When the Church Stopped Telling Stories

This is Part 6 of The Battle for the Christian Imagination. See also Part 5, “Two Half-Gospels,” and Part 1, “The Kingdom We Forgot How to Live In.”

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Why does culture sometimes seem better at shaping the way we live than the Church?

Think about what happens in an ordinary week.

On Sunday, we gather to worship, hear Scripture, and remember what is true about God and His Kingdom. Then Monday arrives, and we return to a world constantly telling us what life is supposed to look like.

Films show us what makes a hero. Television portrays what a successful marriage looks like, or what happens when one falls apart. Advertising tells us what we lack and what might finally make us happy. Schools introduce our children to particular visions of history, human nature, and the good life.

These influences rarely announce themselves as moral instruction. Most of the time, they simply tell stories.

And those stories have a way of staying with us and shaping us.

A person may struggle to remember Sunday’s sermon but vividly recall a scene from a film they watched years ago. They may sincerely believe that generosity matters while instinctively measuring success by the lifestyle they’ve been taught to admire.

This doesn’t mean the Church has nothing meaningful to say. It means something has happened to the relationship between the truth we proclaim and the world people are learning to inhabit.

In the previous articles of this series, we’ve explored how the Church gradually lost sight of the full, livable gospel of the Kingdom and what that loss has meant for discipleship and imagination.

But there’s another part of this history I want to examine.

While the Church was wrestling with what it believed and how to preserve those beliefs, other institutions were becoming remarkably effective at shaping how people understood the world.

They kept telling stories.

And over time, many Christians found themselves living between two worlds: a Christian world where they learned what they ought to believe and a broader cultural world that continued shaping what they desired, admired, feared, and imagined possible.

How did we get here?

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Why Culture Often Feels More Formational Than the Church

Consider what makes a good film so compelling.

For a couple of hours, we’re invited to experience the world through someone else’s eyes. We come to understand what they want, what stands in their way, and what they’re willing to sacrifice to get it.

Along the way, we begin to care about the things they care about.

We may even find ourselves hoping they’ll make choices we would ordinarily condemn. If I’m honest, there have been more times than I’d like to admit where I find myself rooting for the villian in the story.

That’s part of the power of storytelling. It allows us to inhabit a perspective before we’ve consciously decided whether we agree with it.

Education works in a similar way, though through different means. Through the questions a curriculum emphasizes, the people it celebrates, and the assumptions it makes, it communicates a vision of what knowledge is for and what kind of person an educated individual ought to become.

Advertising does something similar with desire.

A commercial rarely needs to argue that possessions will give our lives meaning. It can simply show us an attractive life, connect that life to a product, and leave us wanting to participate.

None of these things necessarily makes a person more deeply formed than worship, prayer, Scripture, or life within the Body of Christ. Christian formation is not a competition over who commands the most attention.

But culture is constantly placing people inside visions of the good life. It gives those visions faces, relationships, consequences, rewards, and emotional weight.

For many Christians, the Church has not always connected its teaching to an equally livable account of everyday existence.

As The Imagination Gap named, that thinness is not mainly a new doctrine problem — it is a formation consequence. The question this article explores is different: what happened outside the Church while that vacuum was growing?

Because the institutions shaping public life certainly didn’t stop working.

The Vacuum Left When the Church Retreated From Public Storytelling

Christians have an extraordinary history of contributing to the arts, education, literature, architecture, and public life.

For centuries, followers of Jesus established schools, preserved manuscripts, commissioned works of art, composed music, and produced literature that shaped entire societies.

They were far from perfect, and their cultural influence was sometimes entangled with political power. Still, the Christian faith was understood as something with implications for the whole of human existence.

The arts were one place where those implications could be explored.

So what changed?

There wasn’t one moment when the Church collectively decided to abandon storytelling. Nor did every Christian community retreat. Christian artists, educators, writers, and filmmakers have continued contributing to public culture across generations.

But particularly within parts of modern Western evangelicalism, a different posture gradually became influential.

As the surrounding culture changed, some Christian communities became increasingly concerned with protecting themselves from its influence. Those concerns weren’t always misplaced. There were genuine theological disagreements, moral compromises, and cultural movements that deserved serious scrutiny.

The problem emerged when discernment began to take the form of distance.

