Our Words Matter
Be careful what you tell yourselves, it just might turn out to be true...
There is a story I have told myself about myself (it comes out in book form next March - I’ll post a link when it’s available for pre-order). You have a story about yourself, too (published or otherwise). So does every congregation, every community, every nation. And here is the thing Harold Johnson, a Cree lawyer and author from northern Saskatchewan, wants us to sit with: our stories aren’t just about reality. They are reality — at least the reality we inhabit and act from.
Johnson argues in The Power of Story,1 the book he finished just before he passed away in 2022, that the most powerful thing human beings do is narrate. We are story-making creatures before we are anything else. The stories we tell — about who we are, what is possible, what has happened to us and what we have done — they build the world we live in. It’s what other Indigenous writers call world-making.
This idea of worldmaking is not a metaphor. It is a claim about how reality works.
I’ve been thinking about this idea of worldmaking alongside Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand’s When Church Stops Working,2 which asks a related question from a different angle: what happens when the story a congregation has been telling about itself — that the church is a community institution that produces belonging, meaning, and civic good — stops being believable, even to the people inside it?
Their answer, as I read it, is that congregations caught in institutional decline are often suffering from a story problem before they are suffering from a resources problem. The narrative of success — attendance metrics, programme vitality, budget health — has become the measure of faithfulness, and when those numbers fall, the only story available is failure. And communities that are narrating themselves as failures make decisions accordingly: they protect what remains, they avoid risk, they stop imagining forward. I see this so often in the church.
Johnson would recognize this immediately. The story is doing the damage. Not the demographics, not the finances… the story.
In the beginning was the Word.
The Gospel of John doesn’t open with a birth or a genealogy. It opens with logos — the generative Word — and makes a claim that became foundational to our tradition: that speech is the medium through which reality comes to be. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. This is not poetry decorating a philosophical point. It is a cosmology: the universe is spoken into being.
Genesis says the same thing from a different time and place. God does not make the world by manipulating pre-existing material. God speaks: Let there be light — and there is light. The word precedes being.
This is also why the prophetic tradition is so generative. The prophets don’t predict the future. They narrate. Isaiah doesn’t merely describe Israel’s situation — he reframes it. The exile that looks like abandonment is, in Isaiah’s telling, the wilderness through which God is making a new way. Do not remember the former things, God says through Isaiah. I am about to do a new thing; do you not perceive it? The community that receives that story differently cannot act the same way. New narrative = new capacity.
Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones is the most visceral. He is commanded to speak to the bones; not to God on behalf of the bones, but to the bones themselves. And in his speaking, they live.
Jesus, when he encounters people, does this constantly. He renames Simon as Peter the Rock; he does this before Peter has done anything remotely rock-like. He calls Zacchaeus down from the tree and announces he is going to his house, narrating a belonging that Zacchaeus has not yet claimed and the crowd has already denied. He says to the woman caught in the story others have written about her: neither do I condemn you; in so saying, he refuses to let their story be the final word.
The incarnation itself is the ultimate form of this reversal; the Word becomes flesh. The story God is telling about the world takes on material, mortal, particular reality. God is fully inhabiting the logic of Johnson’s claim: that if you want to change the world, you have to change the story, and changing the story means getting into it with your whole self.
So, what does this mean for a congregation sitting in a room trying to discern its future?
It means that before you look at the budget, before you commission a demographic study, before you argue about the building — you need to ask: what story are we telling about ourselves, and is it true?
Not, “is it accurate?” Accuracy is a low bar. Stories can be accurate and still not be true in the deeper sense; they might still not be life-giving, still not be adequate to the God who is doing a new thing.
Here are some stories I hear congregations telling. And beside each one, a different story — not a denial of difficulty, but a different narration of the same circumstances They are stories that we can reframe about the same situation:
Story: We’re dying. We used to have two hundred people; now we have forty. Reframe: We have been burying our people. For decades, this congregation has accompanied its members to death — has held vigil, spoken eulogies, carried casseroles, sat with the bereaved. The people who are gone are not a metric of institutional failure. They are the beloved dead. And the forty who remain are not a heroic remnant who “chose” to stay — they are, in many cases, survivors of loss, people who have continued to show up in the aftermath of grief, sometimes their own.
Which raises a different question than how do we grow back to what we were. It raises: what does it mean to be a community that knows how to grieve? That has practice with mortality and loss and continuing anyway? That is not nothing. In a culture that will do almost anything to avoid sitting with death, a congregation that has learned to do exactly that has something to offer — if it can name that as a gift rather than only a wound.
Story: Nobody wants to come to church anymore. Reframe: Lots of people are hungry for exactly what the church at its best offers — community, meaning, honest reckoning with mortality and love and justice. The question is whether what we’re offering matches that hunger, or whether we’re so focused on getting people to come to our thing that we’ve stopped asking what they’re actually looking for.
Story: We can’t afford to do that. Reframe: We are choosing to prioritize other things. Which is fine — prioritization is legitimate. But naming it as a choice rather than a constraint opens the question back up: is this what we want to be choosing?
Story: We need to attract young families. Reframe: Whose story is that? Many congregations have told themselves this story for thirty years and spent enormous energy trying to be attractive to a demographic that wasn’t asking to be attracted. Meanwhile, the people actually showing up — elderly, single, differently abled, living alone, seeking community across generations — have been treated as consolation prizes rather than the actual community God has gathered.
Story: We’re not relevant anymore. Reframe: Relevant to what, exactly? To a culture organized around productivity and consumption and individual preference? Perhaps irrelevance to that is not the problem. Perhaps it’s the beginning of a different kind of witness.
None of these reframes are easy. And in his book, Johnson is clear on this: you cannot simply decide to believe a new story. Stories have weight. They are held in place by decades of repetition, by institutional memory, by grief and loss. Choosing a different story is less like changing your mind and more like learning a new language — it takes practice, it takes community, it takes something that functions a lot like grace.
But this, I would argue, is one of the things the church exists to do. Not to hand people a set of correct propositions about God. Not to be a well-functioning community institution. But to practice, together, a different story about what is real — about what human beings are worth, about what the future holds, about whose voices matter and what kind of world is possible, about a God who shows up and acts in the world.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The prophets spoke to dry bones and they lived. Johnson narrates a world where the stories we choose have the power to remake reality.
Our words matter.
What story are you telling? And is it the truest one you know how to tell?
Harold R. Johnson, The Power of Story: On Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era (Biblioasis, 2022).
Andrew Root & Blair Bertrand, When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation beyond More Money, Programs, and Innovation (Brazos Press, 2023).
have read Johnson's book. Agree with you that it is a "must read". Very readable. Lots to think about - democracy/rules/rotating leadership (not so doable on 'global' scale but NB for smaller (church type settings). Thank you.