My wife just attended a screenwriting seminar (She’s writing an amazing screenplay!) and one of things discussed was the difference between writing for movies and writing for TV.  The instructors spoke about how different of a discipline each are.  I think because we meet in a movie theatre, I always compare my messages to movies.  But in actuality, what we do as Pastors more resembles TV writing than the big screen.  Here’s what I mean…

TV writing moves the "big" story an inch, while movies have to give you the whole thing.  A movie gets 2 hours of my life, that’s it.  A TV show can have an hour a week if it can keep my attention. 

Think about a show like "Lost".  Each episode is only telling you bits about the "Big" story (Who the ‘others’ are?  Where’s Walt?  What the computer’s for? etc…). But you get a story within the story involving the characters in each episode that moves the "Big" story a little further.  Sometimes it gives us answers and many times it creates new questions…

I think our teaching should do the same.  We should answer some questions and create new ones.  When I first started teaching, I thought my goal was to tell everyone, everything I knew (Which didn’t take long).  Today, I see things very differently.  Now, I want to take people on a journey and allow them to discover the same truths and give them tools to really experience God for themselves.   

So the question is, "What’s the big story we want people to be interested in?"

"What’s the smaller story that is moving the bigger story?"

"What can we just tell people?  And what we do want to lead people into experiencing for themselves?"