How to tell a more compelling story

“Dad, you got it wrong,” Josh said after the first service. He was probably 10 at the time, so I overlooked his blunt criticism of my teaching. Was it my theology, my application, my mismatched pairing of shirt and socks? “You got the story all wrong,” he continued.

Around our house, we call it short term memory gain. It’s the condition where details are added to a story to increase its effectiveness in getting what the storyteller wants. And it’s a bad idea for preachers, teachers and youth pastors.

Stories are a vital part of good teaching, even expository preaching. Stories follow the example of Christ, who used them to communicate new and complicated theological truths to his ordinary followers—people largely lacking advanced theological training.

When we tell a compelling story, we connect those same truths to the lives of our listeners, and help move them towards life change. Here are four things that will help you tell better, more effective stories.

1. For the most part, tell true stories. Now, I know, Jesus didn’t always tell true stories. In fact, most of the stories he told that are recorded in the Bible were parables—made-up stories with a lesson. You may occasionally want to make up a parable, but never make up a story with you or your spouse or children as characters.

If you’re telling a story in a message about something that happened to you, make sure you’ve got your facts straight. Don’t embellish it. Let the story be the story. Otherwise, someday, someone who was there will listen to the recording online and call you on it.

2. Tell stories about specific moments. “One time I traveled on a mission trip with some students and we had an amazing time. God worked in our lives and we came home changed,” is a bad story. It’s not really a story. It may be true, but there’s nothing to connect with, nothing to remember, nothing to compel me to keep listening or to some kind of action.

I remember, on one of those trips, having a conversation on the beach with one of my student leaders. Dan was spending an awful amount of time with Katie, perhaps at the expense of team engagement. I could tell they had something between them, but this wasn’t the time for a relationship with a girl. “This is a time to invest in your relationship with God and with this team,” I told him. Dan’s whole focus changed, and I believe his marriage is better today because of challenges like that from people he trusted. I told this story at his wedding, surrounded by sand and sea-shells and reminders of the sunsets on that beach.

3. If you’ve got an interesting story and a boring one, always opt for interesting. If you lose your audience’s attention during a story, you’re certainly not going to win them back when you’re explaining scripture or an application. Tell stories that cause people to put their pens and smartphones down and lean forward in their chairs. Make eye contact with as many of them as possible. And make sure your story is interesting to them. Give details about what you saw, felt and smelled. Take them to that experience.

Often, I will hear preachers share stories about church leadership, their time at seminary, or how they spent their work day at a coffee shop instead of in an office. What’s interesting to you is probably not so interesting to them. Most of your audience will have no context for those stories. Instead, tell stories about wrestling in the backyard with your kids, fighting with a flat tire on your bike, or about the night you were too tired to get off the couch to play Clue with your kids.

4. Tell stories that are relevant to your message. Often, I’ll have some experience during the day that I think would be a great sermon illustration. The problem is, it may not apply to the message I’m preparing right now. No worries, I tell myself, I can find a way to squeeze it in. After all, it’s a great story.

But a great story, with no relevance to the message, is a lousy move. Telling a story just for a laugh, or because it happened yesterday, won’t get you anywhere. Instead, write out the story with as much detail as you can, and file it for a later message where it will connect better. The story should have a clear role in supporting your point and your application.

 

We’ve all done it. Added elements to a story and filled in the foggy gaps of our memories for the sake of a great story. But people see through it, and those little embellishments will come back to haunt you when one of your students wants to know more about your “time in a Chinese prison camp.”

When has one of your enhanced stories come back to cause trouble for you in ministry?

This is part two in a series. Also check out Five things you should never say when you’re preaching or teaching and How to capture and control the energy of a group.