After much commentary, further clarification...

The whole theologian's writing stories thing was just and idea, a thought, a meditation, a speculation. I was advocating that you all change your lifestyles or anything. Simply giving you something to think about. Perhaps we underestimate the power of stories, how they influence us and change our affections. I want to invest story-telling with a new weightiness, that we may take great care when we tell them.

At any rate, I am rather offended to hear it called "stupid" by a certain unmentioned co-blogger.

So...it was written as a reaction to my participation in a Christmas Musical designed towards evangelical ends, which I found to be silly and uninspiring. Since it was written by the daughter of our elders, I know it wouldn't have been ordinarily staged. But it was, and of course it probably did nothing other then make a certain population of our church feel better about themselves, and also waste valuable time and money.

The interesting thing is that the previous year I had had a similar feeling about a professionally written musical that we staged. I felt like the story itself was long on certain characteristics...how much God loves everybody, how amazing it was that he came to earth, how painful his death was...and short on others...the work accomplished on the cross, the gravity and universality of sin, the helplessness of man. It was utterly inoffensive.

So the remedy, thought I, would be to have a really fine man of God with a good grip of Scripture to write a story. Otherwise, we are wasting our time with an immature understanding.

This got me thinking about secular stories, and how powerful they can be; yet they are not even designed with a pretense of making Christ known.

So there. Think about these two things...

A) Stories are extremely powerful.
B) In the hands of the world, they are marshaled towards worldly ends.

This is primarily geared towards the visual story-telling, which I believe to be inherently more powerful. And David's comments nonetheless, I am attempting to monitor and limit what I take in.