Instead of developing Christians who could engage the arts with theological depth, creative excellence, and spiritual maturity, some communities became more comfortable teaching people which cultural products to avoid.

We became practiced at identifying what was wrong with a story without giving equal attention to cultivating people capable of telling better ones. And there were consequences.

If serious artistic work is treated primarily as a spiritual hazard, fewer young Christians will see it as a legitimate vocation. If engagement with public institutions is viewed mainly through the possibility of compromise, the next generation may conclude that faithfulness requires staying outside those institutions.

And if the Christian life is increasingly understood as protecting a set of beliefs until heaven, why invest deeply in the cultural practices that shape life here?

As we traced in How the Gospel of the Kingdom Shrunk to Sin Management, a reduced understanding of the gospel leaves less room for the ordinary life of apprenticeship to Jesus.

That reduction had cultural consequences.

The Church did not abandon every medium of communication. In fact, Christians developed extensive publishing, broadcasting, music, and educational networks of their own.

But creating Christian alternatives was not always the same thing as maintaining a formative presence within the wider world.

And that distinction matters.

Who Kept the Stories?

The stories didn’t disappear when Christians became more hesitant about public cultural engagement.

Other people continued writing them, funding them, teaching them, distributing them, and building institutions around them.

Film studios invested in storytellers who understood how to move audiences.

Publishers cultivated writers who could capture the concerns and aspirations of their readers.

Universities and schools shaped generations through their selection and interpretation of knowledge.

Advertising agencies became remarkably skilled at connecting human longing to consumer behavior.

Eventually, digital platforms created an entirely new way to distribute stories, allowing companies to measure attention and continuously adjust what people encountered.

These institutions weren’t all working toward the same goal. They weren’t necessarily united by a common philosophy, much less conspiring to undermine Christianity. They were doing what their respective institutions existed to do. And in doing so, they were helping shape the moral imagination of entire generations.

Think about how a story reaches us.

Long before someone sits down to watch a film, decisions have already been made about which scripts will be developed, who will finance them, what audiences are worth pursuing, and how the film will be promoted.

A young writer has been influenced by teachers, mentors, editors, and other artists. Producers have considered what will attract an audience. Distributors have decided which projects deserve attention.

By the time that story reaches a living room, it has passed through an entire network of people and institutions.

That network has an enormous influence over the stories that become familiar to us.

None of these decisions is spiritually neutral simply because it happens outside a church building.

And Christians participate in these institutions too, often faithfully and creatively. It would be unfair to suggest that everyone working outside Christian institutions is hostile to the Kingdom of God.

The issue is larger than whether individual creators identify as Christians.

It’s whether the Church has taken seriously its responsibility to form disciples who can contribute to these institutions with wisdom, courage, and integrity.

We may have spent considerable energy evaluating the finished stories while paying far less attention to the people and structures responsible for bringing those stories into existence.

Meanwhile, those structures kept developing.

And they became very good at their work.

The Rise of a Parallel Christian Subculture

In one sense, the growth of Christian media was a remarkable accomplishment.

During the second half of the twentieth century, evangelical Christians built a substantial network of bookstores, publishing companies, radio stations, music labels, educational institutions, and television ministries.

Christian families gained access to resources that reflected their convictions. Christian musicians found audiences. Authors who might have struggled to reach readers through traditional publishing channels had new opportunities.

There was genuine ministry taking place.

A 1977 Christianity Today editorial described the rapid growth of Christian bookstores and noted that much of the publishing industry was producing material primarily for people who were already Christians.

By 1992, Christianity Today was describing a multibillion-dollar Christian publishing and media industry while examining the tension between ministry and the demands of a commercial marketplace. Its essay, Two Cheers for Christian Capitalism, raised a concern that remains relevant: businesses must respond to what customers will buy, even when what customers want is not necessarily what they most need.

Over time, an entire parallel cultural ecosystem emerged.

We had Christian bookstores, Christian music charts, Christian films, Christian television, Christian conferences, and Christian merchandise.

Much of this work was sincere, useful, and sometimes deeply formative. But there was an unintended consequence that I think we need to consider.

We developed increasingly sophisticated ways of communicating with ourselves while becoming less practiced at participating in the cultural conversations happening around us.

The Christian label could indicate that a product came from a trusted theological perspective. That was valuable, especially for parents and churches seeking trustworthy resources.

