The Bible is basically and overall a narrative, an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative. Stories hold pride of place in revealing God and God's way to us. It follows that storytellers in our Christian community carry a major responsibility for keeping us alert to these stories and the way they work.
There is a reason for the appropriateness of story as a major means of bringing us God's Word. Story doesn't just tell us something and leave it there; story invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story.
Of course, not all stories are good; some lack honesty. There are sentimentalizing stories that seduce us into escaping form life; there are propagandistic stories that attempt to enlist us in a cause or bully us into stereotyping responses; there are trivializing stories that represent life as merely cute or diverting.
The Bible's honest stories respect our freedom; they don't manipulate us, don't force us, don't distract us from life. They show us a spacious world in which God creates and saves and blesses. They invite us in an participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, in something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions.
We don't live our lives by information. We live them in relationships in the context of a community of men and women - each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire, and of personal God, who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation.
When we lose touch with our lives, our souls - our moral and spiritual, our God-personal lives - story is the best way of getting us back in touch again.
Maybe it is because Scripture comes to us so authoritatively, "God's Word," that we think all we can do is submit and obey. Submission and obedience are part of it, but first we have to listen. And listening requires hearing the way it is said (form) as well as what is said (content). Stories suffer misinterpretation when we don't submit to them simply as stories.
Spiritual theology, using Scripture as text, does not so much present us with a moral code and tell us, "Live up to this," nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, "Think like this." The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, "Live into this - this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being."
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