In this presentation the speaker introduces a simple mnemonic called the “Story Seat” to help preachers remember the essential elements of any story: Character, Goal, Conflict, and Values (C‑G‑C‑V). He explains each component, emphasizing that the character is the story itself, the goal drives the narrative, conflict creates tension, and the central Value conveys the lesson the sermon intends to teach. The speaker then argues that humans are “Homo narrens,” storytelling creatures whose identity depends on narrative, so using stories captures audience attention far better than point‑driven preaching. He critiques the common practice of inserting isolated stories between sermon points, proposing instead a “homiletical plot” where the entire sermon follows a single narrative arc, keeping listeners engaged throughout. The talk highlights the power of leaving stories open‑ended, allowing listeners to apply the meaning themselves—a technique modeled by Jesus. He references Eugene Laurie’s 1980 book The Homiletical Plot as the theoretical foundation for structuring sermons as stories, describing two approaches: telling a story that is the sermon, or using story structure to build a sermon. An anecdote about his son Mikey’s imaginative desire to “kill the devil” illustrates how personal narratives can point to the larger story of Jesus, reinforcing that believers are God’s storytellers. The speaker concludes with a challenge to integrate narrative techniques into preaching to increase effectiveness.
Chapters
In order to help myself to be able to remember how to tell a story and what a story is, I've created a little memory device that just helps it stay in my head. And it's basically just here. I call it the Story Seat. The circle at the top is what you have in every story. There's the C-G-C-V. The C, the first one, stands for character. Every story has a character or there's no story there. So it's important to understand your character and to recognize that story is character. So knowing your character, understanding their emotions, understanding why they do what they do is very important. The next, we have goals. Now every story has a goal and usually it's the goal of the character. The character's trying to accomplish something, trying to get somewhere, trying to be something. But sometimes it's the author or the storyteller's goal, and the character doesn't actually know what the goal is, but they're helping the story toward the goal. But usually it's the character that has the goal. Then you have conflict. The conflict is what gets between the character and accomplishing the goal. The conflict's what creates a story happening. Because if you just had a character with his goal and he could just achieve it with no problems, there wouldn't be a narrative. So the conflict gets between the character and the goal. Now you could have a story just there, CGC, but when we're preparing a sermon or any kind of teaching where we want to share something important, we want to ask the question, what am I trying to teach? What is it that I want to— people to understand? And this V in the middle stands for values. What is the value that I'm trying to share in this presentation, in this sermon, in this story? And the value can come through the character can come through the goals, can come through the conflict. Any part of the story could develop the value, and that's why I've put it as a large V in the middle, because the value is all throughout the story. Now, when we're using a story in sermon, there's a few things that help us to understand what, um, what story is and why it's so important. First of all, I love this word, homo narens. Basically means a creature of story. We are Homo sapiens, but When we think of stories, humans are the only creature on the planet that tells stories. We are the storytelling creature. And without stories, we have no identity. So therefore, we truly are the creature of story. And if you recognize that, then when you look at your audience and you see a lot of people sitting in front of you, creatures of story, then when you give them a story, they pay attention. And I'm sure you've noticed this in a sermon. You're preaching away and people are distracted, then you start telling a story, and they're focused. You finish your story and start to give some points again, and they start getting distracted again. Story focuses people. So what if, what if we could draw them in and keep them for the whole sermon because the entire sermon was a story? Often what we do is we have our 3 points we want to make in our sermon, and so we say, okay, I need a story to illustrate this point. So we look around for one and we say, yeah, that'll do, that's pretty close. And it may not be exact, but It kind of illustrates the point, so it's good because basically what we're doing is trying to get their attention back. So we will create a commercial break and they focus in, "Oh, story!" and they watch. And then your next point, you get another story, another story for the next point, and you have people focusing, getting distracted, focusing, getting distracted because they're listening to your stories. What if we could, rather than put the stories into the points in our sermon, we could put the points of our sermon into a story? What if we could put the points into the middle of our story? Then we would have their attention the whole time. If we were able to create a narrative sermon that held their attention because it started with a character, it developed through goals and conflict, and the people stayed with us because it was one long epic, a story sermon, or what we could call a homiletical plot. We'll look at in a minute. One thing that's very important when we're telling stories, and it's really— with kids it's fun to do, we just say, "Now kids, we've told this story, what does it mean?" And we apply the story. But adults need the process of making the application themselves. So if we allow the listener to make the application, which Jesus was brilliant at, Jesus would tell a story and then he would just leave it hanging. Didn't feel any need to resolve the sermon, resolve the story into a sermon. He just left it as a story, and