back and I said, "So I'm here this morning to tell you a bruised reed he will never break." So people know Why did you tell that story. You didn't just tell it to me for your own catharsis. You told this to me because you wanted me to remember that a bruised reed God will never break. I had a connection point at the beginning; I had a connection point at the end. But I didn't go back and retell every point of the story and explain every point of the story.

The image I use in my mind is the slats on my deck outside my sliding glass door. There are slats all around my deck to keep a small kid from falling through. And they have one nail at the top of the slats and one nail at the bottom of the slats, and that's all they need to be held on. Now if they don't have any, they fall off. If they have one, they're going to get blown off in a high wind. But neither do they need seventeen nails every half inch of the slat. Just one at the top, one at the bottom, and that's enough to keep that slat connected to the overall deck. And that's the way I feel about a story.

This last technique is the oratorical approach I take when I enter a story. When I go to a story in my message I want to slow down and enter a timeless world. Have you ever gone to a movie and you lost all sense of time and you came out and you're like Wow, I can't believe two hours went by? And that's because story has the capacity to pull you into this timeless realm. That's why stories, fairytales begin "Once upon a time." It's no definite time. It's sort of the timeless time. When I tell a story in a sermon I want to capture that timeless quality of a story. If I go too fast in telling a story, and I've done that sometimes, you know what I'm signaling to the congregation? This story really isn't that important. He's just rushing to get to the next point. No, I want the story to be the kind of thing where I enter into it, so sometimes I'll even move to one side as I tell a story, which is signaling to the listener this is kind of a little side journey and I'm going to slow down here. And so I will consciously slow down my verbal pace as I go into a story. Now you know that I like a little faster pace in the way I speak and preach because I think it adds some intensity. But when I hit a story I won't do that because I want to bring people into a sort of timeless world of the story, and that requires just a little bit slower pace.

John Ortberg talks about knowing where we need to have dwelling time in a sermon. And stories is one of them.

Most often. Now, not every story. There might be some that you want to keep fast for a particular reason, but in general, stories are dwelling points for the listener. They're resting places. They're places of enjoyment and expansion. And so a little slower pace helps that happen.

This article is a transcript of the Preaching Today audio #249 workshop. To order this Preaching Today audio tape, e-mail your request to store@ChristianityToday.com.

Kevin Miller is pastor of Church of the Savior in Wheaton, Illinois,