[00:00:00] Jeremy Pryor: Hey guys, welcome to the 1000 houses podcast. I'm really excited about today's episode. We, do a deep dive on what is the story from life. This has been a transformational, course that we've been developing for the last, at least 15 years, I think.
[00:00:12] So I have a conversation with Justin about the origin of the story from life, and then he gets into, at the very end, how you could be a part of it, how you can jump into one of these if you're interested. So, I'd love for you guys to hear more about this, so take a listen and let us know if you would like to be a part of this.
[00:00:26] The website, if you want to learn more, is storyformlife. org. so go to storyformlife. org and let them know, if you're interested in, jumping into one of these intensives or bringing Storyform Life to your city. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. I'm here with Justin. Justin's going to ask me some questions about this amazing thing called the story form life. So Justin, you take it away.
[00:01:28] Justin Wolfenberg: Yeah, many years ago, 15 years ago, I was sitting in a room with you, had no idea what to expect about this thing, story form life.
[00:01:36] And I took it based on a recommendation from my boss saying, you need to take this thing. And about halfway through it, I realized it was going to change my entire life. And I had been through quite a few Bible studies at that point. And something was different about this. And I know kind of God birthed this out of you and some other people early on.
[00:01:56] So I'm curious from your perspective, how would you describe what this story form life is and what's the history of it?
[00:02:04] Jeremy Pryor: Yeah. So yeah, to describe what it is, I think about it as. a opportunity to Go over the entire story of the bible. What is its main? The main elements of the story the main chapters of the story and then just like taking a big step back and seeing the whole Thing a lot of times people christians.
[00:02:24] We're sort of always in the trees. We don't see the forest, right? We don't see the larger story and I can really have a impact on our faith, where there are just major gaps in the way that we think about who God is, who Jesus is, what is the story. Sometimes we don't actually, we're not actually formed by the story.
[00:02:41] We're formed by, really almost a religion of like practices. And so what a lot of times people experience going through the story from life is, the weight of their faith starts to shift and rest on the story itself. And people aren't prepared for what that does to their faith. and so it could be a very, dramatic experience of deepening.
[00:03:02] And that was definitely my experience. So where did this come from? this really came from, the experience that I had In Bible college, really around trying to understand the nature of the Bible, like really trying to understand the, I wanted to have a really deep faith and understanding of what the Bible is all about.
[00:03:22] And I had a professor, Ray Lubeck, who began to talk about the, this, the Bible from the perspective of story that we are in this, what he, he talked about as a meta narrative. And I think one of the things that I couldn't really understand as sort of a kid. Growing up was what is the significance of the Old Testament?
[00:03:41] There's a lot of stories in the Bible why is the Bible written the way it's written and Oftentimes I found that we were zeroing in on like very specific verses mostly from the epistles You know real kind of propositional truth statements that were true and helpful But didn't really make sense of the other 80 percent of the Bible so while I was going through that experience and Um I found my faith just getting deeper and deeper and deeper.
[00:04:10] I just started falling in love with the Bible and thinking, wow, God is such a good God. He gave us this story that was designed to create this very solid, foundation to our faith. And so I had that experience initially where my faith was really getting centered on the story itself. but I had the luxury of really getting to experience that in Bible college and seminary.
[00:04:33] after having learned from that professor, I went and spent a season learning from him. The professor who taught him this stuff, this guy named John Sailhammer. and so, the next, 10 to 15 years of my life, I walked around with this foundation to my faith, but I'd never given that away to anybody else.
[00:04:51] and it was really a hard one. I, I'd spent years, learning to see the Bible this way. And, What really started to shift for me was, we were a part of a house church, and this missionary from China got a hold of us and said, Hey, I love that you guys are in a house church, and I think the thing that's really amazing about that is that it allows you to really invest in, in disciple making and training disciples.
