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Robb Sutherland

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Storytelling

I am currently spending a week on residential training in preparation for ordination to the priesthood.  Yesterday we had the privilege of spending the day learning with Simon Airey.  Simon is chaplain part time to Grey College in Durham but for the other half he is a Storyteller.

I came across storytelling as part of my MA course, “Preaching in a Narrative Culture”.  Simon spent the day with us looking at things from a much more practical level.  Making stories our own, whether wisdom stories or folk tales.  We then went to look at how we could work towards telling the bible.  Firstly as a way of performing the text as written.  To inhabit the text and then to orate it to the audience as story.  The key to story telling is to go beyond the text and learn to tell the tale from memory.  It is time to learn the lines of the script and make them our own.

The other form of telling was to write Midrash.  A Midrash is a reimagining of a biblical story and requires a deep understanding of a passage.  Then you imagine the story from a different perspective.  Perhaps you write the story from another characters point of view.  I personally have done this a few times.  The first time I told the story of Jesus at the Wedding in Cana from the perspective of the servant who has run out of wine.  The last time was a few months ago when I rewrote the temptation in the wilderness from the perspective of the Devil. 

Simon was quite inspirational.  I commend him to you and I humbly suggest that you may give storytelling a go some time soon.

The Fun Theory

I just had lunch with a colleague.  One of the things we have noticed as we travel through life is that misery loves company.  Sometimes it would seem to us that misery loves company when we are in church as well.  We have people who enforce all sorts of crazy rules in a dictatorial fashion.  We also have some quite important rules that it would seem need to be followed.  However, we seem to enforce these rules in an arbitrary manner with no explanation.  So what if we encouraged people to think differently in church?  What if we did things differently?….

http://www.thefuntheory.com/

Surely there must be a practical application of fun in our church lives.  Surely God doesn’t want us all to be miserable.  Surely smiling is allowed.

How could this be applied to our churches?

The River | Alternative Hymnal

For some reason we are always behind when it comes to the rock channels in the UK (and lets face it, Good Charlotte aren’t a band I listen to other than when they hit Kerrang).

Marked

I have just finished reading Marked by Steve Ross.  I was sent it by a friend who was feeding my comic book addiction.  Here’s a quick review by Alan Grant:

Steve Ross’s graphic novel ‘Marked’; is an exceptionally impressive achievement. The New Testament’s Gospel According to Mark is re-told in comic strip using contemporary life, characters and culture. The result is startling, remarkable and completely unique: the horrors and demons of 2,000 years ago are dragged drooling and screaming into the mean streets – and meaner people – of today. Steve’s chilling message seeps out from under his bold words and images: nothing has changed in two millennia, and Mankind will always fail, unless… somebody cares enough to save us. –Alan Grant

From my own perspective, I was greatly impressed with it.  However, I am a comic book nerd who knows the gospel of Mark.  There have been other attempts to reimagine religious narratives in graphic novels and some have been more successful than others.  For example Deepak Chopra and Shekar Kapur’s Ramayan is an artistic delight and authentically manga experience.  However, the Bible is usually given the well meaning but saccarine 60’s pastel shades of the ghost of sunday school past.  Even the artistic talents who worked on Judge Dredd seemed heavily influenced by the images of their childhood.  Marked however has no such hangups.  This really does look like it belongs up there with Judge Dredd.  The art work is really good.  Mark’s Gospel has been placed into a futuristic post apocalyptic setting that intrigues the reader to carry on.

I have only a couple of concerns.  What is it for?  It doesn’t follow a true enough course to the Gospel itself although it does make you want to ask more questions.  Is this a springboard into the text for someone who has never really encountered the biblical narrative or is it a thought provoking encounter for people like me who have a good knowledge of the original?  Is it both and at the same time actually neither?