Wangerin draws on personal experience and a host of voices to make a case for the importance of embracing story as an essential tool for communicating the gospel in preaching and teaching settings. He turns to personal anecdotes, wisdom from ancient classics, and a provocative anthology of narrative types. Together, Wangerin's reflections create a theology of story that shows how the Word of God takes on flesh in practiced speech.
The sections of the book focus on the effect of spoken stories and the process of building a story step by step. It then provides several examples of stories for telling and expands on the importance of theatrics in preaching and teaching. In a very real sense, preachers and teachers of the gospel are actors. Motion and meaning flow not simply from words but from the embodied presentation of the preacher, who approaches the task as script writer, director, and actor.
Walter Wangerin Jr. is senior research professor at Valparaiso University and the author of more than forty books encompassing a wide variety of genres: fiction, essay, spirituality, children's stories, and biblical exposition. Wangerin has won the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Children's Book of the Year Award, and several Gold Medallion Awards, including best fiction awards for both The Book of God and Paul: A Novel.