Crafting Conversation

The following article was written as part of LICC's weekly Connecting with Culture email series last November. I am reposting it here as we believe that the question it addresses is of fundamental significance for disciplemaking communities. We would love to hear your responses and ideas for how we might creatively address this issue...

Bernard Cribbins, familiar to generations of children as the voice of Jackanory and the Wombles, receives a special award at the Children's Baftas this weekend. Interviewed recently, he was asked the secret to good storytelling. He replied, 'to concentrate on one child, look them directly in the eye, and make them listen to every single thing I say.'

Yet in our world of hyper-communication, myriad means of contact (texts, blogs and tweets) provide an ever-greater choice of options for avoiding eye contact. The art of storytelling - even the art of conversation itself - are under threat as the quality of our interactions is reduced and ever more functionalised.

Over recent years we have become increasingly comfortable with the idea of Scripture as story, and how our lives are intertwined with the great story of Scripture. Yet, despite this helpful emphasis, one cannot help but wonder about our ability to converse about the goodness of God in our lives, to share the story of his work in us. We might reflect on this in regard to our interactions with those outside the Christian community - work colleagues, friends and acquaintances; but increasingly we must also ask about the quality of the storytelling within our Christian communities, our ability to converse with one another about God in church.

At the end of a service on a Sunday morning there is often a hubbub of conversation. Inquiring after one another, sharing experiences of the week gone by, joking around, arranging meetings; are these really conversations where we look each other in the eye? From personal experience, rarely are the stories of what God has been doing in our lives shared in such moments. Rarely, do we ask. Rarely, do we speak the name of Jesus.

We are, it seems, frequently lost for words when it comes to sharing our everyday, ordinary experience of faith: moments of grace experienced; the sense of illumination as something we haven't understood before suddenly comes into focus; questions returned to time and again. These 'grace awakenings' and revelations may be confided to partners and journals, but otherwise remain unspoken.

Perhaps this is the time to begin training, not only taming, our tongues. The church desperately needs to help its people develop a fluency in Scripture so that they might, in turn, become fluent in whole-life discipleship, and in doing so become fluent in sharing in everyday language and conversation what the Lord of life is doing in their lives - one-to-one, face-to-face, eye-to-eye.

Perhaps this Sunday we might begin...