[00:05:15] And I was like, Oh, that's, that's, yeah, exactly. That's, that's a big part of it. He said, can we talk about that? I just, I'm curious how you guys do that. And I'm like, Yeah. So we went out to lunch with him. So me and Stephen Morey went out. And had lunch with this guy, and he opened up to Matthew 28, and he said, Okay, so this is saying that part of discipleship is to teach them to obey everything I've commanded you.
[00:05:35] So this is sort of like repeatable training. How do you guys do that? And we were just like, well, we don't really do that. We, we just do all this, like, life on life. We're just hanging out with each other. We're trying to build community. We're trying to go deep in relationship, and he just really got more and more aggressive, like, hey, that's not What this is telling us to do, this is saying that there is something that is deep in your faith that you need to give away to somebody else, and, and both Steve and I are really convicted by this.
[00:06:01] I remember then saying to him, okay, well why don't you come over to my house, and I just want to see somebody do this. Like, this is, seems really great, so, and something that I guess we're not really obeying. So I invited about 15 people over and this guy came over and he proceeded to offend all my friends.
[00:06:19] And it was like, actually a really hard experience. Um, I remember one of my close friends who had, you know, pretty thick skin. When he left that night, he just said, Hey, Jeremy, just want you to know, if you invite that guy back again, I'm not coming. And I'm like, Whoa, that was really discouraged. Honestly.
[00:06:35] I felt very convicted. Like I need to learn how to do this. I need to learn how to. Take what's in my faith and repeatedly, create a process where other people can catch that. And I was excited to have learned from this guy, but I had to call him and say, Hey, I guess our group's over.
[00:06:50] no one's willing to come back. I appreciate, the time. and so I kind of spent about a month just personally trying to answer this question. What's at the foundation of my faith? And do I have a tool that would give that away to somebody else? And so I began to just. really explore the contours of my foundation, and I just immediately ran into this, which was, I am a disciple because I believe the story is true, and to the extent that I understand the story, and I'm founding my life on the story, I tend to be a more obedient disciple, a more well rounded dis My faith is really founded on truth.
[00:07:29] And to the extent that I'm not believing the story, I don't know the story, I don't trust the story, I don't trust what the scriptures are saying, I find myself really struggling as a disciple. But that is the foundation of my faith. So, my initial assumption was that everyone would Make their own sort of foundational training like that.
[00:07:49] Maybe that's something that everybody does So I wrote my foundational training and called it a Story-Formed life and originally it was eight eight sessions And I called a friend of mine and I said, hey, could we I'm trying to build this out Would you be willing to go through this just so I can experience this?
[00:08:03] Maybe we go to coffee shop once a week and I can take you through it. And he said, oh actually I've got four friends I'd love to do this to go through that, you know, with me. So that was the first group, and it was eight weeks, and we kind of just did this sort of midrash, this very interactive study where I just kind of took the story of scripture, grabbed a bunch of passages that kind of represented each of these eight elements of the story, and took this group through it, and I was totally surprised, honestly, at the level of impact it had.
[00:08:35] I was like, oh, this, you know, this is another Bible study. but I kept on getting the feedback, no, this isn't, there really isn't just another Bible study. like, something fundamentally shifted. One of the elements that was super deep as a part of the foundation of my faith was the decision to confess Jesus as Lord, for example.
[00:08:52] And so we decided to make that kind of the fulcrum, or the fork, Where we are kind of driving people towards, as they're believing the story, all of a sudden the story starts to implicate them. And so now you need to make a decision. do you want to make this confession? Like, so there's these story elements, but there's also like your response to the story.
[00:09:12] And so that was a critical part of it. And so, I started taking different groups through it, and then Stephen went through it, and there was a, a lot of these elements were very similar to deep parts of his faith, although he, he said, look, there's another element to my faith, which is, you know, our identity as, like adopted sons and daughters of, of God.
