What’s your story?

Telling stories

As I mentioned yesterday I had the opportunity to address the Australian Religious Press association about communicating with youth in the 21st century.

In preparing for the conference I came across a lot of research that helped clarify my thinking and really increased my commitment to the work I do with Fusion.

One of the insights I came across I have already written about in different contexts, the importance of telling stories.

In the article, “The movement I can believe in” I wrote about the importance of storytelling in organisations, and in “I’m telling a story about you”, I wrote about the importance of story for the Jewish nation.

It turns out that story telling may o be one of the most important things we can teach young people to do, in order to successfully navigate life.

One longitudinal study (the Making a Life project written by Ani Wieringa) highlights the different ways in which young people use stories in order to (with differing degrees of success) negotiate a complex social world:

Over time, circumstances change, and many young people do not end up following the courses of action that they thought they might.

However, it is the practice of storying, of action and reflection,rather than the detail of the stories themselves, which seems to demarcate those who have some sense of control over their destiny.

Having this capacity is like being captain of their craft rather than being “at the mercy of social forces, blown about by wind and tide” .

Personal stories can also be understood not only as the representation of unique lives but as also, in part, social conversations and storylines that arise out of specific social experiences and settings.

Weaving storylines through chaos, change and complexity can be a significant task not only for young people, but also for groups and communities, researchers and policy-makers.

My Dad often says “If you tell a child from an early age that they are an idiot, they will usually prove you right, no matter what their potential actually was”.

Stories are very powerful things.

It is interesting that the word “authority” comes from the same place we get the word “author”.

I am interested in how people experienced Jesus’s teaching:

The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:22)

He knew His story.

The question that faces us all is whether we are truly going to assume the “authorship” of our own story, or spend our lives as bit players in someone else’s drama.

As I demonstrated yesterday, our young people need to discover a new story. The story the world is telling them is leading to all kinds of problems, including record rates of mental illness.

Too often young people experience Christianity as yet another imposition, another system that robs them of real identity.

Jesus said the truth would set us free. Free to write our God-given story. Free to be truly ourselves.

That’s the kind of Christianity that the next generation are longing for.