Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, where we help to renew and unify the contemporary church in the ancient gospel.

Today's podcast is a talk by Michael Keller on understanding the stories our culture tells us. It was recorded at our 2025 national conference.

This TGC25 breakout experienced some technical difficulties throughout the recording process. You may notice a few audio and video dropouts throughout the session. The vast majority of the content is still intact, which we hope you enjoy.

Welcome to our session here on understanding the stories that secular culture tells us.

I'm glad that you are here and our time is limited. So I'm going to try to jump straight in.

What I want to do is I'm going to do a little more of an abbreviated presentation to you because I think that there's a value to kind of walk through

and hear some questions apparently I was told that the reception of the mic is limited so if you

just sort of raise your hand when we get to that time and I'll try to call on you and I'll try to

repeat for the recording I think those questions can be heard that time and I'll try to call on you and I'll try to repeat for the recording.

I think those questions can be heard and said and I think it'll be good for all of us.

But I think it's a helpful way to kind of dialogue but also work through some of these stories.

So today, my presentation is about the stories that are around us. The reason why Christianity for a lot of people is not something that they want.

The reason why people are not knocking down our doors to talk to us and ask us about what Christianity is really about and people are indifferent is because people have stories.

Their imagination has already been filled with what we'll call

cultural narratives or stories. We can't actually get to presenting the faith, the story of

Christianity, and every willing to admit and actually understand and become fluent with

the stories that are actually already around us

all the time. What that means then is that people, when I say their stories, I don't believe

some point in their life has to answer fundamental questions about our nature. What does it mean to be

human? What does it mean to do life? Why do I do what I do? What's wrong with the world? What's going to put it right?

Those questions, everyone has to answer, but guess what? Almost all of us in this room, we haven't sat

down over a cup of coffee and actually asked those questions because most of us don't need to ask

...