The Case for Storytelling in the Classical Christian School

Stories are like Trojan Horses. They arrive in our cities undetected, and they may deliver beauty or ugliness, truth or lies. They move in stealth because they aim first for the heart and imagination and are wrapped in delight. Stories are not Hollywood’s invention, but God’s—the Author of Creativity.

Christians should be at the forefront of writing and producing stories. We must focus on training a new generation of storytellers, men and women, with imaginations shaped by that which is beautiful, true, and good.

God’s people have been storytellers for millennia. Many of Israel’s festivals focused on the remembering of God’s mighty works among his people, and this took place by telling the stories again and again! But there’s something different about the time in which we live today.

Kairos is an ancient rhetorical term that speaks of the right timing. We’re in a kairotic moment right now, a Gutenberg Press era, where anyone can open a laptop or record with their phone to share their thoughts and images with the world.

John Maxwell says that “the accurate measure of leadership is influence—nothing more, nothing less” (The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership). Isn’t it interesting that our social media personalities are called “influencers”? If Maxwell is right, they are leaders too. Every hour, ordinary people are casting a vision of what the Good Life is through their posts. The topics may be beauty or finance, but they’re weaving a story, and we’re listening. Social media is a marketplace for competing visions of the Good Life.

Christians must lean in and engage in this communication marketplace. As Mordecai told Esther, perhaps God has called us for “such a time as this” (Esther 4:14).

Over the last fifteen years, my wife and I have served in various classical Christian schools as teachers and administrators. Classical Christian schools, whatever their model may be, are situated to train our students to speak the language of our culture: story.

For a definition of story, I turn to Aristotle who described it in his book Poetics. A story is a form of communication that recounts events structured with a beginning, middle, and end. A story, usually following a main character who wants something, hinges on the question: will he get it or not?

Here are three reasons why classical Christian schools should take the craft of storytelling seriously. So seriously, that they train students in it.

First, many classical Christian schools already have this goal in their sights. The engraving at the top of our Rhetoric building is a quote by Quintilian which reads, “The Good Man Speaking Well.” This phrase reminds us of the telos of education, something far more than college or career preparation.

But what is a “good man” in 2024? It is a person of wisdom and virtue shaped in the image of Christ. While that definition may not change, what it means to “speak well” changes with culture. We want our students to speak well: to use the arts of rhetoric and logic to communicate from podiums and pulpits, in boardrooms and courtrooms, but what about speaking well through the art of storytelling in novels or performing on the stage and television?

Graduates of classical Christians schools should certainly be able to defend a position with sound arguments, but they should also have the tools to tell a story that pulls an audience in, rousing their hearts and imaginations. Ancient rhetoric, which our modern-day thesis processes are modeled after, even includes a section dedicated explicitly to storytelling called the narratio: when you weave the facts of the case together in the form of a story.

Second, a school rooted in the Christian and classical tradition can examine its heritage and see a long line of men and women of the imagination. As teachers, we don’t have to look far to find creative mentors for our students: men such as John Bunyan, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and women like Dorothy Sayers and Flannery O’Connor. These storytellers wove their faith into the fabric of their novels, plays, and poems. They knew that to move people and change minds you must harness the imagination, the faculty that shapes how we remember the past and dream into the future.

And we don’t only look to Christian storytellers, for in Paul’s language, “all things are yours” (1 Corinthians 3:21). Homer and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Anton Chekhov, they are ours. While they weren’t all Christians, much of what they wrote was true, good, or beautiful, so we point our students to them again and again.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, when we train students in the classical and Christian tradition, we’re passing onto them a heritage of hope, not rooted in man’s achievements, but in the work of Christ our Lord. When we send out our students, we send out vessels of hope. What the man or woman transformed by the gospel can bring to the storyboards and the screens is a gaze, a perspective, that can simultaneously affirm the broken and the beautiful in this world, and the joy of the next.

When I step back and look at the creative industries today, and note what Christians are doing, I’m encouraged! Many Christians are accepting the call to write novels, produce plays, and direct movies. Keep at it!

But despite the great traction we’re making, two potential pitfalls are clear.

First, it is easy for Christians to conclude that to tell stories as believers, we must only create devotional or explicitly religious stories. There’s nothing wrong with Christians producing in these genres. The danger is in limiting ourselves to them. We have freedom in which genres we choose to tell our stories.

Survey Christian history and notice we have stories like Pilgrim’s Progress (a Christian allegory) and the works of Dorothy Sayers (detective mysteries) and Flannery O’Connor (Southern gothic) or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre(Romance). God is Lord over all creation, which means we can, and should, be telling westerns, space odysseys, or even horrors. When we look at the composition of God’s Word, we see the same point illustrated. Scripture weaves together a tapestry composed of many genres: history in Genesis, romance in Song of Solomon, horror in the Prophets and Revelation, and worship in the Psalms.

Second, it’s easy for Christians to live defensively. It’s clear that many of the plays, movies, and novels produced today are filth: either terrible quality or wicked content. The natural response is to spend all our energy and resources deconstructing the stories we encounter. We’re so busy playing defense, we forget to play offense. Discernment is vital to Christian living, and we must train our students to discern what is ugly and false, but we must also train them to respond by creating what is beautiful and true. Christian engagement in the arts is both defensive and offensive.

In conclusion, the Christian classical school, no matter how large or small, is uniquely situated to partner in training a generation of storytellers. In my next post, we’ll explore practical ways to do this.