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The answer, we believe, is yes, this can be done, though it probably should not be done often. To
be honest, such an undertaking requires considerable skill, both in preaching and in storytelling.
Just as honestly, when this is tried and done badly, it can actually be detrimental to both the
Gospel and the congregation or hearer. The most serious danger here is that it runs the risk of
turning the preacher into a professional storyteller who just happens to tell stories to a particular
gathering of people. Preachers are to preach the Gospel, the Word, the words, in a sense, of Holy
Scripture.

Stories are to put to the service of the Word of God; the words of Scripture are not to be put at the
service of the preacher's good stories. Nonetheless, we are very aware of some very good
storytelling preachers who, even in years past, could (or can) spin a sermon-long story, a real
story, rooted in the Gospel and based in biblical text. When this works well, is well-prepared, and
biblically based, this kind of extended story can, as one of our friends has admirably put it, blow
the stained-glass windows out of the sanctuary!

Some guidelines are all we have to offer here in conclusion.

First, when the sermon is to be an "extended story" it should always be tied tightly to the mast of
a biblical text. Let the story you tell speak of a particular text. Read the text at the outset of the
sermon in order to let hearers have a strong biblical reference point for what you are going to tell
them. When hearers at various points in your story wonder "where this is going," they will at least
know that it has something to do with that text-and, because of that, you already know where the
story is to take them. There is more to it than that, though. Tie the extended story to a text in
order that you, the preacher-storyteller, do not get lost in your own story. When you tie the story
to a text, you will have the compass you need to keep the story cohesive and on-track. Planning
the story will require a certain plot construction. Certain things will need to be included in the
sermon length story-and certain things, perhaps a lot of things, will need to be left out. Let the
biblical text serve as the guidepost for making judgments about the story's plot. Above all, really,
create the story so that it re-says, in a contemporary form, what the text itself seems to be saying
in biblical language. When you do that, you will have an extended story, not as a storyteller but as
a preacher of the Christian Gospel.

Second, make sure your story is rich enough and full enough to sustain a full sermonic treatment
if you decide to undertake one. A thin story or a weak story, or what our Granny Webb would have
called a "one-string" story will not a full sermon make. In other words, not just any good story
you come up with would qualify for this kind of undertaking. The story must have good details,
good dialogue, and, particularly, good development including a plot and even plot twists in order
to sustain an extended treatment. More than this, the story must have a strong emotional and
spiritual character to it as well, a richness of theme and motive if it is to hold up well alongside a
biblical story or text. Every now and then you may find a story from your own experience that
appears to meet criteria like this, but they will be rare, no doubt about that. Between the two of us,
we can come up about a half dozen stories that we believe would measure up to these high story
standards. We will sketch one of them as an illustration in a moment.

Finally, to evaluate a story that you think might become a full sermon, as well as to begin
preparation of the story sermon, break the story down into a series of sequences or sections. This
will let you know, in a sense, how much "story" you have. It will give you a sense, too, of how
interesting, overall, the story will be in the telling. Remember that stories, as we indicated earlier,
have beginnings and endings, and in between there are developments, scene constructions,
character introductions, interactions with movement and dialogue, crises that are confronted and
then resolved in various ways.

In planning the story as a full sermon, break these various dimensions down into a series of six,
seven, or eight sequences, in the same way you would plan, organize, and outline a regular
sermon. Study the sequences and what you think should go into each one. Look at their
progression from one to the next, at their relationships to each other. Work on creating suspense
in the opening sequences, not letting your hearers know what is coming next, and so on. This is
how you go about planning the extended story as a sermon; it is also the way a half hour sitcom is
planned and plotted, piece by piece.

There is another important facet to this, though. Look at several of the "breaks" in your story
plotting as places in which to connect the story you are telling back to the biblical text that serves
as the foundation of your story. In an oddly non-literal way, think of these breaks in your plot as
opportunities for what, in the sitcom, would be brief commercial points. You are telling an
extended spiritual story, one drawn from the present, but at regular points, connect to your
textual starting place. In other words, as they story you are telling moves along, let the hearers
know that two stories are moving closer and closer together, converging as it were. Keep looking,
even glancingly, back and forth between the biblical text's story or "message" and the story from
the here and now that you are telling as the sermon. No doubt you can sense how very intriguing
and even exciting such a story sermon can, if done well.

