Influencing Like Jesus -- Principle 7: Tell a Story

Principle 7: Tell a Story

An Excerpt from Influencing Like Jesus

The Concept

A great story keeps people listening, shakes them from their comfort zones, and gets them asking questions they’ve never considered asking. Ultimately, it can persuade in the most indirect and non-threatening of ways.

An Excerpt from Influencing Like Jesus

Aside from prayer, storytelling, especially when it tugs at the emotions of another person, is the influence principle that is most likely to get your audience to actually do something—to actually change their behavior. I recognize that’s an audacious statement, considering the enormous power of the other principles we’re discussing in this study. But it seems a little less audacious when we consider that storytelling was Jesus’ primary means of teaching and influencing others.

When we think of Jesus’ teachings, we think of stories, don’t we? Parables. Lessons taught through familiar experiences, at least familiar to the original hearers—farming, weddings, employment, borrowing and lending, tending sheep. It was really just an extension of what we now call the “oral tradition.” With the scarcity of both writing implements and literacy, every ancient culture passed along its wisdom and tradition orally and anecdotally. In doing so, it influenced the next generation to embrace longstanding values.

Jesus used stories for far more than this, though. Rather than just perpetuating values of old, he introduced through parable an entirely different way of relating to God and neighbor. To teach that God’s forgiveness is always available, no matter what we’ve done, he told the Prodigal Son story. To teach that it’s never too late to be saved, he told the Workers in the Vineyard story. To teach us how to pray and how not to pray, he told the Parable of the Tax Collector and the Pharisee. To teach that we are to love and serve all people, regardless of who they are or how busy we are, he told the Good Samaritan story.

In this way, he influenced thousands of his contemporaries and billions since then to see differently. How does this work? It’s not just that Jesus’ stories offered clever analogies to everyday experience, or that they were simply memorable tales. A major reason is that Jesus’ stories, like all of the most influential stories throughout history, touched people’s emotions. They had “pathos,” to borrow Aristotle’s term for the influence principle—the power to evoke feelings and arouse emotions.

Digging Deeper: Examples and Resources

Using Story to Increase Adoptions

How do you influence people to adopt a "hard to place" child (e.g., an older child or one with siblings)? Through story, in this case, photographic stories. Read about this remarkable innovation that is revolutionizing the adoption industry.

Read / view the MSNBC story

Read / view the ABC News story

Read about the original heart gallery

Keeping Kids Off Drugs

The “Montana Meth Project” is having success where other ad campaigns have failed. How do you persuade kids to avoid even experimenting with the pervasive, tempting, and highly addictive drugs? Show stories -- in graphic detail -- of what happens when you experiment.

Watch the NBC story

View the Montana Meth ads

Other news stories about the Montana Meth Project

Winning in Court

How does America's most successful trial lawyer win so often? Primarily through telling stories, he says in his book How to Argue and Win Every Time. According to Spence:

"Every argument in court or out, whether delivered over the supper table or at coffee break, can be reduced to a story. An argument, like a house, like the houses of the three little pigs, has structure. Whether it will fall, whether it can be blown down when the wolf huffs and puffs, depends on how it will be built. And the strongest structure for any argument is always story.

"Storytelling has been the principle means by which we have taught one another from the beginning of time. We are indeed creatures of story. The stories of our childhood remain with us as primary experiences against which we judge and decide issues as adults. They are forever implanted on both our conscious and unconscious. Movies, television and theater are highly developed forms of storytelling. The most effective advertisements on television are always mini stories that take little more than a minute. Jokes are small stories. Christ’s parables are stories.

"Before we can tell an effective story to the other, we must first visualize the picture ourselves. Begin to think in story form. Why? Because the story is the easiest form for almost an argument to take. You don’t have to remember the next thought or the next sentence. You don’t have to memorize anything. You already know the whole story.

"You see it in your mind’s eye whereas you may or may not be able to remember the structure and sequence of the formal argument. The story argument is so powerful because it speaks in the language form of the species. Its structure is natural. It permits the storyteller to speak easily, openly, from the heart zone. It provokes interest. It is the antidote to the worst poison that can be injected into any argument – the doldrums."

From Gerry Spence, How to Argue and Win Every Time (St. Martin’s, 1996)

Some resources for improving your storytelling skills

Storytelling training, from a Christian perspective: christianstorytelling.com
A plethora of storytelling web sites: courses.unt.edu/efiga/STORYTELLING/StorytellingWebsites.htm
Some decent books on storytelling, plus a good newsletter: www.stevedenning.com

Sharing a testimony before baptism

North Point Community Church, one of the largest churches in America, does something novel before it baptizes an adult: it shows a brief video of their testimony. These brief stories not only articulate the heart of the believer, but they also influence other, un-baptized people to consider joining them. Click here for the North Point baptism site and then click on "Video Testimony Examples."

Some resources for sharing your Christian testimony

Academic articles

The Storytelling Organization: A Study of Story Performance in an Office- Supply Firm (David M. Boje)
Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 106-126

Abstract: This paper reports on a participant-observation study in a large office-supply firm of how people perform stories to make sense of events, introduce change, and gain political advantage during their conversations. The story was not found to be a highly agreed-upon text, told from beginning to end, as it has been studied in most prior story research. Rather, the stories were dynamic, varied by context, and were sometimes terse, requiring the hearer to fill in silently major chunks of story line, context, and implication. Stories were frequently challenged, reinterpreted, and revised by the hearers as they unfolded in conversation. The paper supports a theory of organization as a collective storytelling system in which the performance of stories is a key part of members' sense making and a means to allow them to supplement individual memories with institutional memory.

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