The Holy Habit of Storytelling
- Invite Welcome Connect
- 19 hours ago
- 11 min read
What we learned at the first Invite Welcome Connect Round Table
Church leaders came to the first Round Table in our “I Wonder . . .” series from close to twenty states and from St. Andrew’s Anglican in Chapala, Jalisco, Mexico. The Rev. Kevin Caruso, rector of Trinity, Wheaton, Illinois, and a member of our board, moderated a conversation among three people who have each found a different way into the same work: the Rev. Caroline Carson of Grace Church, Canton, New York; the Rev. Jonathan French, rector of St. Mark’s, Geneva, Illinois; and Mary MacGregor, retired canon for congregational vitality and missional amplification in the Episcopal Diocese of Texas.
Listening is the ministry
Mary Foster Parmer, who founded Invite Welcome Connect, welcomed participants to the discussion, telling them of the importance of being able to tell our own faith stories.
“The deep truth of Connect is the sacred act of listening. When we relate to those around us by hearing their stories and then connecting them with others, we build the loving communities of faith that God intends for us.”
Before clergy and lay leaders tell newcomers what the church can offer and do for them, Parmer said, they must first listen to their stories, finding out what brought them to visit in the first place. And not only newcomers. Some of the richest stories in your parish belong to people who have been in the same pew for forty years and have never once been asked.
Holy attentiveness, not extraction
Caroline Carson has told her story in some forty-five countries, and she has thought hard about what makes that a ministry rather than a performance.
“If another person’s life is simply material for my own storytelling and I don’t have any continued interest in that person, what am I even doing? Our storytelling cannot be just taking and extraction. It has to be relational and experience-based.”
She would rather receive a story than lead with her own, and she counts more things as stories than most of us do. Music taught her that a story can happen without words. Photography taught her the same. Someone’s silence, she said, could be a story or a part of their story. Places hold story too, which is why the tenderness of the environment shows up in her poetry as readily as people do.
She read us a poem she wrote about a spoon-leaf sundew, a rare carnivorous plant she found in a bog, that had become a prayer for her. Dragonflies stitch sunlight onto still air. She kneels because reverence is the only proper response to something so utterly itself.
“This is one of those thin places, a seam where heaven brushes earth and says nothing, because nothing is needed.”
Several people asked in the chat for the poem before she had finished reading it.
Give people a question, not an assignment
The single most practical thread of the hour was this: “tell me your faith story” is not a question anyone can answer. A narrower question is.
Jonathan French built an entire ministry on four of them. Hungry to know the people of a parish he had joined two and a half years earlier, and inspired by StoryCorps, he set up a small studio at St. Mark’s and invited parishioners to interview each other for seven to twelve minutes around one prompt. Tell us a story of a moment in your life that has no other explanation other than God showing up. Tell us about a time when God spoke to you. Tell the story of an encounter when you sensed God revealing himself to you through another person. Tell us the story of a turning point in your life and how God was involved.
If those sound familiar, he said, it is because they are not far from what Jesus asked the people around him. “So guess what? I stole from Jesus. Blame me.”
“I almost think the prompts don’t matter. You can make them almost anything. They just need to point at something. And if they point at something, you’re going to win, because people are going to start talking, and guess what they’re going to stroll into? They’re going to stroll into their relationship with God.”
Mary MacGregor’s version of the same insight is a deck of forty cards. Sharing Faith Dinners began when a diocesan communications director came back from an interfaith dinner in Houston on fire about what she had seen. Eight to twelve people share a meal in someone’s home. Afterward a moderator lays out the rules: your job is to listen, with no comment; the deck goes around and you draw a card, read the question, and answer it; if you do not like the question you can put it back and draw another; and you may always pass. What is said here stays here.
Three thousand people in the Diocese of Texas did this simultaneously the first time. Fifteen or eighteen years later the cards are still going, in English and Spanish, with a set written for children.
“The hardest part of it all is just staying quiet, because everybody has to come back with, oh, that happened to me, or I agree with you. Just keeping your mouth shut and listening is a great one.”
Somebody has to be obnoxious
The most useful thing Jonathan told us was that his launch failed. St. Mark’s made a logo, put color-coded stickers on the narthex floor leading to the studio, announced it with fanfare, and nobody came.
