The Rev Roddy Hamilton reflects on the importance of storytelling in worship.

ON one of my visits to Greenbelt, the Christian music arts festival, I attended a talk about memory. Specifically, how we can remember passages of the bible’s less exciting parts such as genealogies, through a method of visualising names and places.

It was quite astounding and, by the end of the session, we were all able to do it, to an extent.

I haven’t often used this superpower of remembering Jesus’ ancestors but the idea of remembering important parts of the bible feels important. Yet, the bible offers its own technique for remembering its most important truths and that is in story.

It is only since the enlightenment that the western world has believed truth is found in fact. Up to then, and still today for many of the world’s cultures, truth is found in story. In some sense it is all we have to give the world: the story, and in telling it we share more than we imagine.

Which is why, perhaps, storytelling ought to be reimagined as part of our worship, not just a repeat of the words from the bible as the ‘lesson’ but an engaging encounter, with emotion and drama, colour and vividness, where people find themselves within the story, seeing things from different sides, hearing voices they haven’t heard before.

Many of us have read to children, created our own version of stories of bedtime stories, used our imagination in retelling some event from our past. Might we find the space in worship for such investment in the bible’s story?

If we were ever to reinvent the training for worship leaders, I would strongly suggest a course in storytelling. But, at the same time, I want to suggest that it is something we are all able to do anyway. Perhaps we don’t always believe we have the imagination, or the memory, but the idea of a story, especially a faith story is that it is designed to be more easily remembered. If you were asked right now to either retell the story of Zacchaeus, or recite the beatitudes, which could you do more easily?

With storytelling, perhaps the lesson is not to be pedantic with all the details but tell the remembered story because your version of the story is the one that contains the truth for you. What you remember in retelling are the parts that have settled most deeply in you, and perhaps for good reason.

Being allowed to tell that version of a story is a sacred act, surely, because it is not then just a performance to entertain, but a retelling that contains part of yourself.

And how might we want to tell such stories in worship? Is the lectern or pulpit the best place for that? What would honour the retelling, making it significant to our worship shaped around the story?

“ If we were ever to reinvent the training for worship leaders, I would strongly suggest a course in storytelling.

Back in the Greenbelt tent, we sat on beanbags surrounded by rugs, fairy lights lit the space. Not perhaps the look for our traditional Presbyterian style, but a special chair, a stool, a rug, a space with symbols, not at ‘the front’ but in the centre, even if it is the aisle, centres the story, places it where it belongs, among God people. An offering to God of ourselves as we share the sacred story.

Next time, what would the original hearers hear? ¤

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.