Without trying to put it in the form of an actual story, we want to briefly sketch the outlines of
something that we believe could become a story sermon. It happened to one of us-to Joseph, who
wrote it out in the first person-some twenty-five years ago, though it remains as vivid today in
memory as it was the week after it happened. The letters will indicate its potential sequences.

A. I was a faculty member in a large university, working with doctoral students, and one of the
students to whom I was assigned late in his work there was a tall elegant Nigerian national
studying broadcast management on a scholarship from his government. He had been in the
country with his wife and four children for five years, and I had been his advisor during his final
year before his Ph.D. preliminary examinations.

His course work grades were acceptable; he had organized his doctoral committee which
consisted of me as chairperson and four other young faculty members. Each faculty member
wrote out questions for his prelim exams and at the appointed time he wrote an essay on each of
the dozen or more questions. Following that, I called a meeting of the five of us on his committee
with him.

When we sat around the table in the conference room that afternoon, it become obvious that none
of the faculty members was at all happy with the essays that he had written, including me. The
consensus seemed to be that in his classes, he studied hard and memorized materials well,
meaning that he got good grades, but in these exams he was expected to relate bodies of
information to each other, and he had not really been trained well to do that. It turned into a
serious problem as the discussion of his answers, and his attempts to clarify his answers, bogged
down. Finally, he was asked to leave the room while the five of us talked. Without question, it
seemed, he had not passed either the written or now the oral examinations for the doctoral
degree. It was agreed, though, that I would talk with him on behalf of the committee, and we
would let him know that he had to take the round of exams a second time. No doubt a second try,
allowed by university rules, would produce a better result.

B. He wrote essays on a new set of questions from the same committee members. After he did
that, a bit of a panic set in among the faculty colleagues even before we had the second meeting
together in the conference room. It was tense when we met for the second time for the oral round.
The second set of essay answers that he had written were not even as good as the first set had
been. We had the discussion, and every one of my faculty colleagues-I had turned into a
moderator of sorts-tried to get him to move his oral answers in the right direction.

Finally, after considerable frustration, we asked him to wait in the hallway for us to confer with
each other. When he left, the panic of the previous week reached a fever pitch around that large
table. Almost in unison, the faculty members agreed that he had not passed the exams the
second time, the final time one could, by university rules, take them. He had come this far, but
would not be able to move forward toward his Ph.D. degree. We were all shocked and unsure
what to do next.

C. I went to the hallway and asked him to come back in. As the "moderator," his advisork, I told
him how much we regretted the decision that had to be made, and then told him that we could
not pass him to move forward with his dissertation. He sat for a while, then smiled, and finally he
stood up, all six foot four of him. In a very quiet, calm voice, very collected, he began to speak to
us. He spoke slowly, very deliberately, almost in a whisper. He thanked us all, one by one, and
then spoke words that none of us who were in that room will ever forget.

"I was sent here by my government," he said," and I cannot go home in dishonor. What I have to
do now is not your fault; it is my own. My family will be well taken care of. Someone will come to
see that they are returned home. My wife will know that I have acted honorably. My government
will see, too, that I am returned to my country . . . . " From there the words drifted away. He sat
down, as though waiting to be dismissed. We all looked at each other-stunned, not knowing for
sure if he was saying what we thought we were hearing. And yet we all knew, I think, what he was
trying to tell us. I remember saying something like, "R--; this does not justify what you are saying.
This is just not that important. This is all right. This is all right. You don't have to do anything like
that." And he was looking at me, saying that I didn't understand now, but that it didn't matter
that I did not. I remember feeling a chill like I had never experienced before.

"What was ahead for him did not concern me," he said. "All of you have just done your job--."
With that, two of my colleagues bolted noisily, fighting tears as they jumpted from their chairs at
the table and dashed from the room. Slowing, without any noise or talking, the other two quietly
got up and left. I was left sitting alone at the front table with R--. I didn't have any idea what he
say. By now it was clear that he was very serious. It was not a threat. It was just something that
had to be done.

The silence between us seemed long. It was Friday afternoon. I was frightened. Not wanting to
leave or sent him off by himself, I blurted out that I would like to take him and his wife and
children to dinner that evening.

"You will not do anything, anything, this weekend, will you? Promise me that," I remember
saying. He laughed. "Of course not." I felt a bit better.