[00:09:34] and so he, I said, well, in our next oral forum life, why don't you, why don't you, you know, put that as one of the, and let, let me go through that part of your foundation. And so Stephen took the next group, through an adoption week.
[00:09:48] and then we decided that at the, at the time creation in the fall, we're actually smashed together in one week. you can imagine now as you go through story from life, that's probably not a great idea. There's so much there. So then we separated those two weeks. And so that turned it into a 10 week, experience.
[00:10:04] and then ultimately we also added the covenant week as we felt like there was like a real. We kind of went straight from the, the Old Testament, the Fall, into the New Testament. So we wanted to add that. So now it's, you know, usually a 10 or 11 week process for most people that go through it. But that's how it started.
[00:10:21] And then from there, I continue to be surprised over the course of the next two or three years. Like when, I, Ended up at the church, Justin, you were serving at and the, couple of teaching pastors asked to go through it. I thought their response was going to be, this is so basic. Like, I can't believe we're spending time doing this.
[00:10:40] and so I took them through it and they were just like, Wow, this is so transformational I think also just how little We actually invest in the foundations of people's lives. There's sort of like a way in which we assume that, look, you, you go to church, they're going to preach on some random topic, or they're going through a book of the Bible, whatever the process is, it's not that friendly to like a systematic, like let's take a big step back and actually understand the big picture.
[00:11:09] oftentimes people just never had that experience. And so they're left basically trying to piece. They're faced together like a puzzle, and they don't have, the picture of the whole puzzle, so they don't actually know what they're building. and what Story From Life seems to do is it gives people like, no, this is what you're building, this is what the whole story is all about, and if you have that, Now all the things you're learning kind of, slot into these spaces, these buckets.
[00:11:35] And so what we begin to realize was that faith is not necessarily our deepening our walk with the Lord, deepening our faith is not necessarily rooted in learning new things, like constantly having encounters with new pieces of knowledge. Oftentimes growth looks like is believing something at a deeper level.
[00:11:57] And so oftentimes we'll say in story from life, you know, like Okay, yeah, you've heard this before, but do you actually believe it? So on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you believe it? You know, an example we use a lot is in Genesis 1, it says we're made in the image of God and that our value as human beings is rooted and established and founded on this image bearing that we get to do as, as image bearers of God.
[00:12:21] So a lot of times Christians have heard that they've heard a sermon where that's been described, but then we asked the question on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you really believe it? And the way you discover how deeply you believe something is not to ask yourself an intellectual question like, do I think this is true?
[00:12:38] But to ask yourself more of a question like, how does this impact my life, my emotions? Like, and, and so you, you actually have to discover how much you believe something. And so what a lot of people discover is that on a scale of one to 10, they believe that their value is founded on the image of God.
[00:12:54] They might believe that at like a two, you know, and they believe other things at like an eight, you know, I am. You know, my identity when I, at work. I am my appearance. I am what other people think about me. these are much deeper beliefs in the same category. that's where you, people think they get their value from.
[00:13:14] And so, what we began to discover is that, People started wanting to go through a story from life over and over again to teach it and what was actually happening to them was their faith, these dials, these like scales of 1 to 10, their, their depth of faith was increasing every time they would go through it or every time they would take another group through it.
[00:13:33] And so they were, you know, at a 3, then a 4, then a 5, and then all of a sudden their faith in this truth would somehow, eclipse their belief in this other, other, you know, lie, really. And As soon as that occurred, this transformation would happen to their lives. And, and, and so, and that really was what Jesus said, you know, that's why he never said, oh, you of little knowledge.
[00:13:56] He said, oh, you of little faith. He was always frustrated, when he was frustrated with his disciples, with the fact that they were really wrestling with a level of belief. and so, that's always been confusing to me until I started seeing this process play out. Like play out as we were leading more and more people to the story from life.
