As the author of life, Jesus has included all of us into his grand narrative. Publicly reading Scripture allows us to understand our place in it as a community. It also wields power to challenge whatever preexisting stories we have about God, ourselves, and the world. Biblical narrative and poetry creates an active environment inside our imagination, shaping the very fabric of what we believe to be plausible!
This is, I think, one of the reasons why God has given us so much story, so much narrative in Scripture. Story authority is the authority that really works, because stories determine how we see ourselves, others and the world, and how we experience God.
Throw a rule book at people’s heads, or offer them a list of doctrines, and they can duck or avoid it, or simply disagree and go away. Tell them a story, though, and invite them into a community of people living by that story, and you invite them to step into a different world; you invite them to share an entire worldview. And when someone comes into the Gospel story and finds how compelling it is, it begins to quietly shatter the worldview
that they were in already. There is no telling what can happen, when God himself, breathes new lives and new worlds into being through his word.
-N.T. Wright
Join us this Christmas season for free supper and an audio presentation of several books from the Bible. There will be modest art supplies for your children to enjoy as you engage quietly with The Word just as the early church did.