c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a pastor, writer and software developer living in Winston-Salem, N.C.)

UNDATED _ A business lunch suddenly became a transforming experience.

My client and friend had just attended a weekend called”The Forum.”He wanted to tell me about it. Some 140 people gathered for a weekend of inquiry, focusing on critical events in their lives and how stories get formed and travel with us through life _ not always to our benefit.

A child, for example, receives a sharp rebuke from his father. For some reason it sinks deeply in and convinces him he is unloved. He then spends his adulthood achieving and pleasing, trying to win the love he doesn’t feel he deserves.

There’s much more to it than that, of course. But basically, the group spent three days hearing each other’s stories and trying to sort through what is true and untrue. A leader guided their inquiry by asking questions and suggesting some fresh ways to consider personal stories.

People looked at their marriages, at their relationships, and at their attitudes toward work, among other things.

The weekend wasn’t overtly spiritual. It had little of the intense intimacy of a renewal event like Cursillo or Walk to Emmaus. The focus wasn’t a compelling speaker or uplifting music. The transforming experience seemed to be the power of true story.

My 48-year-old friend was moved especially by a 21-year-old college student who talked simply and honestly about his life. His story had little in common with my friend’s, but its truth helped my friend to experience his own truth.

In fact, as my friend spoke, I found myself making connections to my own life. I saw my own need to excel and achieve, for example, and the frustration I felt in parish ministry when people wanted to stifle my energy and dreaming.

Suddenly, I understood what happened when Jesus told stories.

He spoke simply, truly, from the heart, and from his own experience. People were profoundly moved by his speaking. Some gnashed their teeth in rage; many were transformed.

It wasn’t the words Jesus spoke, it was the power of the person speaking. He spoke as one with authority. When he told them about their need to pray and not to lose heart, for example, he was speaking out of his own solitude with God. When he urged them to set aside their fears and trust in God, he was telling them a truth about his own evolving walk with God. His parables weren’t just wise scenes from everyday life; they were stories from his life and the lives he saw around him.

Jesus wasn’t doing theology, or splitting hairs, or defining terms, or making eternal statements about science or sexuality or politics or abortion or church organization or who gets power in the new age of grace. He was simply telling stories. Because they were true, and because he spoke from the heart, lives were changed.

In the years since then, we have tamed that transforming power by enshrining Jesus’ words. We have argued over phrasing, specific words, punctuation and translations. We have memorized his words, set his words to music, made his words into laws, printed his words in red ink, and treated his words both as a weapon to be wielded and as rare porcelain that can barely be touched.

As a result, the community of the transformed which Jesus began has become angry and fragmented, rather than joyful; conformist and overbearing, rather than liberating; judgmental and legalistic, rather than forgiving; conservative, fearful of change and self-serving, rather than exuberant.

Preachers build careers by blasting other believers. Congregations build budgets by stealing other congregations’ sheep. Instead of story, we feed each other doctrine. Instead of encouraging intuitive connection and self-examination, we demand adherence to orthodoxy. Instead of listening to each other intently, we intellectualize and control.

But it wasn’t the words that transformed those first listeners. It was the power of the person speaking the words.

We come closest to that transforming power when we speak truly ourselves, when we speak from our hearts and tell of the burdens we carry, the joys we taste, the fears we feel, the dreams we dream, the grace we know, and the God whom we sense loving us.

DEA END EHRICH