on telling the Story...

excerpt from Telling the Story: Gospel. Mission and Culture by Andrew Walker (pp.13-14)

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"Given these caveats, and granting there is more than one way to tell thea tale, we can identify a the interpretative narrations - the chapters - which then interleaved together to form the grand narrative:

1. Outside time and space there is God who is good and lives in loving and perfect communion as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

2. God calls time and space into existence with the creation of the cosmos out of nothing, and like its creator this universe is also very good.

3. Creation includes the formation of our world, where human beings are made in the image of God. This gives them the power to freely follow God or reject him.

4. Humankind, however, wilfully rebels against God. This results in enmity between people and God and the estrangement of all creation from its source - this is so because human beings, as 'matter made articulate', betray all creation.

5. God takes the initiative to end this estrangement, because his nature is love. First he chose a human tribe, the Jews, and established a special relationship with them in order to to demonstrate his desire to restore communion with the human race. Second, after several hundreds of years of favored treatment, to show that he wishes to extend this special relationship to the whole world, he enters the physical universe through the incarnation of his eternal Son. He is joined to created matter - human nature - in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

6. Jesus achieves God's desires to restore the broken communion between himself and creation through his birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension.

7. During his lifetime, Jesus Christ calls disciples as the authentic witnesses to and co-participators of his work. Through them he institutes a Church, an ecclesia - the people of God. The people of God, in all generations, do not merely follow their founder, but are organically linked to him by divine favour, though not by nature. This is accomplished by the Holy Spirit, who is sent by Jesus from his Father after the resurrection. The Holy Spirit constitutes the church.

8. The people of God, under the Spirit's guidance, are the bearers of the good news of GOd's restoration of the world through Jesus. They are bearers in the double sense that they are guardians of the apostolic 'deposit of faith', and the tellers of the story.

9. The good news will not end like the final chapter of a book, because it is a never-ending story which continues beyond time and space in everlasting communion with GOd. But it will reach its fulfilment at the end of time, when Christ will return in glory so that 'God may be in all'. "

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Taken from:

Walker, Andrew. Telling the Story.  Gospel, Mission and Culture Gospel & Culture. London: SPCK, 1996.