Dan Kimball has been on the speakers circuit for a long time. I have been listening to his presentations in youth ministry and reading his stuff on pastoral ministry and outreach for at least 13 years. One of his most recent connections is as a friend of the Sentralized Conference and the Forge Tribe.
He really challenged those who were listening to do two things.
1. Know our story and why it matters
2. Have a passion for bringing other people to faith, and not get caught up in all of the other "missional stuff" at the expense of evangelism
Kimball argued that many Christians simply don't know their story. He quoted Bill Maher:
What was interesting was how he described how non-Christians and those questioning or hostile to the faith pick out different things in the story to understand the story through.
He says that Christians are familiar with and passionate about the nice and comfortable verses, while non-believers are more tied to the more difficult creepy passages, and interpret the narrative of Christ through the lens of Leviticus or some of the more violent texts of the Old Testament.
He also shared how a post-Christian society hears the ancient truths differently, quoting a participant in his church that asked, "Is Jesus a zombie?"
To show how hearing certain exerpts of a story to create a different whole can be done, he used another narrative to show how a story can be deconstructed by selecting different parts of the story to guide one's understanding of the whole.
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