D. That evening I met all six of them for dinner at the restaurant near the campus. We tried to
enjoy the time. His family did not know what had happened. Afterward, I walked alone with him
for a few minutes in the restaurant parking lot. I was still trembling, though I tried not to show it.
He was calm and friendly. I told him that I was going to do something about the situation-though
I didn't know what-over the weekend. I asked him, or I told him-again I don't know which-to
meet me on Monday. He said no problem, he would-and then told me that he appreciated it, and
(he kept emphasizing) he understood.

E. I had a friend in the English Department of the university, a Christian and an Elder in the
same church I attended. Late that night, I called him and told him the whole story. Just before
noon the next day, Saturday, we met for a sandwich. By then, he and I both had gotten a number
of our church friends involved. They were meeting for prayer by lunch time. None of us knew
what to do. By late afternoon, the same church people had prepared a dinner to take to the family.
There didn't seem much we could do-and we all knew that as supportive as we all might be, it
didn't and wouldn't change the situation itself at all.

F. Then, at about 11 o'clock that Saturday night, I got a call from my English Department friend,
from Terry. He had an idea that just might work. Meet him for breakfast before church. I didn't
get much sleep that night, and at 7 on that Sunday morning we were at Denny's. Terry said he
knew the man who was head of the International Studies program at the university. They were
always looking for good foreign graduate students, particularly ones preparing to return to their
home countries. Maybe he would help us. Terry would try to reach him that afternoon and we
would try to see him at school as early Monday as possible. The prayers of the church continued
that morning at worship and that day. Terry called me again about 6 that evening to say we had a
9 o'clock appointment the next morning in International Studies. He and I would both go.

G. The next morning, the head of international studies heard us out and asked to meet R--. Within
an hour he and the International Studies head were together. By 5 o'clock that afternoon, R-- was
invited to transfer into the International Studies doctoral program where he could complete his
work, with one extra year tacked on; his specialization in broadcast management would remain
unchanged, but it would have an educational emphasis. This time he would succeed, since the
university's requirements in International Studies were different from the traditional academic
units. Two years later, R-received his doctorate and returned to Nigeria with his family.

For several years after that, we remained friends by long distance. I am convinced, in retrospect,
that it didn't take a village to turn a terribly frightening situation around. I am just as convinced,
though, that it took an entire Church, working together, to do it. Or, rather, it took an entire
Church, calling upon the God a miracles, to do it.

Granted, it is a fairly complex story, only summarized here. Its details beyond what are here
would fill it out. We have, for example, considerably shortened the ending, the specifics of which
are actually quite surprising. A lot of people did a lot of things in a very short time that made the
weekend work as it did. Looking back at it, can you trace the places where the story breaks down
nicely into a half dozen or so well-marked sequences?

We would look for a text on which to "base" the story, or one with which the story could interact.
Ironically, a number of texts come to mind without too much difficulty. The main thing, though, is
that the story itself is rich enough and full enough, with enough twists and turns, to hold up over
an extended telling. There is enough to it to support its being developed into a full sermon. The
fact, too, that it has a extends over time, not a long time, but over enough time for it to take a
series of unexpected turns. Not only that, but it has enough drama in its unfolding development
to hold interest (if well told) from beginning to end. On top of that, finally, the story breaks apart
nicely into a series of sequential units-those important moments at which a return to the biblical
text will keep the story of R-in its proper Gospel perspective.

Every preacher reading this will know that in this brief chapter, or even in this book, we have only
scratched the surface of what it means to make storytelling a part of the contemporary church's
preaching, of your preaching in today's dynamic new settings. Storytelling is here. It is a part of
Twenty-First Century culture, not just in the United States but in the world. Stories are long and
short, in cinema, on global television, in millions of paperback novels, in documentaries and
educational formats. The world is shaped-and changed-by the exploding world of storytelling and
stories-including rich, personal stories. The church, we plead, needs stories, too. It needs your
stories, your personal stories, made sacred by the sacred uses to which they are put-stories that
become sacred when told by Spirit-filled people.

As aging preachers to young ones, we urge you not to depend on others for stories. You do not
need second-hand stories, hand-me-down stories for your pulpit or platform. Be original and
creative. Dig into the life that God has given to you and you along. Bring your own sacred stories
to the service of the Gospel. Let it be said of you what was said of Christ on earth: He spoke
nothing to them without using a story!