But it could also become a market category.

An artist could build a career almost entirely within the Christian marketplace. A film could be financially successful because churches promoted it to their congregations. A book could reach a substantial audience without ever meaningfully entering the broader literary conversation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with serving Christian audiences. The Church needs music, literature, teaching, and creative works that nourish its own life.

The concern begins when that becomes our primary understanding of Christian cultural participation.

We can end up measuring success by how effectively Christian content circulates among Christians rather than asking whether our people are being formed to live faithfully in the world.

And Christian media is not immune to the pressures of the marketplace simply because it carries a Christian label.

It can reward familiarity over depth, reassurance over difficult truth, and recognizable formulas over artistic honesty. Have you seen a “Christian” film lately? Ugh.

Perhaps the most troubling possibility is that we began to confuse having a Christian version of something with having a Christian vision for it.

Those are not the same.

A Christian film is not faithful simply because it contains biblical language. A novel isn’t spiritually mature merely because its characters attend church. A media company doesn’t necessarily advance the Kingdom because its audience is evangelical.

The deeper concern is the kind of life the work presents as desirable, the account of humanity it communicates, and whether the people creating it are themselves being formed in the way of Jesus.

Without those deeper questions, the parallel culture we’ve created can reproduce many of the same habits as the surrounding culture, merely replacing the packaging.

We may succeed at providing safer entertainment while doing little to cultivate a more faithful way of living.

The Kingdom Is Public and Formative, Not Private and Defensive

There is a striking passage in Jeremiah that speaks to God’s people living within a culture that does not share their covenant commitments.

In Jeremiah 29, the people of Judah are living in exile in Babylon.

They are far from home, surrounded by foreign gods, and living under political authority they did not choose.

God’s instruction through Jeremiah is not what we might expect.

He tells them to build houses, plant gardens, marry, raise families, and seek the welfare of the city where they have been sent.

He even instructs them to pray for that city’s welfare.

These people were not being asked to abandon their identity or assimilate into Babylonian worship. They remained God’s covenant people, called to faithfulness in a foreign land.

But their faithfulness was not meant to take the form of complete withdrawal.

They were to establish lives, cultivate what was good, and contribute to the well-being of their neighbors.

That is a remarkably different posture from treating the surrounding culture as territory to be avoided.

We see something similar in Acts 17.

When Paul arrives in Athens, he is deeply troubled by the city’s idolatry. He doesn’t minimize the spiritual problem or pretend that the competing beliefs around him are harmless.

But he also doesn’t retreat from public life.

He reasons in the synagogue and the marketplace. He engages philosophers. When he speaks at the Areopagus, he demonstrates an understanding of the religious and intellectual world of his listeners, even drawing upon their own poets.

Then he directs their attention toward the God who made the world, calls them to repentance, and proclaims the resurrection of Jesus.

Paul neither accommodates idolatry nor refuses engagement with the people living within it.

His allegiance to Christ is precisely what gives him a reason to enter that conversation.

We should be careful about turning these passages into a simplistic mandate to conquer cultural institutions. Neither Jeremiah nor Paul offers a strategy for Christian market dominance.

What they reveal is a way of inhabiting the world while remaining faithful to God.

This matters because the Kingdom Jesus announced cannot be confined to a private religious experience or a separate Christian marketplace. His reign has implications for the whole of life.

A Christian educator is not serving the Kingdom only when teaching a Bible lesson. The way that teacher approaches truth, treats students, and cultivates their capacity for wisdom matters.

A Christian filmmaker is not exercising a faithful vocation only when producing an explicitly evangelistic film. The way that filmmaker portrays human dignity, suffering, love, justice, sacrifice, and hope matters too. A just as importantly, how that same filmmaker approaches beauty of his creative craft with excellence in the making of that same film has Kingdom implications.

The Church’s responsibility is not to become a substitute film studio, university, or publishing house.

It is to form people who follow Jesus faithfully wherever He has placed them.

That kind of formation will inevitably have public consequences.

Story Became Secular by Abandonment, Not by Nature

There’s an assumption we need to examine beneath a lot of this history.

Somewhere along the way, Christians began speaking as though storytelling belonged primarily to the secular world, while the Church was responsible for communicating spiritual truth.

The distinction can sound almost natural.

