A sermon requires you to already be in the room.

You have to show up. You have to be open to receiving what is being delivered. You have to have enough relationship with the source that you will sit still long enough to hear it. For a lot of people — especially people who have been hurt by the church, who are skeptical of organized religion, who have not set foot inside a sanctuary in years — none of those conditions are in place.

A story does not require any of that.

A story just requires that you find it interesting enough to keep reading. And once you are reading the theology can come in through the side door. Not announced. Not labeled. Just present inside the narrative in a way that works on the reader before they have time to put up the defenses they would bring to a sermon.

Peretti changed how I understood spiritual warfare not because I sat in a class that explained it but because I experienced it through characters in a story. The understanding arrived through the emotions first. The doctrine came in behind it and landed on prepared ground.

That is what good Christian fiction does. It prepares the ground. It opens a door that other approaches cannot open because the reader does not know the door is there until they are already walking through it.

I am not trying to replace the sermon. I am trying to reach the people who will not come hear it. The person who would put down a theology textbook but cannot put down a good story. That person needs what the story can carry in a way that the direct approach cannot deliver.

That is why this genre matters. That is why I write in it.

That is why I am not going anywhere.

Stephon Rudd