So he started ambushing people. Anyone who made an appointment with him got asked what they were doing right now, and marched into the studio. It took about ten episodes to catch on. Then it could not be stopped. They planned to run it through the six weeks of Lent and had to extend it two more weeks because people would not let it end. They ended up with roughly forty-five episodes and had to give over a room in the office suite to recording.
“The only thing I did was be obnoxious. It wasn’t hard. Low investment and high reward.”
His other advice was equally concrete. Find your ringers, the people who already tell a good story, and get them in first; then have them invite the next round. Publish within three or four days, not three weeks, because momentum is the whole game. Expect the editing to take two hours the first time and ten minutes by the tenth. And give people the right to pull their episode down afterward for any reason at all, no explanation required.
Somebody asked in the chat whether it is a deal breaker if nobody in the parish can edit audio. It is not. Post it unedited. Post it as a transcript. Or do not post it at all and let the recording simply be the occasion for two people to sit down together.
What happened next at St. Mark’s was the part nobody planned. A ninety-one-year-old parishioner told a story about his years as a police officer and a Christmas Eve call he never got over. A parishioner who had never met him heard it, could not find his phone number, called the rector to get it, and took him to lunch.
The freedom to pass, and the discipline of asking again
Both women on the panel insisted on the same safeguard. People must be free to pass, every time, without explanation. Caroline remembered being asked about her faith journey in an interview years before her discernment for the priesthood and turning, as she put it, eighty-seven shades of red. This is a process that involves bravery and risk. Humor helps. So does offering another door: write it down, choose a card, give a one-word answer, submit a photograph.
And then she named the trap on the other side of it.
“If you’re a busy person, people ask you to go out, and my standard response was, I can’t, I have rehearsal. After about six months, people stop asking. We cannot do that in the church. We cannot ever stop asking. Even if you have someone who passes twenty times, you’ll never know. Maybe the twenty-first time they will come along.”
Barbara Wisnom put the principle into the chat better than we could have: “Safety needs to be a part of it. Meet people where they are, not where you want them to be.” Andee Zetterbaum added a caution worth sitting with. For people who have been hurt in the name of Christianity, she wrote, talking about God is comfortable while the name of Jesus can carry everything abusive they experienced. Knowing which words your people can hear is part of the work.
Culture, not program
Mary MacGregor told a story that landed hard. She once asked a group of women what they loved about being Episcopalian, and one answered, “I used to be a Baptist, and now that I’m an Episcopalian, I don’t have to talk about Jesus so much anymore.”
“Have we set up our church in such a way that we’re so married to our order and our prayer books and the way we do things that there’s no room to share about our personal lives and our relationship with God? That’s at the heart of what we’re called to do.”
Her answer is that leaders shape the culture, and the culture does the rest.
“When the church provides those opportunities to share, whatever those opportunities might look like, it shapes the culture of that church.”
Kevin offered a version any vestry could adopt this fall: ask each member to sit down with four parishioners this year, share their own story of faith, and listen to theirs. Jonathan offered another. Every October, on the last Sunday of the stewardship season, four people at St. Mark’s stand up during the sermon time and say why they tithe. It outperforms his preaching every single year, and he has made his peace with that.
Which brought Kevin back to what this ministry framework has always been.
“Invite Welcome Connect was never meant to be a program. It’s a framework for thinking about how we do the things that help us share good news. Storytelling weaves in and out of all of it.”
Stories that do not need words
A parishioner at Kevin’s church once asked people to send in photographs of thin places, printed them cheaply as squares, put the question on the wall, and posted the pictures as they arrived. Thirty or forty images went up, anonymously, and the congregation started talking to each other about them because nobody knew whose was whose.
Caroline described working with a congregation in Toms River, New Jersey, that was fighting to keep its property under eminent domain. She had each table write a psalm, through the lens of love and the lens of anger. It was cathartic before it was ever fun, and the people came out of it knowing each other better.
Someone else remembered photographs of parishioners printed, mounted on sticks, and set in their own pews during COVID, so the priest was never preaching to an empty room.
Where it goes from here
The chat turned, near the end, to social media, and the counsel was consistent: use what your people already know how to use, be consistent, and let it be imperfect. One congregation reported five times the reach on TikTok that it gets on Facebook and Instagram combined. Eileen Harvey-Qualset had the best idea of the hour: “Let your high school youth group do this. They can interview quickly on their phones, edit and post faster than we can ever learn how to do.” Victoria Kaplan named why it matters: social media can highlight the humanity within the church, showing that it is more than a religious institution.
