{"id":17027,"date":"2018-03-13T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-13T17:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=17027"},"modified":"2018-03-17T12:04:19","modified_gmt":"2018-03-17T19:04:19","slug":"a-spoon-full-of-story-helps-the-truth-go-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/a-spoon-full-of-story-helps-the-truth-go-down\/","title":{"rendered":"A Spoon Full of STORY Helps the TRUTH Go Down."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Several weeks ago, I began listening to the Audiobook <strong>The Social Animal:\u00a0The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement<\/strong>\u00a0by David Brooks.\u00a0 Brooks is a cultural commentator and a write for <em>The New York Times.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As I began listening to The Social Animal, I was intrigued by its design.\u00a0 Brooks had compiled a massive collection of information from the areas of psychology, sociology, and biology in order to help give the reader (listener) insight into what it means to be human.\u00a0 Yet, Brooks rightly understood that there is only so much bare data that a reader can absorb without being overwhelmed.\u00a0 The solution that Brooks came up with was genius:\u00a0 He wrote a fictitious account of two people:\u00a0 Harold and Erica.\u00a0 As Brooks told the story of their lives, from conception to death, he created an emotional vehicle to attach his many theoretical observations and propositions.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As Harold and Erica\u2019s life unfolded, opportunities arose for Brooks to share some fascinating research and scientific information for example:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A disproportionately high percentage of successful people have had a parent die early in life.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Men usually overestimate IQs while women tend to underestimate theirs.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>People who look at the faces of two candidates for a fraction of a second can predict with 70 percent accuracy the winner.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The more people that are at a restaurant, the more food you are likely to consume.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you&#8217;re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These \u201cfun facts\u201d make the book an enjoyable tour through the inner workings of development, life, morality, and relationships.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I was especially intrigued by the information about politics.\u00a0 Brooks mentioned something that I believe to be true.\u00a0 Most people do not choose their political party based on their values and beliefs.\u00a0 They choose their political party because of relationships (family, friends, etc.) then adopt the values and beliefs of that party.\u00a0 (I could go on a tirade at this point\u2026why Republicans say they want a smaller government while wanting a larger military\u2026 or why many progressives are staunch fighters against animal cruelty but ridicule those who stand up for the rights of the unborn).<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Yet, it was the last few minutes of this audiobook that made the biggest impression on me. \u00a0In the end, when Harold\u2019s death was being described in intricate detail, I felt true sadness.\u00a0 I was surprised by the wave of emotion which swept over me.\u00a0 I did more than hear about Erica\u2019s loss\u2026I felt it.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I finished this book weeks ago, and as I reflect on it now, I realize that there is a valuable lesson for preachers and other Christian communicators here.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You see, God has given us the Holy Scriptures to steward and proclaim to our generation.\u00a0 These truths are powerful and life-changing. \u00a0Yet, many Christian leaders preach and teach as if their listeners are all seminary students in a hermeneutics class.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>There is a trend in many seminaries to teach that the only Biblical form of preaching is <strong>expository preaching<\/strong> (preaching verse-by-verse through a book of the Bible, going deep into the inner meanings of verse).\u00a0 While this is a valuable preaching philosophy with a lot of advantages, I worry when one preaching philosophy is put on a pedestal and other methods are treated as unbiblical.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>For example, when Jesus preached, he often used hyperbole, object lessons, or parables (storytelling).\u00a0 \u00a0When Paul was on Mars\u2019 Hill, he connected the gospel to a local statue to an unknown god.\u00a0 Today, missionaries around the world use chronological Bible storying to share the good news in a variety of contexts.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Brooks was effective in communicating truths because they were wrapped in a story.\u00a0 Modern preachers can learn from this.\u00a0 What if sermons utilized more narrative to communicate Biblical truth?\u00a0 Christian author Ted Dekker did just this in his book <strong>Tea with Hezbollah<\/strong> as he wrote a fictional story to accompany the information that he wanted the reader to understand.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>At the end of the book, <strong><em>The Social Animal<\/em><\/strong>, I felt something.\u00a0 In the same way, many preachers want their listeners to experience God in their sermons.\u00a0 \u00a0Maybe the most valuable lesson from David Brooks does not come from the data he shares, but his model of communication.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Several weeks ago, I began listening to the Audiobook The Social Animal:\u00a0The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement\u00a0by David Brooks.\u00a0 Brooks is a cultural commentator and a write for The New York Times.\u00a0 &nbsp; As I began listening to The Social Animal, I was intrigued by its design.\u00a0 Brooks had compiled a massive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":17029,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[776,957,1190,1189],"class_list":["post-17027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-david-brooks","tag-stu-cocanougher","tag-the-sevens-are-social-animals","tag-the-social-animal","cohort-lgp7"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17027"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17147,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17027\/revisions\/17147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}