Between the Listening and the Telling
A Minister's Message from Rev. Dr. Chris Shorow, Senior Minister cshorow@fccedmond.org 405.341.3544
Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our faith, our longing, and one another. We tell stories to remember who we are. We tell them to make sense of suffering and to savor the pleasure of living. And yet somewhere in the noise of carefully edited lives, endless commentary, and content shaped for an audience, we have lost something important: the practice of telling and receiving real stories, face to face, in community.
Author and storyteller Mark Yaconelli, whose book Between the Listening and the Telling will be our companion this season, believes that loss matters more than we realize. The kind of storytelling we have lost is where someone asks a genuine question and then actually listens. Where we recognize something true in another person's experience and feel a little less alone. Where ordinary moments, memories we have not known how to name, and questions we have not had space to ask, finally get some room.
Church was always meant to be that kind of place.
Our worship series Telling Our Stories runs May 24 through June 17. We will listen for the stories that shape us, beginning with Acts 2 and the birth of the church, where the Spirit gives people language for good news they could not have found on their own. Pentecost reminds us that the gospel is not only a story we remember. It is a story the Spirit keeps telling through the church. And we will sit with the ancient words of the Shema and consider how the story of God gets passed on through the rhythms of daily life. No crisis required. No perfect lesson.
That same invitation continues through The Stories That Shape Us, Sundays May 31 through August 9 at 10:10AM in Fellowship Hall. Each week during the Sunday School hour we will read and listen alongside memoirists, poets, and spiritual writers who have found honest words for what it means to be human. Maya Angelou once wrote that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. This is a place to set some of that down.
We all carry stories, and we are shaped by the stories we receive. Come find out what happens between the listening and the telling.