The Stories We Tell

I serve in volunteer parent leadership at my daughter’s middle school. We’ve been struggling to get volunteers to help with our events.  One of the things we realized is that for years the recruitment strategy in middle school has been to tell parents we don’t really need them.  Developmentally that is appropriate.  Kids need more space at this age, but that doesn’t mean parents aren’t needed to raise money, organize the directory, coordinate the promotion events, manage service opportunities, and provide appreciation events for staff and teachers. The leadership realized the story we had been telling parents that they could rest and take a step back wasn’t actually giving us what we needed to support the students and the school.  So we began to work on changing the story.  We decided to start with the incoming parent group. This week we created a display of brightly colored posters highlighting all the different volunteer opportunities and the time commitment of each.  We put these out at the incoming student info night.  I also spoke at the event saying that if parents wanted to know what was going on at school a great way was to volunteer since teens aren’t known for their in-depth sharing! It will take time for our school community to make a cultural shift, but we’re on our way.

The stories we tell shape so much of how we behave and function.  This is why one of the stories we have told from the beginning of SFC is that we love the traditional church. We see ourselves as grounded and rooted in the past, simply taking the next step on the journey of the church.  We found in the beginning that it was easy to talk about the flaws of the established church and think about what we weren’t going to be, but then we decided that wasn’t healthy and it was more important to talk about what we were going to be.  This narrative has helped us to continue to adapt and see possibilities in all sorts of events, programs, and practices.

Another example of the power of story comes from my own marriage.  Early in our life together I was upset with my husband for not finishing some tasks.  I spent several days grumbling to myself about how he only did part of the work, then one day I thought about how the word part is in the word partner.  What if I thought about things as he did part and I did part?  And then I began seeing all the things I only did part of and he took on another part. Suddenly instead of being annoyed about a couple of things, I saw the beautiful way our life together ebbed and flowed as we each contributed part of the equation.  The story of being partners changed everything.

Lately, in the mainline church, we have been telling ourselves a story of decline and death.  I truly believe the more we tell the story of life and light the more we will be true to what God would have us do as the church.

-Eilidh