Archive for September, 2010

• I love it when poets pay homage to storytellers.
• Thomas McGraff paid homage to storytellers…
• All time is redeemed, by the singular person who remembers and resurrects. I remember. I keep the winter count.
• Every one of us is a keeper of the winter count.
• American Indians kept track of their history in an odd way; they kept track of the year from winter to winter. From the first snowfall to the next snowfall.
• They called their years winters.
• Elders of the tribe would review the past year and come up with the most significant events that would define the year for them and distilled those events to singular image that they would release to the keeper of the winter count.
• The job of the keeper was to present the narrative of their life together in an image of a buffalo hide.
• He would create a spiral of images that would encapsulate their year… this was their annual report.
• We do our annual report with an accounting mentality; they portrayed theirs with a story.
• The storyteller would preserve the memory by remembering.
• The function of the storyteller was to remember and resurrect the life of that community and to conserve the memories of the past in story form.
• We have been chosen and called by God to be storytellers in a very different world than the one most of our churches are used to.
• Len was born in a Gutenberg world; many of us were born in a Google world.
• TGIF = Twitter, Google, iPhone, Facebook.
• Most of our churches are stuck in a Gutenberg culture.
• Born after 1973 you are a native; before you are an immigrant.
• Immigrants ry to preserve the old country.
• Most church fights are about preserving tradition.
• The first job of a missionary is to learn the language of the culture.
• The language of a TGIF world is a very different language than Gutenberg.
• We communicate the Gospel in word and verse; we need to communicate it in image and story.
• There’s a war going on in the world and it will be won by whoever tells the best story, whoever out narrates the opposition.
• The future belongs to the storytellers, the artists.
• “In the medieval world the church saved the arts; in the future the artist will save the Church.”
• The future belongs to the artists.
• We have a huge mission.
• We are short-order chefs, kitchen cooks.
• We cook stories up that people who are starving need to hear.
• We are enabling the soul to grow.
• Jesus was the greatest storyteller of all time… that’s how we communicated.
• Jesus’ message wasn’t pointed.. it was a narrative.
• Warning: they kill the storytellers first.
• Jesus’ was killed because His stories created a threat that would have undermined the establishment.
• Jesus was an artist.
• Jesus used a lot of paradox, crowd-sourcing, etc.

He used a lot of sugar and salt.

• When no one is looking sneak into your cooking the story teller’s secret ingredient.
• Heighten the sense of what’s coming next.
• Leave people wanting to come back for more.
• Sugar and salt keep people wanting to turn the page.

Use the right utensils.

• Regardless of how you’re cooking, you need the right utensils.
• Biblical storytellers need to pay attention… in a Google world we need to carve out images and story.
• The only place that doesn’t understand the cultural currency of image, not words, is the Church.
• Every church has a mission statement… but is it an image?
• We all have versitas… we think the Bible is about Bible verses, what about Bible stories?
• Carve out stories, don’t cut them up.

Cayenne Pepper

• Jesus always spied up His story with passion… He made them exciting.
• We tell too many stories without passion.
• A world without passion is a world without beauty, truth or goodness.
• You tell stories by becoming what you tell.
• Get so involved in the story that you become the central character in the story.
• When you tell the story of Jesus, tell it until you become a “little Christ,” a Christian.

What kind of stories are we going to tell?

• We all have stories to tell… which one do you love to tell?
• What is your favorite story?
• Our favorite story should be, “I love to tell the Story of Jesus and His love…”
• When this is no longer the favorite story of the Church, we are in trouble.
• It’s about time we started lifting up the Jesus story, telling the greatest story ever told.
• We need to go beyond telling the story on Sunday and start singing it.
• The greatest sermons ever told are the ones preached on Sunday and sung on Wednesday.
• What gets settled down deep is not what you say but what you sing.
• A keeper of the winter count learns the story of our community to the point where we can take the stories, turn them into songs and sing them in a way that people can write their own songs and verses.

Closing

• That was the cry of a TGIF generation.
• When I get older then I’ll be stronger, they’ll call me freedom… just like a waving flag.
• It’s a cry of hope.
• This a culture looking for waving flags.
• We are flying a lot of flags… leadership, justice, causes… of the Kingdom?
• We don’t know what a Kingdom is because a kingdom has to have a king. We don’t understand that in America.
• You know where the king is because they fly the flag of the king where he is present.
• We need to start flying the right flag.
• Jesus is the King.
• Our storytellers need to start flying the flag of Jesus and His Kingdom.
• We’ve been waving “Six Flags” over Jesus… we need to wave the flag of Jesus for a world desperate and searching for Him.