Never underestimate the power of a well-told story.
The Rev. Adam Bartholomew was converted to biblical storytelling when the Rev. Thomas Boomershine asked him to serve as his audience while he prepared an audiotape of Mark’s Passion narrative as part of his dissertation at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where both were students in the 1970s. First Boomershine read the narrative. Then he told it.
“I was absolutely astonished at the difference. That converted me,” said Bartholomew, a former United Church of Christ minister and now Episcopal priest-in-charge at Church of the Ascension in Mount Vernon, New York .