The God-Hungry Imagination Quotes

“There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O’CONNOR9”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“C. S. Lewis said it this way: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”12”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“As we already said, authors receive their ideas from somewhere; and in the case of holy scriptures, that somewhere is the mind of God. Human beings encountered Someone outside of their ordinary, everyday experience; and that Someone provided both the source and the interpretive lens for the way those encounters were narrated.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“the only thing I wanted was to walk with Frodo into Mordor. Because if I could live for a little while inside a great story written by a first-rate Christian storyteller, maybe my fragmented world just might make some kind of narrative sense again. And I was right.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“food to nourish the imagination”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Something more is going on with Jesus’ storytelling than clarification or embellishment: he’s out to rock our world.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“This is why the apostles get jailed or stoned or hauled before various proconsuls and vice-whatevers. Not because they’re advancing some kind of propositional argument, but because they’re subversive storytellers with a disconcerting penchant for altar calls.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Part of the magic of the imagination is that it can conjure something out of nothing except the simple medium of words until the hearer really feels as though she’s experiencing a multisensory event.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“To use C. S. Lewis’s distinction, perhaps we could even say that for the evangelistic youth minister, it’s about truth; for the bardic youth minister, it’s about meaning. Both approaches are necessary and appropriate. But they are different and depend on the context.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“The youth-pastor-as-bard is charged with expressing the language, narrative, and culture of the kingdom to listeners who think they already know what the kingdom is all about. For the leader among quasi-believers who are bored and mostly apathetic, who think they know all about “God and stuff,” the emphasis is on story.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“if there is no light by which we see, no Great Story that illumines our days—and no Storyteller—then we have no source by which to enchant the young people in our charge.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Tell me a story,” says the poem by Robert Penn Warren. “In this century, and moment, of mania . . . Tell me a story of deep delight.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“We sought those experiences only story can provide, experiences that our crazy college days could never give us: timelessness, transcendence, intimacy, identity, mystery, subversion, enchantment, wonder, play, resonance, world building.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Youth are natural-born storytellers. Our task in discipleship training is to steer them into a particular storytelling tradition—that is, the narrative, language, and culture of the Christian faith as it has been lived and expressed for two thousand years.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Like fish, when metaphors get old, they go bad,” writes Christian poet Jeanne Murray Walker,9 and nowhere is that more apparent than among Christians on a Sunday morning.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“The Christian community first came up with theological abstractions because eventually we had to speak in shorthand about the complexity of God’s story and character, or we’d never get anywhere in regular discourse with one another.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Religious language,” write the authors of Soul Searching, “is like any other language: to learn how to speak it, one needs first to listen to native speakers using it a lot, and then one needs plenty of practice at speaking it oneself.”8”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“every church can treat each discipleship class and each worship service as an opportunity for continual rehearsal of what the words, stories, symbols, rituals, and experiences in the Christian community mean.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“be fully immersed in the baptismal waters of the Christian faith takes the entire pool of the worshiping community.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“But when a confirmand stands up in front of our congregation on Confirmation Sunday, we’re not asking her to talk about what God means to her. Nor are we asking her to acknowledge a set of propositional statements about the universe. Rather, we’re inviting her to step inside an ongoing story and become one of its characters for the rest of her life. It’s less like a math test and more like a game of jump rope: it’s not about passing or failing or even emoting but about watching, practicing, and jumping in.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Unfortunately, church leadership too often capitulates to youthful and parental pressure that would make confirmation as fluffy, fun, and noncommittal as possible.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“From ancient times discipleship training has involved learning the biblical narrative and theological language of the Christian community:”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“confirmation is one of the most important and serendipitous storytelling opportunities we in youth ministry will ever have.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Catechesis means impressing upon youth a Life, not a religion. —KENDA DEAN AND RON FOSTER”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Adolescents are looking for a soul-shaking, heart-waking, world-changing God to fall in love with; and if they do not find that God in the Christian church, they will most certainly settle for lesser gods elsewhere. —KENDA CREASY DEAN AND RON FOSTER11”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“like story itself, worship works: it offers experiences of transcendence and timelessness, resonance and wonder, intimacy and identity, mystery and enchantment.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“When well told and well lived by the storytellers, worship, like story itself, offers opportunities for the imagination to be nurtured and transformed.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“To those of us who pride ourselves on being “informal,” I’d encourage us to consider what story we could possibly be telling without form. Is our story merely about how cool our pastor is and how loud our subwoofers are? Or have we truly developed a biblical theology of worship that imparts the only story that really matters to the next generation?”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“liturgy is not a particular style of worship or some outmoded preference on the part of old people; it’s a timeless pattern based on the fourfold movement—one that was originally created by first-rate storytellers who knew what they were about.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Writes Webber: This conflict of style has continued in the twentieth-century debate about traditional versus contemporary worship. Traditional worship seems to be hanging on to modernity while contemporary worship has capitulated to pop culture. In either case the debate continues to rage about style with little concern for a biblical theology of worship. 8”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry