Written by: Pete
06/06/2011 07:50 

This is a short post entitled 'Whose Story' by Sammy Davies, who is just finishing up his 2nd year on the Binary Course, doing an MA Theology (Contemporary Church Leadership)

 In the run up to a recent church mission the 'Contagious Christian' course was run in order to help equip the members to share their faith effectively. The privilege of preaching the ‘sharing your story’ session was all mine and encouraged people to, amongst other things, make Jesus the hero of the story not themselves. 

Too often we’re tempted to give our testimonies as stories of how we’ve changed rather than what Christ has done. While this isn't wrong, it's an odd emphasis given where the power really is. Rather than focusing on what we were like before Christ and after Christ I encouraged the church to major on what Christ had done for them. How does this work out? Well often in a before/after kind of way. Christ has taken our old idols, smashed them and now reigns in their place. But the hero needs to be Jesus, not a new, cleaner living self. 

If we focus too much on how great our lives are now rather than what Jesus did for us then we run the risk of sharing morality rather than glorious grace. If we focus too much on our selves we take peoples attention away from the saviour and onto the saved, the exact opposite of how it should be.

Personal testimonies are powerful tools, even more so in our postmodern world. Wouldn't it be great if through sharing our stories of faith people met the eternal Word rather than just another holy Joe?

One more danger we need to avoid is the desire to make our testimonies ‘sensational’. By that I mean sensational in human terms. We forget the biggest miracle is blind people being given sight! Look at 2 Corinthians 4 to see how it’s a miracle on the scale of creation!!

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