story priority: how to change lives using the 468 jesus narratives

The first apostles relied on different spiritual content than we practice. They were laser focused on the life and stories of Jesus.

To our credit, we have grabbed the grand purposes of Jesus’ life in our teachings, but the first followers grabbed the details from each story of his life. The minutiae of his life talked louder

to them than it does to us. The Jesus Stories consumed them and flowed into their conversations, preaching, evangelism, and discipleship.

In 2007 our historic church in Seattle felt directed by the Spirit to open dinner churches throughout the city. These dinners were modeled after the New Passover Jesus tables used by the

early church throughout the first 300 years of Christianity. Very quickly these dinner rooms started to fill up with secular people. It was remarkable. Soon we were spreading these Jesus tables from one neighborhood to the next and were engaging with a multitude of unreached neighbors most evenings of the week. From that tableside vantage point, we observed the surprising power of the Jesus Stories to capture the imagination of secular people and draw them toward Christ. Realizing we were not engaged in an innovation but rather in a recovery project, we started focusing our spiritual content on the Jesus Stories like the apostles of the first church. We learned very quickly that secular, agnostic, and even atheistic people enjoyed talking about the life of Christ.

from the Introduction