Stories communicate our message
People love a good story; we can use that to show them the needs in Japan
A big dilemma for missionaries is that many of the people who pray for and support us struggle to understand our lives and ministries. They don’t live in the same country. They haven’t had the many unique experiences that missionaries share, or dealt with the same challenges.
How do we bridge that gap? One good way is through stories. I have never been to the US or England or South Africa. But I have read stories set in these places and met people from there who have told me their stories. That is no substitute for lived experience, but I am not as ignorant of those places as I am of Yemen or Greenland, places I’m pretty sure I’ve neither read about, nor have I met anyone who has lived there.
I’m passionate about missionaries’ stories as a way to explain what we do to people who haven’t experienced it. A long time before I came to Japan (and a good while before the internet existed) I was reading missionary biographies and missionary prayer letters. Now we have the internet, which is an amazing vehicle for sharing short and long stories. Let’s use the tools we have to help bridge the gap.
Bypass obstacles
Stories are a way into people’s hearts; they allow us to bypass people’s cynicism, ignorance, busyness, or distraction. Stories allow us to engage people’s hearts and emotions. And as a bonus, for most people, stories are much more memorable than facts and figures, or abstract statements (see my article, “Concrete Language”, on p. 37 in Autumn 2022 Japan Harvest).
Tell indirectly
Stories also allow us to tell people things indirectly. Here’s an example:
Last time we went to Australia for home assignment we went with our teenage boys to a local library. On previous home assignments it had been a favourite place to spend time. But the library had changed—it now looked like a bookshop with books grouped on free-standing shelves with labels like “Pop science”, “Award winning,” and “Fantasy”. The décor was black and grey, the size of the library had halved, and, most disturbingly, there were very few books on any shelves. It was only four days since we’d landed in Australia after three years away and we were all still feeling a bit raw. This unexpected shock left me feeling unsettled and uncomfortable. We struggled to hold back our exclamations about the changes and one boy struggled to hold in his anger.1
This is obviously about reverse culture shock, but notice that I didn’t use that term. Of course instead of telling a story, I could have explained the concept this way:
Reverse culture shock is when someone who has been away from their “home” culture for a period returns and finds things there have changed.
This dictionary-like explanation is shorter and simpler than telling a story, but a story will help you better understand reverse culture shock, letting you experience it second-hand. And I’m guessing that if I asked you in an hour, you may still remember my library story.
Fiction also works
On our last home assignment my husband and I told a story about a fictional missionary. Our purpose was to help show people the need for missionaries like us, who don’t serve on the “front lines”. We used a pile of labelled boxes to show the various responsibilities that a missionary needs to take on: extra responsibilities that non-missionaries don’t necessarily know about. For example: obtaining visas, looking after short-term teams, managing financial gifts that people send, and finding new missionaries to join us in the work. We started the story with a volunteer from the audience who was given a “ministry” box to hold. Then, as we explained a variety of other responsibilities that they also need to “hold”, we gave more labelled boxes to the volunteer. The pile grew tall in the volunteer’s hands and people got emotionally involved: Was the pile going to fall?
Then, just as it looked impossible, we asked for more volunteers, and we gave each of them just one box from the pile. It immediately looked a lot easier to manage and made our point: that missionaries who do church planting and evangelism need help from others, and that often the only people who can do that are other missionaries in the same country.
Stories engage, and they also inspire people to act. They get your audience engaged actively in what they’re reading. How can you use stories in your communications with supporters?
1. Story based on a blog post written by the author on her personal blog: “Unexpected changes,” on the edge of ordinary, https://mmuser.blogspot.com/2018/07/unexpected-changes.html (July 12, 2018).