My narrative story

Over the years, I have dealt with people who have reacted to my teaching and preaching in ways I found dissappointing. I felt they weren't listening, were apathetic, or perhaps were ignoring what I was saying.

I used to complain that it seemed like people listened to my preaching through a filter. I did my best to make my messages simple and concise, and yet it seemed like most people took what I said and just filtered it out.

I wanted to somehow take those filters out of people's ears.

Over the years, I made excuses, ignored the problem, dismissed people as being hard-hearted, and never came to a satisfactory understanding of what was really going on.

This all came to a head one Sunday morning when I called four young people into my office to talk to them before they were baptized. These were youngsters who had been coming to our church for quite some time. They were respectful and generally "good" kids. They professed a salvation experience several months before, but since I had broken my foot and was on crutches, several months had passed before I was able to baptize them.

This meeting was supposed to be a formality. I was supposed to ask them if they had been saved and understood baptism. They were supposed to just give a pat answer so we could go ahead with the baptism.

When I got to the part about baptism and asked them if they understood the nature of baptism, they began to explain to me in detail how the baptismal waters washed away sin.

I don't teach that. Their Sunday School teacher doesn't teach that. In spite of the discipleship course they had completed, not only were they giving me an answer that was totally wrong, but they thought it was the answer I was looking for.

I was floored. This experience rocked my world.

I couldn't find a way to explain this using any of the standard excuses. They just didn't fit. These kids weren't hard hearted. They weren't dumb. They weren't apathetic. They weren't even poor listeners. On the contrary.

I put everything I could on hold over the next few weeks. I had to figure something out.

I did a lot of introspective soul-searching, thinking, and research. And I started to find some surprising answers. Answers not only to the problem at hand, but also answers that helped me with some other seemingly unrelated things.

I came to realize the simple reality that a lot of the people I thought were rejecting my preaching weren't even understanding my preaching.

My never ending attempts at making things more simple were, in fact, doing exactly the opposite and making things even harder for them to understand.

Thankfully, I found a major key to getting through that filter I imagined. While it is as old as Adam's family, it is largely forgotten and misunderstood by today's academics, teachers, and preachers for reasons I plan to discuss in later posts.

More next week, but for now, I will leave you with one of the sites that helped enlighten me as to what was going on.

Back then, the site was called, www.chronologicalbiblestorying.com. Now it has been updated. Unfortunately, perhaps due to copyright concerns, it seems to be missing the pdf orality test, the part that helped me the most. You can find the updated site at www.oralitystrategies.org.

—Luke

This is the second article in this series. You can find the first one here.