I’m glad that many of my Pentecostal-Charismatic friends have not lost that tradition of storytelling. Whilst there are some who tell stories that are less than beneficial, I find that the tradition generally has done well to preserve the power of a story. Perhaps we can seek to learn from them once again how to tell stories.

In fact, I’m wondering if this is perhaps a main reason for our mainline denominations’ inclination to proclaim a gospel that befits the middle-class mind, thereby marginalising those who are intellectually less keen and cerebrally less inclined. The Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition has shown itself to have reached a world beyond the zones of evangelistic comfort. Much of this has been done through the telling of the story that is understood by even the simplest of minds.

Of course, one may say that the anti-intellectual inclination of the Pentecostal-Charismatic tradition and its emphasis on the experiential are the very things that have caused them to rely on the art of storytelling. There may be mileage in this argument, but it is a different concern all together. The point to be noted herein is that they have captured the art of storytelling, and it is something the rest of us need to recover.

Expository preaching seems to assume that we can capture with almost absolute accuracy and almost in totality the messages of the biblical authors. How is that possible if the methodology itself was born of a modern system of thought and is fraught with modern presuppositions?

Proponents of expository preaching often criticise storytellers’ sermon as not being “biblical” enough, not being “word-based” enough, and not “expounding the word of God” enough. Underlying such criticism is the unobserved presupposition that the only way to communicate the word most powerfully is through a series of suggestively propositional sermons. But the bible itself is a story, isn’t it?