[00:14:14] Justin Wolfenberg: Yeah. Thank you, Jeremy. And I heard a couple of big themes there. Like one is the big picture of the story versus slices that we've heard. And that was way different. I'd never had stepped back and look at the whole story. And then the other piece you were describing is this idea of we're actually driven by our beliefs, not our knowledge.
[00:14:34] Yeah. And that was also very different for me. And that dial thing really was helpful. And then one of the other things that really started to come out to me as we were doing this is that we, and you say the word story, and one of the ways we talk about it is the Eastern or the Hebraic way of thinking.
[00:14:51] Like that was one of those things I was like, Oh, yeah. Oh my, this is like a new language, a new lens to read the Bible versus the way I've always done it, or we're traditionally taught is like the Western or the Greek way, which was very logical and individual and rational.
[00:15:05] And then it's like, But there is such a difference when you're like, what are the themes? What are the values? What are the meanings that drive so deep in the story? And they lead you in totally different places. And so much more of the Bible becomes relevant to every aspect of our life. I just couldn't believe how it hit me.
[00:15:23] from a business standpoint, from a father standpoint, from a church standpoint, from every aspect of my life was impacted by the story where I thought there was like these categories of my spiritual life in one side and, and these things there. And so there was really, there was, you know, many, many things that make it so different.
[00:15:41] I've walked through this with people who have been to have PhD in seminary and they're rocked. And I've watched people who have never read the Bible. Walk through it and they're rocked. I mean, it, it's a very challenging and foundational and like, from your experience, when you got to like soak in something, it's like, that was a rare, you know, no one does that, or at least very, very few people.
[00:16:05] So it was a real profound, gift for me. and then I started leading them and I just saw lives change. I think I've been leading them now for 15 years and I'll run into people who I led them seven years ago. And they'll walk over and give me a hug and start crying and say, That story form life changed me, you know, and that's when I was like, wow, okay.
[00:16:27] This isn't the latest fad. We're on the new book, following the new author. It's like seven, eight, 10 years later, we're seeing people's lives and not perfect, but on it should be. different trajectory. And that gives me such, you know, as we're doing this and, and I like how I always describe it. This doesn't answer every question of the Bible, but it does set the foundation that a community, a couple can build upon it.
[00:16:53] And so you set this up where it's like, let's start here. And then the foundation you're building upon is way, way more stronger. I've seen marriages turn and get on fire just because they were both Christians, both doing things, but they became unified, with a stronger foundation and things changed.
[00:17:13] so I, I've become a really big believer in it. And one of the things I like to use as an example about like a story is in the American story. I always like to contrast maybe the American Christian story for the biblical. And I often will ask my group. I said, what, what, you know, what happens if you get a gray hair, especially a woman, what happens if a woman gets a gray hair and everyone goes, it's a crisis, it's the worst day of her life.
[00:17:40] You know, they're all like, we dye her hair, you know, and it's a pretty universal experience and a very negative thing, but then I asked the question, I say, what does the Bible say? Say about gray hair. And it says, you know, and most people honestly don't know. Very few do. But occasionally someone will say, Oh, it's a crown.
[00:17:59] It's a crown of righteousness that comes out of Proverbs. And, and I say, you know, these two stories are very different. Like, why would you hide in your crown? and I just asked the question, like, how does that happen? set us up how we treat and value old people in our culture. and those two stories split very differently.
[00:18:16] One is like, how do we get rid of them? They have no value. The best part of their life is over with. And A Crown of Righteousness Greyhair paints this story Of like someone who's valued and honored and that is that that alone changed how I treated my parents and now how my kids treat their grandparents.
[00:18:36] Those are totally different stories, that I wouldn't have gotten out of kind of the American Christian story. And that's just one example of many, many, many things that that drives deep in this. And so we are now, taking the story form life. And we actually have weekend experiences up for last 20 years.
[00:18:57] It's always been an 11 week experience, with some variations, 10, 11 weeks. And now we actually have a weekend experience. And right now we're doing two a year in Cincinnati where you come and you immerse yourself, you get to stay with a local Cincinnati family. You get to. have dinner with them. You get to have a Shabbat meal with them.
