This is someone's story: the BIAPT conference

Lovely to be in Edinburgh in the sun and at the fine Pollock Halls complex for the annual BIAPT conference. The theme this year is story and narrative. We have a real storyteller telling -so far- traditional stories. And I think that this is a good idea -not to just have academic conversations about story but to be exposed to it.

Interestingly, Mark Cartledge's keynote address on the first afternoon has given us the 'go to' story for the conference so far: "Shane's story". It's an Alpha distributed testimony which is a good example of its genre and people keep using it as a common point of reference. Clearly it has raised questions about selection of narrative threads, power, whose interests are being served by the editing and distribution and indeed commercialisation, coaching and priming.

One of the things that I've found myself commenting on several times so far is the connection between telling our stories and the ministry of spiritual direction. I think this is mostly about the fact that I keep noticing how in telling our story in spiritual direction, we are often integrating new experiences into our narrative or finding /noticing experiences hitherto unintegrated that now gain traction or saliency in the light of our development and so need to find a place in our story. I guess this is analogous to the idea of narrative repair.

Kirsteen Kim spoke about the story of Korean Christianity strating with the the 2007 incident of the kidnapping of a mission team from Korea by the Afghani Taliban and then going behind that story. This was helpful in seeing a story unfold of a nation and its relationship to Christian faith -but I wondered how far it was really helping us to consider story in practical theology and how far it was simply being appropriated as history. Certainly we could begin to unpack the story and identify where other stories and perhaps even counter-stories might lie but I felt we needed to have some more guidance into how to 'take' this as practical theology. None of this is to take away from the actual contribution which was well presented and interesting. I'm merely reflecting (perhaps my own ignorance) that it didn't help me to move forward in understanding story in practical theology.

 Alison Millbank gave a very thought provoking talk about virtue and story as they inform or might inform church and school life. The title was "Ethics of Elfand' -drawing on a GK Chesterton essay of that title but which wrestles with the immanence of transcendent virtues (if I've both understood aright and expressed it in a helpful way). It was a wide ranging talk with many interesting things in it relating to church communities and church (largely) primary schools in relation to a notion of the common good. There seemed to be a paradox in the talk: I thought I heard her to be saying, in effect, that the common good is well-enough understood in the kind of way that Chesterton exposes in his essay because it is something of (my terms) a participation common grace of understanding of good lives -and yet later we are considering how the ends (teloi) of things (needed to define virtues in Aristotelian thinking) can only be understood in traditioned ways. I suspect that the paradox is resolved by recognising that the details of living are affected by teloi even if we can recognise in a more general way what common good might be: our understandings from particular traditions of what human beings are 'for' may nuance or even partly contradict some general understandings. But I'll need to think about that more.

One of the things that I found myself considering has been how little we have heard 'from the front' about narratology and the insights it and related areas of study might have to bring us into how stories 'work'. So I have felt that there has been a bit of a sense of sharing of ignorance where our thinking about story and narrative has not deepened although, I would suspect, a number of people have been able to make further connections between stories and to view theology through story. The shame, though, is that for practical theologians, there has been perhaps too little examination of the way that story is both tool of reflection and object for it.  Interestingly perhaps, for me, the most helpful (in the sense of insightful) aspect of the conference in respect of understanding story has probably been the last session with the storyteller Angela Halvorsen Bogo where she explored the ways that text and story work because they are performance and not simply text and the way that biblical texts contain fossils (this is my way of expressing it not hers) of the fact that they began as storytelling performances.