Reasons for Stories of Faith

Our Friday morning men’s group at church is continuing a study of Dallas Willard’s book “The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering our Hidden Life in God.” Among other projects this fall, I have started a new project titled “Stories of Faith Podcasts” with our youth deacons. I’ve started a webpage (still hidden from direct linking from the main website because we’re not ready for the official project announcement to the congregation) for this initiative, as well as a WordPress.com blog where we’ll link episodes into an RSS feed. Right now we just have 1 episode, which we recorded Sunday night.

Stories of Faith Podcast

I still need to create the Feedburner feed and link it to the main page on the church’s website.

This morning I was continuing to read Willard’s book (along with Matthew Chapter 5) and came across this passage, which spoke to me as a justification for why initiatives like our “Stories of Faith Podcast” are so important and needed in today’s world. On page 64 Willard writes:

It is, frankly, hard today to think adequately of God– or perhaps to think of him at all. Our intellectual history works against it, and we certainly do not get much training for it. Frankly, our daily experience, under pressure from many quarters, constantly keeps us from thoughtful living and “dumbs us down,” in many ways– especially theologically. But the resulting lack of adequate ideas and terminology does great harm to our faith. It insulates our real life from what we say we believe. We cannot, even by a miracle, believe a blank or a blur, much less act on it. There is now “what” for our minds and lives to lay hold of in such a case– or it is the wrong “what.”

To trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will. Such is present in the biblical language, of couse, and it continued to be carefully crafted in the works of Christian writers well into the twentieth century.

Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.

While the content, style and form of user-created content like that included (and to be included) in our Stories of Faith podcast series may be a far cry from the carefully chosen language of the Old and New Testament books of the Bible, I believe that God continues to speak through his people. I hope this podcasting initiative, and more specifically this COMMUNICATION, learning and evangelism project, will enable more people within our congregation and in other places and times to “think more adequately of God” and obtain more “rich and accurate ways of thinking and speaking” about Him.

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