Nikki Collins introduced Hope Exchange, a new storytelling project out of Virginia Theological Seminary that will host events across the country and build resources for congregations. You will find her contact information below.
Participants also told us what they want next: storytelling with children and youth, storytelling across an intergenerational congregation, inviting our neighbors outside the church to share their stories with us, interfaith storytelling groups, antiracism and drawing in diverse populations, and how to start a spiritual conversation with someone you have just met. We are listening. Our next Round Table comes in September and takes up the harder conversations. Watch your inbox for the date.
Kevin closed by asking everyone to write down one thing they learned and one thing they would actually do in the coming week.
Resources
Everything below was named during the Round Table, either by a panelist or by one of you in the chat. It is organized by what you might be trying to do.
Prompts and questions to start with
• The four God Corps prompts used at St. Mark’s, Geneva. Jonathan French offered them freely: “Feel free to steal anything we did and give me no attribution.”
◦ Tell us a story of a moment in your life that has no other explanation other than God showing up.
◦ Tell us a story of a time when God spoke to you.
◦ Tell the story of an encounter when you sensed that God was revealing himself to you through another person.
◦ Tell us the story of a turning point in your life and how God was involved.
• The Connect checklist questions in the Invite Welcome Connect Checklist Where did you grow up? Did you grow up in another church tradition? How did you find your way to our church? Did someone invite you? Simple enough to ask a newcomer at coffee hour, and just as good for a member of forty years.
• Sharing Faith Cards, free to download as printable PDFs from the Tool Kit under Invite. Forty questions, in English and Spanish, including a set written for children.
Storytelling around a table
• Sharing Faith Dinners has the full format, the ground rules, the host and moderator instructions, and the complete question list. Mary MacGregor’s rule of thumb: eight to ten guests, two rounds, three to five minutes each, about an hour of sharing after the meal.
• Order a printed deck from the Episcopal Diocese of Texas for about $8. The cards are beautiful, and the deck itself does some of the hosting for you.
• The same deck works far beyond a dinner party: vestry meetings, retreats, search committees, newcomer classes, and interfaith gatherings.
Recording and publishing stories
• God Corps at St. Mark’s, Geneva to hear what a parish podcast actually sounds like. Start with the episode where two nine-year-olds interview each other.
• StoryCorps, the model Jonathan adapted. Listen to a few before you design your own. They offer Tips for a Great Conversation and Great Questions for any conversation.
• The Moth Radio Hour, suggested in the chat by Marty Stebbins as another format worth borrowing from.
• Practical notes from St. Mark’s: keep episodes to twelve or fifteen minutes, get a signed permission slip, promise to take anything down on request, publish within three or four days, and remember that free editing software is enough.
• God Corps Planning Timeline, a resource for helping you plan and implement a God Corps program in your own congregation.
Formation and study
• Sharing Our Stories from Forward Movement, released three weeks before the Round Table in their new CEDAR collection. Three eleven-minute videos with a discussion guide, moving from why sharing our stories is hard, through being friends with God, into a storytelling structure of confrontation, comfort, and calling.
• Education for Ministry, named in the chat as four years of practice at exactly this.
• The Beloved Community StorySharing guidebook and the Seekers Forum how-to, both in the Connect section of the Tool Kit.
Stories told without words
• A wall of photographs of thin places, gathered from parishioners and posted anonymously, so the congregation talks about the pictures and finds each other.
• A psalm-writing session, table by table, when a congregation is carrying something heavy together.
• Photographs of parishioners mounted on sticks and placed in their own pews, which one congregation used during COVID.
• Poems, songs, and images invited from people who are already making them and have never been asked to offer them to the church.
• Spoonleaf of Dreams, a poem by the Rev. Caroline Carson, based on her own photograph.
People and projects to know
• Hope Exchange, a new storytelling project out of Virginia Theological Seminary that will host storytelling events across the country, build congregational resources, and convene a symposium for church leaders. No website yet. Nikki Collins invited anyone interested to write to her at nikki@futureoffaith.org.
• Invite Welcome Connect On Demand, our subscription training for congregations and dioceses, alongside the free resources that make up most of our site.
• Where to start if storytelling is your entry point into this ministry framework and you are not sure what comes next.
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