How to Share the Gospel through Story

When a writer begins a literary or genre story with the agenda, “I want to write a story so my readers hear the gospel and follow Christ,” my response is this: Fabulous! Will Jesus be a central character? Do you intend to improve on the literary arguments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John’s Gospels?

Too many times, authors with this underlying motive create content that resorts to one character preaching to another, without building the proper motive for that character to do so. Rather than the story climaxing in the great truth of Jesus’s saving work as a necessary conclusion to all that has come before, the book becomes a pretext for their agenda.[1] These authors, through storytelling, try to trick the reader into a conversation that might not happen any other way so they can proselytize. God often uses our blemished offerings for good, so I’m certain this method has worked to bring some into the Christian fold. I am also sure this method has cemented the opposition of many others to even opening a faith-themed novel.

Please consider, instead, that any story with a strong literary argument proposing a truth about universal human experience that coincides with the Christian message can illuminate the gospel of Christ. Perhaps the central argument might be grace redeems the humble and brokenhearted (Les Misérables) or unyielding conformity leads to death of the spirit (Dead Poets Society) or sacrificing love conquers death (Harry Potter series) or forgiveness costs the forgiver. All of these moral premises implicitly point to biblical principles and equip the reader for living the good life. Explicit critical discourse, external to the book, can explain the direct link of these principles to the gospel.

It is possible to express more explicit faith claims in your stories, such as belief in Jesus’s saving death and resurrection leads to contentment, but keep in mind you then must make that claim the controlling idea of every element of the story, exploring and exhausting all other possibilities for faith content. You must show logically how this specific faith leads to contentment and nothing else—a challenging but doable task.

Even then, the claim falls short of the gospel that says believing in Jesus’s saving work leads to eternal life. How will you logically and literarily present eternal life as the necessary climax of a story while death still presides over human experience and we cannot see, without eyes of faith, the life beyond? Short of re-creating the resurrection and appearance of Jesus to the disciples, you will have a hard time.

Not even speculative fiction can help here, since any character other than Jesus dying for others and self-resurrecting leads to a belief in the power of someone other than Jesus. You can get close—certainly C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe presents a strong gospel message, though its premise is only voluntary sacrifice of innocent blood breaks the bondage of sin and death and not Jesus’s saving work leads to eternal life. Close, but not the full gospel.

Characters can assume and believe the gospel. The right story situations can provide room for dialogue about faith and the gospel in a way integral to the moral premise. But nothing other than the gospel story itself with Jesus as the central character can prove the gospel literarily. This is what the Bible does, with all its sixty-six books. Shall we improve on what God himself has argued? Everything else can express only a facet of that greatest story ever told.

[1] See my article, “How to Write a Story with a Message.”