Do you like being told what to do?
Probably not right? We aren’t always open to different points of view.
However, we’ll often respond to the moral of a story.
For example, have you ever tried to persuade someone with a story about “someone you know”?
Evangelization is often about trying to do just that–convince someone to see things from a different point of view. To change their perspective from the worldly to the Godly.
How do you do that effectively without turning them off? Tell them a story.
Why stories work for evangelization
The key to persuasive storytelling is something called Transportation.
Stories sweep us up and take us along for a ride. We are transported into the world of the story.
Judgment is suspended there. It’s no longer about your listener, it’s about the person in the story.
They become free to notice (without you telling them) how the story resonates with their own experience. They realize that perhaps they do have a problem, and perhaps what you’re telling them is a good way to deal with it.
The message gets in “under the radar.” If your listener is resonating with the story and transported into it, the moral message can get in through the back door, so to speak.
Here’s an example. Think of how you feel after watching Rocky. You leave feeling like you could achieve anything if you work hard enough.
Movies like that work to change us even though the real world might not work that way.
How to tell engaging and persuasive stories
So how can you make your stores more engaging and persuasive?
- Imagery: Paint vivid pictures with your words. Have people imagine a scene. Give examples using concrete images they can see in their heads.
- Suspense: This is the oldest trick in the book. Don’t give everything away in the beginning. Hint at what’s to come. Or, start your story with a snippet from the middle, then backtrack to the beginning. Suspense keeps listeners engaged because they want to find out what happens in the end.
- Emotion: This is very important in stories. If you’re telling a personal story, include how things made you feel or what feelings were going on inside you at the time. People will be caught up in the emotions and feel it themselves.
- Modeling: People in your story have to model the behavior you’re trying to get your students to adopt. The character in your story must to go through the transformation you want your listener to go through.
- Have a point and desired outcome from the beginning: You don’t tell a story to kill time. You want your listeners to do something after hearing your story. You want them to believe something new, adopt a behavior, accept some teaching, or be moved emotionally to gain a new perspective. Tell the story with that in mind and you’ll be able to shape it toward your desired effect.
Evangelization takeaway
Stories are a powerful tool for evangelization.
They can help you get a foot in the door with people that aren’t open to change. The effect of Transportation may allow your message to be heard and taken to heart more readily than simply teaching about the facts of the Faith.
Next time you’ve got a tough issue you want someone to understand, try telling an engaging story with characters (maybe yourself) that model a transformation into accepting that issue.
You’ll have more success and less headache, I guarantee.
Image courtesy of nattavut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In my experience, story telling us not a panacea. Engaging and interesting, almost by definition, but not always effective.
I recall a homily I have one time where I used a story about my brother returning from front-line service in Irag. He was struggling as he left the front and he talked to the chaplain. The chaplain said “leave it here”. I used that as the tagline for the homily, about leaving our troubles at the foot of the cross. Over and over I came back to the “leave it here” line. Feedback after the homily? Over and over I heard “thank your brother for his service”.
Sometimes I think we are overly optimistic about the value of stories for actually changing hearts and minds. Everyone certainly say “great homily” and “I really like it when you preach”, but that is not the same thing as leading people to conversion. That is a far more difficult task.
I wouldn’t be too quick to write off stories. I agree, they don’t always work. But in my experience they work very well, especially in certain situations where you’re trying to introduce potentially inflammatory issues like artificial birth control and the Church’s teaching on sexuality. I’ve found that personal stories about my own experience with these work very well to cut through the objections and at least open people up to give it a hearing…if not work to really change minds. There’s a lot of agreement on this in marketing and psychology as well.
Of course, you’re right that one story won’t always bring someone to conversion, But it can definitely be a powerful way of presenting ideas that can get a foot in the door.
I am not for a minute suggesting “writing off” stories. And I think the particular examples you’ve cited, are great candidates. Many people say “I don’t know anyone that uses NFP”, and if you can break through that to say “I do”, then that really can lead to an opportunity.
And, to be fair, you were not necessarily talking from a homiletics standpoint, but that is where I went. When there really isn’t an opportunity for dialogue, as in a 10 minute homily, sometimes the story itself ends up becoming what is remembered, not “the moral of the story”. In a classroom setting, or just a discussion, there is opportunity for dialogue, and in those cases stories can be explored and compared and given their full context.
I’ll have to ask the people that listen to my homilies if they’ve read the latest research from marketing and psychology. Somehow I doubt it. 😉
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Yeah, a lot of times you have to connect the dots for people and make it explicit as to what the story is leading them to. They can be kind of blind to it. That’s where the classroom setting has an advantage. Even the prophet Nathan had to connect the dots for King David. He didn’t get the moral of that story either. 😉
And BTW, that story sounds like a really great connection! I would have got it.
Of course just as an example the Prodigal Son is a terrific story which I heard for decades before it began to motivate me. Sometimes the hearer has to percolate for years.
“In a classroom setting, or just a discussion, there is opportunity for dialogue, and in those cases stories can be explored and compared and given their full context.”
Yes. In my class we spend 30 minutes on the P. Son doing just that; but still, the kids are 11-12 years old, so I don’t hope for big impact now, but years down the road.
That’s a really good point. You might not get impact right away. The old planting seeds thing is sometimes our only glimmer of hope but it’s real. I think there’s a much better chance of those ideas taking hold and bearing fruit later if they’re presented in very memorable way like in a story, though. So it works well that way too.
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