Home Pastors Articles for Pastors Has Your Church Lost the Power of Testimony?

Has Your Church Lost the Power of Testimony?

Sometimes we heard stories about how God physically healed, other times there was an emotional healing. Sometimes a child came to Jesus, and other times, after a run of bad luck, bad debt, bad decisions, someone finally got a good job, a chance. Someone else fell in love. It was basic stuff, the stuff of living a life, birth, death, sickness, money, love, family. We’d whisper into the microphone or shout out loud from the back row, and the entire group of us, sitting on folding metal chairs, we’d clap, we’d shout, we’d murmur praises and hallelujahs, yes, brother, I hear you, my sister.

I still feel most at home in the informal, easy camaraderie of the smaller, missional communities of my growing up years. And even though, like most of my generation, I pick and choose from seemingly – incongruous faith traditions to round out my own narrow experience, falling in and out of love with liturgy and the church calendar, with pews and priests, labyrinths and laity, I always come back to the school gym of folding chairs, to the easy egalitarianism, to the worn out and highlighted Bibles, to the passionately informal, hearts-on-fire misfit crew, to the every-one-here-is-a-minister-so-go-ahead-and-pray-with-each-other-for-heaven’s-sake.

I feel at home here because we’ve always been a Church of storytellers. We’re a people of story. When we hang out, we tell stories back and forth, relationship building masquerading as performance art, and we make space for each other to talk up front, around back, in the rows and in the homes. There isn’t anything compelling about an instruction manual, about warranties, about scientific how-to-steps. No, it’s in the story-telling that our hearts are captured, touched, broken, mended, shattered, understood, encouraged, knit together.

Somehow, when I find myself in someone else’s stories, I find God there, too. It’s hard to fight with someone about their own experience so sometimes, even if it jumps my fence, I have to slow my quick judgement, slow my I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong, to give space to the truth that God works and moves in mysterious and unique ways. Even if I disagree with the premise behind it, I can look a soul in the eyes and say, I heard you, I hear you, I honour God at work in you.

I love when faith communities make space for the stories of the people of God. I hope we always make space for the testimony. Not the sanitized three-steps-to-success stories, no, the real ones. Not the properly vetted, people as mascots for evangelicalism. The unpolished, unedited people of God should be heard, we should be listening, we should be speaking, preaching the Gospel of our lives back and forth, not to one-up each other, but to encourage, to testify to the goodness of our God.

He’s saved me.
He’s healed me.
He’s loved me.
Oh, I can testify to this: God is love and love is God and grace covers us all.

I met God one time when you told me why God matters to you, how you love Jesus, and it felt like a holy moment. The only proper response is to slip off my sandals when someone is telling me a story of God, to hold a white hanky and wave it like a white flag, this is holy ground, this glimpse of humanity encountering a holy God in the details of life. It’s basic, yes, universal, elemental. I don’t care if it’s in a home group, a living room, a slick video at a megachurch, an old microphone with an amp under a bridge, a coffee shop conversation, I want you to testify to me of God in your life.

What about it–what’s your story? You can start the practice of Testimony by making a comment below.

This article first appeared at PomoMusings.com.