those people would go away and they would chew on it on it for weeks and months and even years until the story meant something to them. When we leave a story unresolved and leave it open, the listener does the work of applying the story, of making the application, and it changes the entire process of your sermon because they take it home with you. They take the story and they do the work themselves of applying it to their lives. Another thing that can happen when we make the application is we can actually interrupt their application. They could have heard the story and said, "Oh, I know exactly what that means for me," and then you say, "Here's what the story means," and they say, "Oh, I guess I was wrong," and they get derailed from their own thought process. I'm sure you've had this happen after a sermon where someone comes up and says, "You know, when you said da-da-da-da-da, that was exactly what I needed to hear today," and you think back over your sermon and you think, "I never said that." That's because that person was open to the Spirit and the Spirit spoke to them. So if we can allow the Spirit to do his work through story, tell a story and let the people apply it to their lives, the story will stay with them for a long time into the future and will shape them. That sermon will shape them for days, weeks, months, even years to come. To create a sermon that is a story is not a new idea. The first book that I can find of when it came out, of when a book was written about it, was in 1980. By a man named Eugene Laurie, and he wrote a book called The Homiletical Plot. And in this book, what Eugene says is you can actually make a sermon be a story, or you can make a story be a sermon. You can use the plotline of story to construct a sermon. So there's two ways of thinking of story as sermon. One is to say, I'm gonna tell a story and it's gonna be a sermon. I'm gonna tell a story, I'm gonna put the points into the mouth of the character, like I was saying here. There's another way which is saying, why not use the structure of how a story works to develop my sermon? So if we were going to do that, what this model says is the first thing that happens in a story is the oops. Something happens to the character, something that needs to be fixed. And then the character starts trying to solve it. And so you can start in your process saying, how can I understand this? How can I understand the Sabbath? Well, what is the purpose of the Sabbath? Is it just I have to do this and I can't do that? And so we go through lots of applications of saying, Ugh, basically you're struggling with what is the meaning of this thing. And so you try a number of different things and then you find the text and you have the aha experience. You find the text, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," and you say, "Aha, that's it!" And then often what we do is we've done all that work, we start our sermon and we say, "Brothers and sisters, I'd like to tell you a story." I'd like to preach to you today about the Sabbath. And I want to start with the text that says Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And what you've done, you've taken them straight to the aha, and yet they haven't gone through this whole process, so they don't really get it as much as you do. They're not that bought into the story. So take them through this process, take them on that journey, and then when they get to the aha and you start applying it to life and you have the, the we experience of saying, this is what it means, this is what it means to me every day, this is what it means to be on the weekend, this is what it means to me every month, This is what it means to me every year. And then you have the "yeah" at the end of the sermon, which is that you look in Isaiah and it says, "And the Sabbath will go on throughout eternity with God and his people." And the Sabbath suddenly has become a story, and the people will be riveted with you because they're following you and developing your sermon through the story plot or the homiletical plot. Now, when we look back at that story of the dragon that I told at the beginning of this presentation, 3 weeks after that story was told to my children, I was putting Mikey to bed, and Mikey said, "Dad, I know what I'm gonna be when I grow up." And I said, "Really? What are you gonna be?" And he said, "Well, I know what I'm gonna do." And I said, "What are you gonna do when you grow up?" He said, "I'm gonna kill the devil." I said, "You're gonna what?" "I'm gonna kill the devil." "Mikey, how are you gonna kill the devil?" "Oh, I guess I'll have to get some metal and make a sword, and I'll poke him in the tummy." I said, you know, my mind said I should tell him Jesus conquered the evil, the devil is conquered, he's in his death throes now, but I was wondering what's going on in the mind of my child. So I said, "Mikey, what makes you think that of all the millions of people alive right now and all the people who have been alive before and will be alive after you, that you're the one person in the universe who's gonna kill the devil?" And Mikey looked at me like I was missing something quite obvious. Mikey looked at me and he said, "Dad," I am Michael. And I did what you probably just did there. I had a bit of a chuckle to myself and I gave him a cuddle and I said, Mikey, that's really special that you saw your name in the story and so you thought it was you, but that's actually Jesus and he's done it for us. But Mikey hit on something that all of us can hit on, and that is that our names are in that passage. We are the ones. These are they who are keeping the commandments of God and have the testimony the testimony of Jesus. These are the storytellers that are telling the Jesus story. Who are they? These are the ones who were washed in the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. The story of Jesus is the identifying mark of his end-time people. The storytellers of Jesus— that's us. You and I are God's storytellers. And I would challenge you to look at the way you preach your sermons and say, how can I involve narrative and sermon? How can I raise the effectiveness of my sermons through the power of story.
