A STORY TOO LITTLE KNOWN
Telling their story was part of the way of life God gave to ancient Israel. Parents were to recount to their children and grandchildren what he had done for his people in a previous generation (eg Exod 10:2; Deut 4:9). In such Psalms as 78 and 105-107 the Israelite people recited basic elements of their early history. All this was to help them understand who they were, and observe the terms of their unique covenant with the Lord. The story of their nation and the story of their religious life were one and the same, of course: they didn’t separate sacred from secular, as we tend to.
There was a time too, not so long ago, when we used to tell our story. As a young naval officer, newly come to faith (in 1971), several of those who discipled me were diligent to teach me the Christian story of my nation as well as what the Bible had to say. That kind of thing is rare now, and life for believers the poorer for it. These days a lot of Christian leaders wouldn’t have a sufficient grasp of either the history of the Church or the story of their nation to be able to teach them to others. To be fair, these accounts I’m referring to – of the Church’s and nation’s past – were often more myth (the story we wanted to tell about ourselves) than history. The British national myth, as communicated to me from childhood onwards, wherever I learned it, was too often about our privileged past and our superiority over other, lesser peoples (!). Quite apart from this, I was to discover in adulthood, each part of the Church had its own myth too. Partly the story was told to maintain a strong sense of identity for whichever group we happened to belong to (in my case, the Protestant evangelicals). Partly it was told in an attempt to disqualify other groups (in particular I was warned of the dangers of Catholicism and theological liberalism).