Are You a Bean-to?

Eugene Peterson believes that the task of being a Christian in our world today is intricately connected to the words that fall from our lips. Whether we preach in front of a community of faith, or offer a word of hope to a co-worker caught in the trappings of addiction and denial, the words we speak are the embodied means by which usher God's grace to this fragmented world.

Peterson thinks that story-telling is one of the most effective ways to do this.

In Tell it Slant, he tells the story of teaching in a graduate program on Jesus' parables. One of the students in the class, Father Tony, talked about the lessons he'd learned about story-telling in raising up leaders in Africa.

"When he [Tony] first began the work, whenever he would find men who were especially bright he would pull them out of their village and send them to Rome or Dublin or Boston or New York for training. After a couple of years they would return and take up their tasks. But the villagers hated them and would have nothing to do with them. They called the returnee a been-to (pronounced bean-to): "He's bean-to Boston." They hated the bean-to because he no longer told stories. He gave explanations. he taught them doctrines. He gave them directions. He drew diagrams on a chalk board. The bean-to left all his stories in the wastebasket of the libraries and lecture halls of Europe and America. The intimate and dignifying process of telling a parable had been sold for a mess of academic pottage. So, Father Brynne [Tony] told us, he quit the practice of sending the men off to those storyless schools," (Tell it Slant, 60-61).

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I'm grateful that most of my education (history, english, and theology) was provided to me by men and women (starting first with my parents) who believed in the power of story.