– Excerpt from the book Searching for God Knows What:

“It strikes me, even as I type this, how distant and far our formulaic methodology is from the artful, narrative sort of methodology used to explain God in Scripture. It makes you wonder whether we can even get to the truth of our theology unless it is presented in the sort of methodology Scripture uses.

It makes you wonder if all our time spent making lists would be better spent painting or writing or singing or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the church has a kind of pity for Scripture, always having to come behind it and explain everything, put everything into actionable steps, acronyms and hidden secrets, as though the original writers, and for that matter the Holy Spirit who worked in the lives of the original writers, were a bunch of illiterate hillbillies. I don’t think they were illiterate hillbillies, and I think the methodology God used to explain His truth is quite superior.

What I mean by this is I feel my life is a story, more than a list; I feel this blood slipping through my veins and these chemicals in my brain telling me I am hungry or lonely, sad or angry, in love or despondent. And I don’t feel that a list could ever explain the complexity of all this beauty, all this sun and moon, this smell of coming rain, the beautiful mysteries of women, or the truck-like complexity of men.

It seems nearly heresy to explain the gospel of Jesus, this message an infinitely complex God has delivered to an infinitely complex humanity, in bullet points. How amazing it is that Christ would explain that to be His followers we must eat His flesh and drink His blood, and that He is the Bridegroom and we are the bride, and that we will be unified with Him in His death, and that we will live forever with Him in glory.”

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Here is a segment of a talk by Donald on Narrative Expression: