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    Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World
    Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World
    Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World
    Ebook170 pages2 hours

    Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World

    By Nish Weiseth and Shauna Niequist

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    About this ebook

    Speak, by popular blogger Nish Weiseth, is a book about the power of telling our own stories and hearing those of others to change hearts, build bridges, advocate for good, make disciples with grace, and proclaim God’s kingdom on Earth today.

    Nish Weiseth exhorts today’s Christians to follow Jesus’ example by using story as a vehicle for change. After all, Jesus was a master storyteller. He frequently and effectively used the art of storytelling to communicate deep truths about God, humanity, love, and eternity to a culture on the brink. His stories defied social norms, revealed God’s Kingdom, and fiercely advocated for the least of these.

    With examples from Scripture as the foundation, Speak is a call for grace, openness, and vulnerability within the evangelical church. Nish Weiseth encourages those in the Body of Christ to know their own story of transformation and redemption—and to use those stories as a catalyst for change at both a personal and global level.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherZondervan
    Release dateAug 5, 2014
    ISBN9780310338192
    Speak: How Your Story Can Change the World
    Author

    Nish Weiseth

    Nish Weiseth grew up everywhere from Arizona to North Carolina. She went to the University of Colorado at Boulder where she did her undergraduate work in religious studies, philosophy and Italian and met her dark, mysterious, adrenaline-junkie husband, Erik. Nish is a writer, blogger, and entrepreneur. She launched the now wildly popular and influential collaborative blog, A Deeper Story, where over sixty writers share their stories in order to address issues found on the collision course between Christianity and culture. She is also the author of her own personal blog, nishweiseth.com. She and her husband live in Salt Lake City, Utah, have two young children and are members of Missio Dei Community.

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    • 4/5
      Where more sermons will not change the world, our personal stories, testimonies of a living faith, can. In Speak, popular blogger Nish Weiseth, stresses the importance of using a story as vehicle to explain the gospel, show grace, and proclaim God's Kingdom on Earth today. Though Weiseth doesn't promote a Kingdom Now ('over-realized') theology, it's obvious that goodness, justice, giving, neighbouring and church planting show the Kingdom to the world. In 8 short chapters stories from the Bible, Weiseth's own pilgrimage on parenting, leaving Portland, Oregon for Salt Lake City, Utah, spiritual gifts, mission trip, evangelical church leadership, etc. are illustrated by blog posts with inspirational thought from friends, and fellow writers including some of the reaction they sparked. To help you along, she also shares profiles of NGOs like World Vision and International Justice Mission as part of her call to action.

    Book preview

    Speak - Nish Weiseth

    Foreword by Shauna Niequist

    I’m a story girl — I always have been. Apologetics and debate make me cranky. I glaze over at numbers and statistics. But tell me a story and I’m hooked. Tell me a story and I’ll never forget it. Tell me a story and I’ll carry it with me wherever I go, like a penny in a pocket, like a friend.

    The conversation our culture is having right now can hardly be called a conversation — so pitched, so loud, so obsessed with being heard and not at all concerned with hearing. We label and stereotype; we identify who’s in and who’s out; we define ourselves by who we vote for and what cars we drive and what zip codes we live in. And we define other people by who they vote for, what they drive, and what zip codes they live in.

    Our culture specializes in boxes, in categories, in labels. We think we know everything there is to know about someone because they send their kids to this or that kind of school, or because they go this or that kind of church, or because they have this or that kind of sticker on their car. This is sloppy. And this is dangerous.

    And this is why story matters. Because when you listen to a story, you have to give up your stereotypes and your labels. Because stories crawl out of the boxes every chance they get. Because stories zig when we think they’ll zag. Stories surprise us around every corner. Stories reach out and grab our labels and shred them to confetti.

