EVERY STORY I KNOW BEST I LEARNED FROM A FLANNELGRAPH

A Well-Storied Faith

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Wisdom ... has prepared her meat and mixed her wine; she has also set her table.

PROVERBS 9:1-2

Have you ever said something you wish you could take back? I've certainly written some things I wish I could take back. One of these mea culpas is a mocking of certain people I have tardily come to honor and celebrate.

In one of my early books, I wrote about how the church finds itself in a digital, electronic culture with computer-savvy kids. Yet our churches are still trying to teach the Bible through flannelgraphs, chalk talks, and chalk artists. I made sport of those people and their ministries.

Now I am so repentant, so embarrassed I ever said such a thing. Every time I meet someone who uses flannelgraphs, I kneel down in front of them and beg, "Please forgive me. I'm so sorry for what I've done. I'm grateful to God for you."

Why the turnaround? Every story I know best I learned from a flannelgraph.

I'm a slow learner about some things, and it took me too long to realize this. For much of my life I have unknowingly suffered from a serious and stealthy illness: versitis.

No, not "bursitis." "Versitis."

What is "versitis," you ask? A burglar broke into a home late one night while a couple was sleeping upstairs. The woman of the house, a Christian who knew her Bible, came to the head of the stairs, saw the shadow of the burglar in the living room, and shouted out, "Acts 2:38!"

That's the verse where Peter tells the crowd, "Repent!"

Immediately the burglar fell to the floor, his hands over his head. He stayed there motionless until the police arrived and took him away.

As he got into the car, the cop said, "So it was Scripture that got you to give up?"

"What? That wasn't Scripture. She yelled she had an axe and two .38s."

From my childhood I have accessed the Bible through the template of books (66), chapters (1,189), and verses (31,103). The problem is that this template is alien to the material. The Bible wasn't written numerically. The Bible was written narratively, metaphorically, in stories and poems and songs and letters and memoirs and autobiographies and dreamscapes. The original template of the Bible is not numbers; it's narraphors.

I started learning the chapter-and-verse template as early as my nursery days, through the church's "farm system," a training regimen made up of Sunday school pins, Upper Room certificates, "sword drills" in youth group, college "mission bingos," N. A. Woychuk's Bible Memory Association prizes, and Awana "jewels." This training regimen is systematically being dismantled, however, as more and more resources are being diverted from the farm system to preserve the bureaucracy's factory system. Hence our children's increasing biblical illiteracy, even of the alien template, not to mention their disconnect from the ritual life of the church.

Because the farm system was still vibrant as I grew up in the church, I entered college well-versed in the Bible. At least I thought so. It wasn't until well into my ministry that I realized that, while I had memorized hundreds of Bible verses, I had never memorized a Bible story. Not one. In other words, what I had learned "by heart" was not the story, but the verses. I had "hidden ... in my heart" (Psalm 119:11) only the parts, not the whole.

When I began itemizing what stories I knew best (Daniel in the Lions' Den, David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, Noah and the Flood, the Woman at the Well, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Feeding of the Five Thousand), it suddenly hit me: I had learned all these from flannelgraphs at vacation Bible school, chalk talks at Sunday school, gospel songs at camp meetings, chalk artists at summer camps. If it had not been for the narraphorical teaching of the flannelgraph, I would have a worse case of versitis than I do.

THE GREATEST STORY NEVER TOLD

How bad is our versitis? In my public speaking, I often showcase the greatness of Jesus' communication skills by probing how he masterfully weaves a story around a metaphor, and then declaring, somewhat sarcastically, "This is not a Jesus method of communication: 'Here are the seven habits of highly effective discipleship.'" I can always count on a substantial number of people immediately bowing their heads, programmed by this alien template to write down the seven habits I had just said Jesus did not give us. Similarly, I have given entire sermons exploring a biblical story in depth, only to have someone come up to me and say, "Missed our having a text this morning." When a Jesus story only counts when it's broken down by the numbers, it is time to be averse to verse. It is versus-verses time.

You can test the severity of your own versitis by a little experiment. Can you recite from memory the most famous Bible verse, John 3:16, "the gospel in a nutshell"? I bet you can recite it perfectly. Now recite John 3:15. No? John 3:14? How about John 3:17? What story is this verse a part of? Because of our versitis, the Bible is too often stripped of story and mined for minutiae; it becomes not "the greatest story ever told" but the greatest story never told, or half-told.

Don't feel bad. I too was once a Nicodemite. I still am in some ways.

Nicodemus — Jesus' conversation partner in the flannelgraph version of John 3:16 (encompassing John 3:1-21) — is the patron saint of all of us suffering from versitis, as well as all left-brained people. Nick- by-Nite comes to Jesus with a left-brained approach about how to enter the kingdom, and when Jesus tells him he must be born again, he responds, "How can someone be born twice?" And Jesus responds with a right-brained metaphor: "You must be born again of water and of the Spirit." This "ruler of the Jews" interpreted Jesus literally, and mocked Jesus' metaphor: "Must I enter my mother's womb a second time and be born?" Nicodemus met the law, and the law lost. Nicodemus could understand truth as text, as words, as laws, as left-brain logic. But Nicodemus could not process Jesus' right-brained imagery and poetry of being "born again."

How many Nicodemites are there in every corner of Christianity whose versitis has caused them to be more committed to words than to the Word Made Flesh? How many have made a religion of words and lost sight of God's Image-Made-Story? Jesus was trying to show Nicodemus how crippling versitis can be. A faith that doesn't know what a metaphor is can't sustain us, nor can it grasp who God is and how God relates to us. In the fourth century, for example, the Arians read the Nicene Creed literally, believing that Jesus was literally "begotten" by the Father in the same way we are "begotten" by our parents. They never did get the...