His early followers - they were storytellers too. They went from town to town, city to city, just telling the story of their encounter with him. They simply related their experiences of having lived with him: what he said, what they talked about with him, who they discovered him to be in their encounter with him, and what they did to participate in his dreams.

Basically, they related everything about him that had engaged their senses throughout his time with them. In a way, you may say that they were living in a memory. But living in memories is all right if they are living memories, isn’t it? After all, it was a story they would never be able to forget for the rest of their lives. Hence, they just moved from place to place telling it like it was.

They had seen by now that in telling the story of their lives with Jesus, they were also telling a story of themselves. They were, in that sense, inviting others to come and find their places and significance in that great story too. I believe they learned from the Master that the best way to communicate a story is by telling the story as it is, over and over again. So they told a story like it was a story.

I’m afraid we have forgotten how to tell our story like it is a story. We have dissected our large, large story and confined it into a book consisting of chapters and verses. We no longer believe that stories contain the message. Instead, we believe in abstract articulations of the message, and we use stories only when they illuminate the message itself. Now we exalt the scientific hermeneutical method of “expository preaching.” The place of storytelling itself has become marginalised and it is now belittled as something lesser than expository preaching. We have forgotten that the story itself is the message.