During a webinar, author and youth minister Mark Yaconelli explains how to connect with youth
“Story is relationship,” Mark Yaconelli told a group of 44 participants in the Scattered Church webinar last month focusing on evangelism with youth and young adults.
Gina Yeager-Buckley, Associate for Presbyterian Youth and Triennium, hosted the forum, which concluded a five-week series on evangelism produced by the Theology, Formation & Evangelism ministry area of the Presbyterian Mission Agency. TFE Mission Specialist Kari Hay has made all recordings of all the webinars available in English and Spanish on the Scattered Church webpage. To hear Yaconelli’s talk, click the link above.
Yaconelli described the relationship developed through storytelling as an exchange of gifts where presence and listening are offered, and young people respond with a piece of their life experience. Yaconelli believes youth are experts in their own life experience. This is why prompts like “tell me about a time where you experienced this” can be more fruitful than general questions that can be answered by a word or a shrug. Participants were so excited about new ways to inspire conversation with young people that they requested a list of Yaconelli’s storytelling prompts. These will be shared via Presbyterian Youth and Triennium and will be available as a resource here.
As an example of how to help people conjure memorable moments and share them with others, Yaconelli described the spiritual practices of Ignatius of Loyola, who opened up the reading of scripture through slowing down the narrative to imagine its context through sensory experience. One example is to imagine the smells and sounds of the farm to which the Prodigal Son returns.
For a moment, participants were asked to imagine what if seminaries taught storytelling rather than preaching and to consider how story transports listeners through time, space and bodies. “Story is the language of empathy and compassion,” Yaconelli concluded, before suggesting a simple way to use story to engage scriptural texts with young people through appealing to their experience first and asking them to conjure up the moment through their senses.
Original source can be found here.
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