    There was a person in my life who made me crazy. She made me mad and made me nervous. She was control, control, control. Perfection, perfection, perfection. Her anxiety brought out my anxiety, and being around her exhausted me. So I did what we do with people who make us crazy. I labeled her: control freak. I congratulated myself for being laid-back, especially compared to Little Miss Hand-Sanitizer-on-Everything.

    And then one night, when we were up so late we stopped editing our words and let them all fall out in a jumble, she told me about what life was like for her as a little girl. She told me about how, when she was still in elementary school, she practically lived at the hospital when her mom was dying, and how careful they had to be about germs. Her little girl-self took it upon herself to never, never, never be dirty because it could make her mom sick.

    There it is, I realized. I blushed with shame, furious with myself that I had done it again: I labeled and distanced. I didn’t listen. And when I finally did listen, the story I heard made it all make sense — the control, the perfectionism, that crazy hand sanitizer all the time.

    And aren’t we all like that? Impossible. Crazy-making. Cartoons. Walking stereotypes. Until someone sticks around long enough to hear the story of how we got here, what winding journey brought us along, what diagnosis and hospital room and fear made us who we are.

    A wise friend of mine is teaching me to ask this question every time I disagree with someone, and especially when I disagree in a visceral way: How did that person come to feel this way? Essentially, he’s teaching me to ask, What part of this person’s story do I need to know to understand what he or she is telling me right now?

    Wouldn’t that change everything?

    When we listen, we’re forced to drop our labels. When we listen to stories, there’s no longer any room for stereotypes. We’ve had all the screaming and all the polarizing and all the labeling this world can handle. The only way into a better future is an entirely new way.

    And that way is the way of story-telling, and story-listening. That way is about the details, the how-we-got-there, the way the sky looked when she said that thing that changed everything.

    The way is story.

    Because we’ve run the cartoon-and-label way into the ground. The cable news shouting matches are a dead end.

    The new way through is story-telling and story-listening. It’s unfamiliar at first, and scary, but over time, you find you begin to develop muscle memory for it. You find you begin to feel something like a holy curiosity for everyone you see: What’s her story? How did he come to feel this way? What is it that I don’t yet know about her story?

    This is an exciting way to live. This is, I believe, a Kingdom way to live, because instead of straw men and cartoons, we begin to dwell in actual humanity, which was the plan all along, of course. Story draws us together, hands and voices and memories. It bridges the distances we’ve created, because we thought the distance would keep us safe. It doesn’t. It only keeps us lonely.

    My friend Nish knows all about this holy curiosity. She knows all about this Kingdom way of living. She knows, deep in her bones, that stories change us in ways that debates and statistics never will.

    Nish is a story girl too, a kindred spirit, a sister. And honestly, I can’t think of a better guide along this path . . .

    Introduction

    The language of logical argument, of proofs, is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling, moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the freed language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.

    MADELEINE L’ENGLE, A CIRCLE OF QUIET

    I am a part of the millennial generation. We are in our twenties and thirties. Some of us are single, and some are married. Some of us have kids. Some don’t. We are, as a group, overeducated and underemployed. Some of us are children of parents who were part of the Christian Coalition of the Reagan years. Some of us are children of parents who preferred the principles of the People for the American Way. We’ve got lots of tech savvy, but we’re spiritually running on empty, and we’re searching.

    We’re searching for God. We’re searching for real, honest community. We’re searching for significance and affirmation that, yes, our voices matter.

    Our stories matter.

    I am part of a generation on the brink of exploding in frustration. We’re fed up. We’re leaving the church. We’ve been injured, and we’re growing more cynical by the day. We’re tired of the heated, bloated rhetoric of those on opposite sides of political and theological divides. We’re tired of oversimplified answers to nuanced questions, and we’re tired of being apathetic.

    I’m tired of being tired.

    And that’s why I’m writing this book.

    I’m a blogger who writes primarily about my life, my experiences, and my opinions. On one hand, it’s fantastic. It provides me with an immediate audience, immediate feedback, and, often, immediate praise.