The world tells stories. The Church teaches the Bible.

The world produces entertainment. The Church produces religious content.

But Scripture gives us no reason to treat storytelling itself as a secular activity. In fact, it gives us plenty of direction to treat storytelling as sacred.

Human beings tell stories because we remember, imagine, interpret, and seek meaning. We describe what has happened, what matters, what might happen next, and what kind of people we hope to become.

Those capacities belong to our created humanity.

They can certainly be distorted. A story can make evil attractive, disguise falsehood, manipulate desire, or encourage rebellion against God.

But a story can also reveal something true about courage, grief, reconciliation, sacrifice, or the beauty of ordinary faithfulness.

We should not assume that every story produced outside explicitly Christian institutions is devoid of truth. Nor should we assume that every story produced inside Christian institutions is therefore wise or spiritually healthy.

Both assumptions discourage discernment. And neither reflects the biblical conviction that the whole created world belongs to God. That is why I think we need to reconsider what we mean when we call storytelling secular.

Story did not become secular by nature.

In many places, it became secular by abandonment.

Not because every Christian stopped telling stories, but because significant parts of the Church began treating public storytelling as someone else’s responsibility.

We ceded ground that was never outside the scope of Christian vocation in the first place.

And then we were surprised when the stories surrounding us reflected visions of life that differed from the one Jesus calls us to inhabit.

The answer is not to slap a Christian label on more entertainment.

It is to recover a vision of discipleship broad enough to include the people who write, teach, compose, design, produce, publish, and distribute the stories through which a culture understands itself.

Beginning Again: Apprenticeship Over Bunker

I don’t think the answer is for every church to start a media company.

Nor do I think we need another campaign to reclaim Hollywood, dominate education, or take control of cultural institutions.

Those ambitions can easily become substitutes for the very discipleship we’ve been neglecting.

What we need is both simpler and more demanding.

We need to become the kind of people who can live faithfully under the reign of Jesus while participating meaningfully in the world He loves.

That begins with apprenticeship.

It means learning to recognize the stories that are forming our desires, not merely sorting entertainment into categories of acceptable and unacceptable.

It means helping our children develop discernment without teaching them to fear every person or institution outside the Church.

It means taking the vocations of artists, writers, teachers, filmmakers, and other cultural workers seriously, not merely as opportunities to insert Christian messages, but as places where faithfulness, wisdom, and love of neighbor can be practiced.

And it means recognizing that the Church’s deepest cultural contribution will always depend upon the kind of people we are becoming.

A Christian artist can possess enormous technical skill and still be governed by ambition, vanity, resentment, or fear.

A Christian organization can communicate beautiful truths while treating its own people in ways that contradict them.

And a small congregation with no significant media presence can offer a remarkably compelling witness through the ordinary lives of people being formed in the likeness of Jesus.

Our influence is not the same thing as our faithfulness.

The Holy Spirit forms us as we abide in Christ, receive His Word, participate in the life of His Body, and learn to obey Him in the places we’ve been given.

From that life, faithful cultural participation can grow.

Some of it will take the shape of art. Some will happen in classrooms, businesses, neighborhoods, and homes. Some will reach thousands of people. Much of it will never attract public attention.

But it will bear witness to a Kingdom that is already present and a King who reigns over far more than our religious institutions.

Perhaps we can begin by paying closer attention to what forms us throughout the week, who is shaping the stories our neighbors inhabit, and whether we’re preparing the next generation to participate faithfully in those places.

We don’t need to retreat into a separate world to remain faithful to Jesus.

We need to learn how to follow Him in this one.

And as we do, we may discover that the stories were never someone else’s territory to begin with.

At StoryQuest, we’re exploring how a fuller vision of the Kingdom can shape the way we live, create, and participate in God’s world. If these questions are stirring something in you, you’re invited to continue exploring with us.

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Continue the series

The Battle for the Christian Imagination is a fourteen-part series tracing how the gospel of the kingdom narrowed, how moral imagination atrophied as a result, and how the Church can recover an embodied vision of life under God’s reign.

Previous: Two Half-Gospels (Part 5)

Start from Part 1: The Kingdom We Forgot How to Live In

Or follow Zach’s writing on Substack at substack.com/@zacharyleighton for ongoing thinking on moral imagination, formation, and the imagination of the Church.