Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm Brandon Vot, the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Have you ever wanted to be a better evangelist? Have you ever wanted to more convincingly convey the gospel?

Well, so you're going to love this new course inside the Word on Fire Institute titled The Five S's of Effective Evangelization, The Five S's of Effective Evangelization.

It's taught by Elizabeth Scalia, who is the editor at large at Word on Fire.

And in this course, she walks us through the five S's of Effective Evangelization, namely storytelling, scripture, sacraments, saints, and small moments.

Today, we share the first lesson from that course on storytelling. And Elizabeth explains how storytelling is a foundational action upon which everything has always been built.

And therefore, an evangelist must be an effective storyteller and Elizabeth shares how to do that.

So we hope you enjoy this sample from our course on the five S's of Effective Evangelization.

Sit back and I'll turn you over now to Elizabeth Scalia talking about storytelling. Enjoy.

Hi, I'm Elizabeth Scalia, editor at large at Word on Fire and a content editor for the Word on Fire Institute.

And I'm here to talk about some of the essential ingredients that go into the making of a great evangelist. And one of those happy coincidences that occur sometimes, all of these ingredients begin with the letter S, which makes them easy to remember, right?

It almost suggests a spiritual synergy that we might call serendipitous.

The five S's that go into making a great evangelist are storytelling, scripture, sacraments, saints, and small moments. There is a sixth S we should keep in mind, and that would be spirituality, which if I've done this right, it will be communicated to you through all five of these lessons.

Today we'll be talking about the importance of storytelling, the foundational action upon which everything from families to cultures to productive societies to the life of faith has always been built since Eden and our earliest stories.

I mean storytelling predates reading and writing. It probably predates speech itself. I imagine there were cavemen and women grunting and pounding their chest and gesturing to each other besides the fire talking about the day's adventures or warning others about a dangerous animals' lair.

There's a ferocious hungry cougar, 300 paces down. I can even imagine them exaggerating about a big fish that got away or something very fast that they managed to outrun because that's what humans do.

As the prehistoric paintings in the French caves at La Scale remind us, ancient peoples even told their stories visually. There was a hunt, there was a stampede. We ate well.

Storytelling brings the past into the present and makes it real and immediate and relevant to us and its power lies its ability to strike at the heart and excite the imagination of others.

In that way, it also engages memory because when a story resonates with our own sometimes unrecognized desires, it makes us want to remember the tale and share it with others.

An activated memory is one that learns how to make connections between one story and another, how to come upon a situation in life and be able to retrieve a story, personal or scriptural, analogous or direct, and relate it constructively and helpfully, even fruitfully, to the realities of someone who was before us.

Storytelling, of course, was essential to the passing on of faith at a time when reading and writing or specialized skills possessed by prehistoric religious or academics but not by the masses. Oral tradition is simply storytelling.

The ancient Israelites would repeat the stories of their history over and over again in order to ensure that their mysterious relationship to Adenai would only go on and would proceed rightly in terms of law and practice.

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