These are the slides which accompanied a workshop I gave at St. Paul Lutheran in Denver, CO during the 2015 Festival of Homiletics.

1. sharing faith digitally in the 21st century
festival of homiletics
12 may 2015
denver, co
slideshare.net/maryhess1

2. a few caveats…
• situatedness
• limited focus
• slides available online
(slideshare.net/maryhess1)

3. “Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of
good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O
Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not
fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”

5. big idea in faith sharing in digital cultures:
TRUST GOD

6. but how? and why?

7. it’s all about story…

9. “dances up the ladder from information to
knowledge to wisdom”

10. “a great story invites an expansion of
understanding, a self transcendence…”

11. “more than that, it plants a seed which makes it
impossible to do anything but grow in
understanding…”

12. there are stories all around us…

13. competition? or apprenticeship?

14. wonder with me about story spaces that are digital

15. a paradox exists:
the public performance of hatred and an
unprecedented opportunity to experience freedom
are both present in digital cultures
Michael Wesch

16. self enclosed stories?

17. expansive, connected stories?

18. how might we climb up the ladder, and help to
practice knowledge that might lead to wisdom in our
stories?
where are we doing that already?

19. five practices for living in the tragic gap
• an understanding that we are all in this together
• an appreciation of the value of otherness
• an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways
• a sense of personal voice and agency
• a capacity to create community
Parker Palmer

20. take the example of games…

21. four dynamics we’re learning from games
• urgent optimism
• weaving a tight social fabric
• blissful productivity (optimized to do hard meaningful
work)
• epic meaning
Jane McGonigal

22. do you see the common resonances?
and what about our faith in the midst?

23. what’s theological about games?
EVERYTHING!

24. urgent optimism
• God “knit me together in my mother’s womb?” (Ps 139)
• “Notice how the flowers grow. They do not toil or spin.
But I tell you not even Solomon in all his splendor was
dressed like one of them.” (Luke 12:27)
• we understand that death is not final, that we are
baptized into death precisely because we are thus drawn
deeply into life everlasting

25. tight social fabric
• how tight is a community which values the widow, the
orphan, the immigrant, the child?
• how tight a social fabric is woven when we understand
that those who mourn, those who are weak, those who
hunger and thirst for righteousness — are blessed?
• Hannah’s song, Mary’s song — “God has thrown down
the rulers from their thrones, but lifted up the lowly. The
hungry he has filled with good things, the rich he has sent
away empty.” (Luke 1:46-55)

26. blissful productivity
• optimized to do hard meaningful work — our nagging
suspicion that the Protestant work ethic is a bleak way to
be in the world needs to be replaced by Frederick
Buechner’s affirmation that vocation is where your deep
joy and the world’s deep needs intersect…
• blissful productivity is woven deeply into notions of the
priesthood of all believers, into profound understandings
of vocation
• think of children! (Matthew19:14, Luke 18:16)

27. epic meaning
• can we imagine a story more epic than that of God’s
relationship with God’s people over eons?
• Creation, the Exodus, the Covenant at Sinai, the
Promised Land, Davidic rule, Jesus’ life and death and
resurrection
• we hold within our hands and our hearts stories and
practices that are a moral compass of the sort Maria
Popova speaks

28. but where have these factors gone in our practices
as Christians?

29. perhaps….
• can we learn how to “hold lightly” in the best sense of
that phrase? can we learn to rely on God’s overwhelming
love to hold us, to free us to take the risks necessary to
mend the ruptures in our social fabric?
• can we learn how to live in repentance and the promise
of forgiveness? can we embrace the joy that comes from
trying and failing? the “do overs” of life?
• here is where our doctrine of the Trinity helps!

31. believe
create
share

32. let’s explore a bit with each other…
let’s try some “what ifs?”

33. what if God is all around us, communicating with
us even — perhaps mostly! — in the midst of
digital cultures?

34. what if….
try reading this commercial through your
theological lenses

36. turn to your neighbor and see if you can find a way
to talk about an “and” move as you think about
what it means to be Christian…
what would an “and” move look like if we were
using Christian stories to talk about it?

37. what if
we could use social media to weave a more tight
social fabric? what could that look like?

39. turn to your neighbor and talk about something
you’ve encountered via social media that has
helped to shape your sense of the social fabric

40. what if
we could find ways to enter digital culture that
create and draw upon blissful productivity?

42. turn to your neighbor and share a story
about a time when you found yourself
being blissfully productive…
(doesn’t have to be in church!)

43. we need to work on sharing our stories, and digital
culture invites us to do so in myriad ways

44. our religious communities need to share stories
that claim experiences which we don’t otherwise
have language for, and have to help us find a moral
compass in doing so

45. joy, mercy, forgiveness

46. sin, sorrow, repentance

47. hope

48. how will we “story” ourselves and the church?
how will we invite people into epic meaning-making
adventures?

52. we also need stories that transform our
perspectives, that reframe our taken-for-granted
views, that help us to “re-contextualize” in the face
of context collapse

55. resources for image and sound
• which images will you use? (flickr, google)
• which sounds/music? (freesound, sound cloud)
• look for creative commons licensed resources

56. creation tools
• tackk.com
• animoto.com
• story corps app
• adobe voice app
• magisto app
• iMovie at Apple

57. sharing tools
• youtube.com
• vimeo.com
• slideshare.com
• storify.com

58. so now we have tools to use, and metaphors to
play with, how do we elicit stories?
how do we listen carefully?

59. storytelling resources
• storyingfaith.org
• digital storytelling wiki
• art of hosting
• liberating structures
• public conversations project
• respectful conversations project

60. projects done by local churches…
• MN Episcopal Story Project
• Bethlehem Lutheran
• StoryingFaith.org

61. believe
create
share
storying faith
• keep in mind the mystery of
the Trinity
• stories need encouragement to
emerge
• working on creating stories
supports faith formation
• reach out to learn, to hear
stories that are not your typical
stories

62. Q & A

63. image and photo credits
(underlined citations are urls)
Time Magazine covers
CEDA model (Julian Stodd)
anglican “in” language
complimentary rules cartoon
denominational purity
Banksy stained glass window
hands earth
joy (diana robinson)
forgiveness (len matthews)
may my soul note rest (eperales)
repentance (vince42)
hope tree (hartwig hkd)
peace dove (stuart williams)
trinity circle (action bronson)
all other photos and images by mary hess

64. video credits
future of storytelling
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjoO6Y29f7I)
be together not the same
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD-oCSoI9OQ)
racism is real
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTcSVQJ2h8g)
apple: the song
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRsPnzcZ1VY)
the Syrophoenician woman
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAl--5UKaPc)
an unexpected Christmas
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY)
poetry slam quarter finals
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv00xjClbx0)
“cuz he’s black”
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Wf8y_5Yn4)

65. more info:
mary hess
meh.religioused.org
these slides live at:
http://www.slideshare.net/maryhess1/