Whippersnappers & Nonfiction Faith

Mark Steele is the President and Executive Creative of Steelehouse Productions where he creates art for business and ministry through the mediums of film, stage and animation. He has received national acclaim as an actor, comedian, film and stage director, producer, and writer. Mark has produced, written, and directed award-winning commercials and film shorts for over 17 years. He has directed over 40 short films including several award winning short films for the North American Mission Board, Women of Faith, Sonic Drive-In’s, QuikTrip Corporation, Josh McDowell Ministries, and Honda. He has also written, produced, and directed national youth gatherings with over a million teenagers experiencing his work in video and live-dramatic presentations. Mark’s third book, “Christianish” is set to come out in the summer of 2009. He lives in Oklahoma with his wife, Kaysie, and their greatest productions: Morgan, Jackson and Charlie.

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• We have to get to the heart of why we do what we do.
• Regardless of where you fit, we’re here for a common reason: we are all storytellers.
• We take different approaches to how we do it and tell different aspects.
• Storytelling is always ministry.
• Storytelling at its core is community.
• The purpose of storytelling is getting vulnerable and into the details so people on both ends are transformed.
• Real storytelling is community, therefore, storytelling is ministry.

If we’re all here because we’re called to tell God’s Story, than why doesn’t it always work?

• The stories we tell will change people for the better or for the worse.
• Storytelling is ministry; and ministry is surgery.
• Ministry is the act of looking at someone who doesn’t know Jesus and carefully, strategically and intentionally love the “cancer” out of them.
• We wield sharp blades whether we know it or not.
• The purpose is to see the cancer in others and to help it out.
• The problem isn’t that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t realize or accept the fact that we are wielding blades.
• We treat storytelling like it’s a erasable pen, when really it’s a sharp knife.
• Maybe it would work more often if we realized that.
• Part of the problem is that we don’t get what a story is for.
• All Jesus did was tell stories.
• “All Jesus did that day was tell stories—a long storytelling afternoon. His storytelling fulfilled the prophecy: I will open my mouth and tell stories; I will bring out into the open things hidden since the world’s first day.” (Matthew 13:34-35, The Message)
• To be a profound minister, you have to realize life is not fiction, but it’s non-fiction.
• How do you replace fiction for faith and maturity that have to be real?
• Where do the young side and mature side collide?
• We’ll still tell stories people want to hear, that are supposed to be true, we don’t do it on purpose, but it will happen because we haven’t balanced our fictional flights of fancy with God’s non-fictional truth.
• God ‘s eyes are looking for a heart that are completely His.
• We’ve spent so much time trying to figure out what it’s like to come as Him as children that we come to Him as a whippersnapper… the way an old person perceives children.
• A child sees no line between the story they fictionalize and their non-fiction life,
• It’s all the same. It merges.
• We’ve lost the art of making our story life our real life.
• Our real life deeply influences our story.
• Stories invite criticism, assessment and eyeball.s
• It’s easy to say what we think we need to say and how we need to say it without it being linked to who we really are and what we’ve really experienced.
• It’s easy to let it be about the calling, skills, and the gifts… but often those don’t work.
• What’s missing?
• We’ve pulled our real life, our non-fiction story, away from our calling, our gifts and the stories we’ve been meant to tell.
• We’ve held back the most real and vulnerable parts of who we are… our real-life story, and replaced it with a story we think people want to hear.
• We’re more concerned with the skill set and the approach than the reason for it in the first place.
• The passion for telling God’s Story has been tainted and tampered.
• We’ve got to re-learn what it means to tell God’s story.
• It requires vulnerability.
• It requires risking being an active participant of people’s healing.
• It requires being a part of helping them tell their stories.
• It’s not enough that we know… we have to dig into the vulnerable places that causes the non-fictional places of who we are to mesh with the storytelling so every story we tell is able to to attack the cancer in someone else’s life because we’ve addressed the cancer that once ate away at our lives.
• Our stories need to get personal.
• “Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.” (Gal 5:25-26)
• They need to be more than our opinion.
• Our story, our cancer and how God has redeemed us from it, has to be woven into our art.
• Genesis 19, Lot was used to where he was at and did not want to leave.
• They fled to Zoar.
• God told them to flee BEFORE… he told them to run away and not look back when it was completely feasible to do so.
• They waited until the last moment and the worst scenario to leave… as a result, Lot’s wife was killed.
• They went the small town… so small, its name means small.
• In this town, horrible things happened to Lot and his family. So bad, that they fled to the mountains.
• God made a place for Lot, but the mountains are rough… it was a long run, harsh terrain and a difficult place to live.
• It wasn’t the easiest, but it’s what God had planned for them.
• God has given us a mountain… a difficult place in our calling and our skill… that he needs us to go all the way to.
• Your heart and your ministry may be all the way to the mountain, but Zoar is where you left your calling.
• We’ve not brought what He called us to do all the way with us.
• Taking the job, doing it for the right reasons is not all that’s required… the hardest part of us isn’t there yet… our cancer, our history, our story, our life, the way we were transformed and changed… what God has done. The journey, the pain, we have to bring IT into our story.
• You have to bring who you are at the deepest core into your story.
• There are a many people telling a lot of stories, but they aren’t changing people.
• People with cancer can’t reject their cancer until they can see that their cancer has been rejected before.
• People can’t believe in God’s transformation until they’ve seen it happen in your own life.
• “If you don’t go all the way with me, through thick and thin, you don’t deserve me. If your first concern is to look after yourself, you’ll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself and look to me, you’ll find both yourself and me.” (Matthew 10:38-39)
• Stories begin where they transformed the teller.
• If you want to transform people with your stories, you need to tell the story of what transformed you.
• Use art to tell about your transformation so someone else can be transformed.
• It takes the competitive nature of what we do off the table… we are all unique, we all have our own story.
• There are people who are not going to transform until they hear your story.
• Tell YOUR story.
• “That means we will not compare ourselves with each other as if one of us were better and another worse. We have far more interesting things to do with our lives. Each of us is an original.” (Gal 5:26, The Message)
• We’ve got a calling and we’ve got skills… which God needs to transform the world… but it all means NOTHING if you don’t see that Christ made us uniquely and wants us to tell that non-fiction story in the flights of fancy in our art.

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