    Yet, on the other hand, there’s also criticism, of course. Which I’m not averse to. I welcome it, particularly if it’s constructive and offered with care. I believe iron sharpens iron — and I’m willing to be sharpened. However, the criticism I encounter as I write on the Internet can be harsh, personal, and unrelenting. Somehow the Internet gives people the idea they have carte blanche to treat others cruelly.

    Have you ever read the comments section after an article on any of the news network websites? They are rough. In fact, I tell writers who haven’t checked out the comments sections on news websites to never do so. When certain readers engage content on the web they disagree with, they seem to be emboldened by that anonymity to speak their minds. Why? Because they can. Unfiltered, unchecked, and with abandon.

    When typing words onto a screen rather than talking with someone across a coffee-shop table, it becomes quite a bit harder to separate the person who wrote the content from the content itself. We forget that content is written by real people with real feelings, real experiences, and real lives. We forget that bloggers and writers on the Internet are actual people. And perhaps everyone hides behind some sort of anonymity on the web.

    Here’s an example: My friend Rachel wrote a piece for CNN Belief Blog about why the millennial generation is leaving the church in droves.¹ She had written about this phenomenon on her own blog previously, and she’d even admitted to painting a picture using generalities that don’t apply to every single individual. She had simply identified what might be motivating twenty- and thirtysomethings to walk away from the church. It was a well-written piece that received over nine thousand comments on the CNN site.

    Unfortunately, many of those comments were hurtful, personal, and vitriolic. One person wrote:

    I feel bad for this author. She mocks the idea of getting hipper bands or a coffee shop to bring people into the church, and writes: Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions — Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. — precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being ‘cool,’ and we find that refreshingly authentic.

    Ah yes. Authentic bull. So so much better than that new-age edgy bull. Pumpkin, it’s the same old bull just sold to you in a different package. Grow up. God is about as real as Hera and Zeus and Jupiter.²

    Ouch.

    That kind of hatred and intolerance on the Internet belongs to a breed all its own. The harsh rhetoric can rival that of some of the most outspoken, negative radio talk-show hosts. And you know where it can be the worst? On Christian websites and blogs!

    Thoughtful, intelligent, Jesus-following Christians are declared unbiblical and un-Christlike when they choose to be brave and write about a tough subject. They’re accused of mocking Scripture and not holding it in high enough regard. They’re called heretics. I’ve seen them picked apart, chewed up, and spit out by other Christians, all in the name of Jesus. It’s heartbreaking.

    As a blogger, I’d become accustomed to watching these attacks unfold, and for a long time it kept me from writing bravely. I didn’t want to be called out. I watched as my friends, who also wanted to address hard topics, wrote out of fear instead of bravery.

    And yet some of the people I admire are able to courageously communicate their ideas effectively — like my dear friend and fellow author, Sarah Bessey. In her book Jesus Feminist, she tackles the sometimes-volatile issue of the equality and value of women in the kingdom of God, delicately weaving in her own stories and her experiences of being a woman in the church.

    Another brave writer is Lauren Winner. In Mudhouse Sabbath, she discusses the rich practices of Orthodox Judaism — traditions she grew up with — and how they enrich her life as a practicing Christian. Remarkably, evangelical readers who would bristle at the thought of incorporating Jewish practices into their modern Christian faith walk began nodding their heads in agreement, drawn in by Winner’s unique knack for telling stories from her own life. The gift from both Sarah Bessey and Lauren Winner is that they engage hot-button issues at a basic human level.

    And they do it with story.

    A Deeper Story

    In the fall of 2010, I was blessed with the opportunity to meet and hear Ann Voskamp, author of the New York Times bestseller One Thousand Gifts. In her message, Ann made one remark that got under my skin. She was speaking about using writing as a way to glorify God when she instructed the audience, Give me your story, not your sermon.

    It was my lightbulb moment.

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