The Gospel & Authentic Storytelling - Marcus Goodyear

As humans, we are the stewards of story. The stories we tell apply meaning to our own lives and to the lives of those around us. Stories can move people to tears, to joy, and even towards change. So those with the privilege to communicate stories to an audience have a special responsibility. Storytelling, particularly telling other people's stories, requires great care and integrity. Today we're talking with someone whose job is telling stories. Our guest is Marcus Goodyear, Senior Director of Communications at the Howard E. Butt Foundation. He is also the Managing Editor of Echoes Magazine, a quarterly publication reaching 24,000 subscribers with encouraging stories about local friends and neighbors. He's here today to discuss his experience telling stories with kindness, authenticity, and a love for God and others.

Scripture References

Hebrews 2:10
Numbers 4:1-20

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Transcript - The Gospel & Authentic Storytelling - Marcus Goodyear

Leah Archibald: Making It Work is brought to you by The Max De Pree Center for Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary and the Theology of Work Project.

Mark Roberts: Welcome to Making it Work.

LA: Through conversation, scripture and stories, we invite God into work’s biggest challenges... so that you can live out your purpose in the workplace.

MR: I’m Mark Roberts.

LA: And I’m Leah Archibald. And this is Making It Work.

Marcus Goodyear: Thank you, Leah. Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here.

LA: It's so fun to have you today. I wonder if you could start just by telling us a little bit about your work as a communicator and how you see the importance of story and storytelling.

MG: Yes. So for me, a good story has authenticity. And authenticity—you can hear the word author in that word authenticity. And I was looking, and I have this big, huge Oxford English dictionary with a magnifying glass that I used to read. And so I was looking it up and reading, one of the first uses of the word authentic in the English language was Wycliffe saying, the Bible translator saying, "No ghostly understanding is authentic but it be grounded in the text itself." And so he's... From the beginning of that word's use in our language, it's tied to understanding of Bible and understanding... Our ghostly understandings, by which I assume Wycliffe is referring to the Holy Ghost. And so for me, telling a story is about revealing the piece of God in me, or the piece of God in the people for whom we are telling that story and carrying it.

LA: There's also a big question when you bring up the term author of who is really the author of a story. For those of us, you write a magazine, Mark and I host a podcast, but there is a question of who is the author of a person's story. Is it the person compiling the story? Is it the interviewer? Is it the author of the article? Is it the person themselves? Or is it the person that we call the author of salvation, as it were? That was the first thought that jumped in my head.

MG: The author of salvation, that is a very rich phrase. I think in America we have a cult of authorship, and so we tend to think about authors as these people who go into rooms and they produce worlds, and then the worlds get brought out to us on a platter. But anybody who's worked in words knows, or storytelling of any kind, not just words, knows that it takes a whole community of people. When you go see a movie, you have tons and tons of people listed in the credits at the end. For this podcast, I know that there are at least four other people, I think, who are involved in this behind the scenes.

LA: Thank God.

MG: Yes. Right. And it wouldn't exist without them. So there's a shared creativity. We're co-creators with each other in the same way that as Christians, we're co-creators with God in our work. So when I work with really young authors, which we do a lot, 'cause we have an internship program and things like that here at the foundation, I find that one of the things I often have to do is break down their sense of pride in their work, not because it's bad to have pride in your work, but because it can get in the way of that co-creation. And help them see that you will still have a byline. You can still be the author, in the sense that you've been thinking, but that doesn't mean your words are holy. That doesn't mean that three or four layers of editors aren’t going to come in and ask for revisions multiple times, because that's part of what makes somebody into an author, is the ability to revisit and rethink all of the different ways this story can land with different audiences, make sure that you've touched as many bases as you can.

LA: Mark, I want you to jump in here, too, before we leave this beat of authorship as a thing to think about in regards to storytelling. What are your takes on who is the author in a story?

MR: Well, you set it up interestingly, and I think it depends. It certainly depends on whether you're telling a story that ostensibly you're making up in your head, though what Marcus alludes to is certainly true. If I completely invent my own story, I'm going to be connected to a whole long history of storytelling. And not that I'm ripping off other people's ideas, but that's going to shape me. So the idea that I completely made up a unique story would be kind of silly. But obviously, there's a difference between telling a fictional story that, where I can shape it, and telling a story about a person who actually exists. In my work as a pastor, I often tell stories about people, and that's a very interesting dynamic because I'm kind of the author and I'm kind of not the author, I'm kind of the editor. And there's a different kind of faithfulness required, I think, in those kinds of situations. So I don't think there's a singular answer.