[00:19:18] You get to ask them real questions. You get to see their kids run around and then you get to go through the story form life in a weekend. And we designed that intentionally for people out of town. We were like, we can't take an 11 week experience and we just didn't feel called to do it online. It's just not the same.
[00:19:37] And so now we have this weekend experience where we can even go to other cities. Like this year I'm already going to two other cities and doing it with more coming. And so as people are listening and hearing this and going, man, how do I get this as a tool in my tool belt? I feel like it's a must have.
[00:19:53] If you are going, I want to build a community, I want to build a family. I want these things to be happening. How do I get on the same page? How do we talk about our faith in a way that grounds us and unifies us? I have found no better tool than the story form like, yeah,
[00:20:09] Jeremy Pryor: absolutely. it's so exciting to see you guys expand this and these intensives in Cincinnati are awesome.
[00:20:14] there's a group that I'm trying to start, an intensive in Austin, Texas in a few months. if anybody's down there interested, I love the way you guys have been developing it. Steve and Maury did an incredible job of setting up Storyform Life and getting it to this place.
[00:20:28] Then Justin, you and Brad Gruber and Tim Schmoyer and, you know, your whole team has come around and really it's amazing. I do think that we need to have a foundation laying tool. I'm convinced that when Paul would go into a city, he would have a tool like this, apostolic tool, to like lay a foundation, he describes this in 1 Corinthians 3.
[00:20:48] and that this, this is a critical part of somebody's faith journey, and so not having that, not experiencing that, and I think there's others, like the Alpha Course is an example of like, in this genre, a foundation laying tool that I went through, I was really influenced by. Before I started, to develop the story from life.
[00:21:04] And so this is to me The alpha course was a little bit on that greek side in my kind of experience, I learned a ton from it But I was like, I think you know, I think that we need to try a little bit more of a hebraic Approach to this foundation laying and I feel like, you know, making it more story oriented making sure we're starting with creation And like building up this whole foundation.
[00:21:28] Why is the bible written the way it is? I want people to really to trust, not just the words that are in the Bible, but even like the topics the Bible chooses to focus on and sort of even the chronology of the Bible. Like the, the, the things that it likes to introduce first, second, third, like we wanna, we wanna be aware the Holy Spirit was a part of all of that.
[00:21:46] And I think there's a intentional reason for it. And so we just, we wanna have that experience and yeah, you could do this over the course of, you know, a year or two years if you, if you have the privilege of going after Bible college. But for most of us, we, we need to have something that's, that's, Actually canned Just logistically fit into our lives.
[00:22:02] And I think that the 11 week story from life journey was really that, that for those of us living in Cincinnati, but for people out of town, being able to get this in a weekend intensive is like a life altering experience. And then you'll have this tool in your tool belt that you could use in your city for the years to come.
[00:22:18] and you get the support from Justin and the whole team. So, yeah, I love where this tool is headed. And I think we're still learning how to wield it in a way that is more and more helpful for people. so yeah, super excited about what you guys are doing and where it's at now.
[00:22:33] Justin Wolfenberg: Yeah. Thank you, Jeremy for everything with that and continuing to steward that. the last thing I'll say is like the Bible starts with the line, in the beginning. You know, it's like that, that tips you that it's a story. if you want more in the notes, there will be the story form life website where you can get up to date where the next intensives are, or if you want to reach out to me, that will be in the notes as well to say, Hey, come, come to our city.
[00:22:57] You, you get 12 to 16 people who are hungry and can give a weekend. We'd love to come and bring the story form life to you.
[00:23:04] Jeremy Pryor: Very cool.
[00:23:06] Justin Wolfenberg: Cool. Thank you, Jeremy. I appreciate your time and everything.
[00:23:08] Jeremy Pryor: Awesome.
