Quotes from Sarah Arthur

a story's plot has a beginning, middle, and end consisting of a sequence of events developed around a particular conflict or gradual unveiling. As far as worship-as-story is concerned, this guiding story arc has already been provided for us in the church calendar or liturgical year. It's not a plot we're creating from scratch.

For her, the conflict was a theological problem, a serious error on the part of her fellow Christians. "There is a new and troublesome fear of the imagination - though without it, how can anyone believe in the Incarnation, the Power that created all of the galaxies willingly limiting itself to be one of us for love for us! And this fear is expressing itself in a new kind of book burning and witch-hunting.

be fully immersed in the baptismal waters of the Christian faith takes the entire pool of the worshiping community.

many of us spend our days carefully trying to discern how much of the postmodern ethos presents new opportunities and how much of it presents a threat to the gospel, all the while navigating the bewildering mess in between.

Everyone's talking about metaphor and the nature of narrative, as if these are new discoveries rather than the very building blocks of language and understanding (not to mention faith).

Youth are natural-born storytellers. Our task in discipleship training is to steer them into a particular storytelling tradition—that is, the narrative, language, and culture of the Christian faith as it has been lived and expressed for two thousand years.

Tell me a story," says the poem by Robert Penn Warren. "In this century, and moment, of mania . . . Tell me a story of deep delight.

For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.

When it all comes down, the church is the living story we're inviting young people to participate in. Again, to quote Robert Jenson: "If the church does not find her hearers antecedently inhabiting a narratable world, then the church must herself be that world.

if there is no light by which we see, no Great Story that illumines our days—and no Storyteller—then we have no source by which to enchant the young people in our charge.

every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.

in a world threatened by the loss of story, the task of Christian discipleship—specifically, catechesis or baptismal training—becomes a matter of life and death.

This is why the apostles get jailed or stoned or hauled before various proconsuls and vice-whatevers. Not because they're advancing some kind of propositional argument, but because they're subversive storytellers with a disconcerting penchant for altar calls.

In the end, there is a normative story that we live into as a church: the story God is telling through scripture, as summarized in the words of the creed. And

we must become bards: poets charged with the task of keeping and imparting the stories, language, values, and beliefs of a culture.

Contrary to the cavalier attitude many pastors and religious educators take on this point, the Bible's narrative ingredients do matter for how we understand what's happening in a given book or chapter, along with how these individual stories fit together.

Our songs and our stories do more than persuade others that an order exists: they build the house; they weave a world; they companion our listeners into the experience of such ordered cosmos. —WALTER WANGERIN JR

Saint Clement of Rome Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, grant, we pray, that we might be grounded and settled in your truth by the coming of your Holy Spirit into our hearts. What we do not know, reveal to us; what is lacking within us, make complete; that which we do not know, confirm in us; and keep us blameless in your service, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Storytelling is our task with the next generation, and it starts with loving the story ourselves and telling it as though we believe it—because we believe it.

Something more is going on with Jesus' storytelling than clarification or embellishment: he's out to rock our world.

Worship is about God in Christ. I suppose one could argue that if there were no people to do the worshiping, no worship would take place; but scripture paints a different picture. Worship goes on in heaven from the lips of the seraphim (see Isa. 6:2-3), while here on earth—should humans fail to praise—even the stones would cry out (see Luke 19:37-40).

food to nourish the imagination

the only thing I wanted was to walk with Frodo into Mordor. Because if I could live for a little while inside a great story written by a first-rate Christian storyteller, maybe my fragmented world just might make some kind of narrative sense again. And I was right.

Catechesis means impressing upon youth a Life, not a religion. —KENDA DEAN AND RON FOSTER