There's this... So as Marcus says, there's this community, not just the actual community to which I'm attached, but the much larger community of humanity and community of storytelling over centuries, that shapes the way I think. Does that make sense? Marcus, would you agree, since I've just put some words almost in your mouth?

MG: I think my response would be that I actually don't see much of a difference between a fictional story and a nonfictional story. I do think there's a difference between an essay that is trying to make an argument and a narrative essay, but I would see much more similarity between a narrative essay and a fictional work, because in both of those instances, you're taking characters, you're taking settings, and you're trying to express them in a way that will land with people, and within a story form that people understand.

So I feel like we're sort of in the weeds of English class here. But for me, every day I wake up in the morning and I choose the story I'm going to tell about myself. And so there's a sense in which the stories I embrace shape who I am. And so I have the ability to choose a story that is hopeful. And for me, this is a lot of what the gospel is about, I'm choosing to align myself with the greatest story ever told, which is a story of life after death. It's a story of redemption after suffering. It's a story of what happens when Jesus goes on the cross, why he goes on the cross, all of the many different ways to think about that, and the real suffering that happens there, and on the other side is always redemption, it's not hopeless.

So this... And I'm not saying that Jesus is only a story, so don't misunderstand. But those... We have four people who sat down at some point and chose four different ways to shape that story. And that was based on a real set of circumstances, and yet they were making story decisions along the way. They understood, and God through them, if we think about divine inspiration, understands the technology they're working in, the technology of storytelling. So, for me, storytelling is about getting at the deep truth of the thing. And sometimes I'm using fake characters to do that, not in my work here. But more often, I am trying to get at the truth of the person for whom I'm sharing their story.

So for instance, in our most recent issue of Echoes, we wanted to unpack this data point we had that churches in Texas at least feel like they don't know enough about mental health. So pastors are getting all of these mental health crises coming their way, and they are confident that they can help people one on one, but they don't necessarily know how to dive in deep with really hard mental health challenges and make good referrals and things like that. They feel a little over their head on that topic.

MG: So we went to a pastor who talks openly with his congregation about his own mental health struggles. He has, in his past, had debilitative OCD. So not just the kind of detail work that people joke about, but truly he thought if he turned the doorknob the wrong way, somebody was going to die. And he's been open about that. And so we were aiming to use his story, with his permission, and with his involvement, to talk about him as a character in a specific church. So whenever we tell his story, we're already abstracting him into something other than what he really is, because, of course, he's this fully grounded person, but we're going to tell this narrow, little focused, not exactly a parable, but almost like that. And so he becomes a caricature of who he really is, that is closer to the truth, or is being used to communicate something that has nothing to do with him. So we want to be really careful that David does not feel used in that way. (David is the name of the pastor.)

We have asked his permission, "Do you want to be vulnerable about this? Does this land the way you want?" And so in that sense, he's been a co-creator with us. Not in a way that burdens him, not in a way that he has to dive into the editorial process and make more work for himself, but in a way that he, if he wanted to, he could.

LA: So in this scenario, it seems like you're struggling with the authenticity of how to tell this person's story, where putting something within a time limit, is a storytelling lens that we have to be aware of.

MG: Yes. Yeah. When we articulate ideas, by the very nature of doing so there are things that are not being articulated. We're choosing where to focus our attention. We're choosing what element of ourselves we want to turn into a narrative, or what element of another person we want to turn into a narrative. And those narratives shape us. Ten or 15 years ago, it was really common in Christian circles to hear people talking about worldview. And that's a metaphor that I find personally less helpful, but I think what it was getting at is this idea that we can choose how we want to think about ourselves in relationship to the world. And so in some sense, what religion does, and what different religions do, is they create a narrative that people can try to find themselves in. And so like I was saying, the narrative of Christianity, for me, is fundamentally one of rebirth and renewal. And, shoot, I am fully on board with that narrative. And it means I'm going to make certain assumptions about my day-to-day, when I have experiences of suffering, even like, minor ones, then I just need to remember that that's temporary. It's okay. It's not to be accepted with resignation, but it's to be accepted with hope that there's a better thing on the other side if we can work through it together.

MR: Marcus, that, what you're just saying here, I think, is really important, and would be helpful. I'm sure we have some listeners who are thinking, "Well, this is interesting, but my work has nothing to do with stories. I just go in and do spreadsheets, and... "

LA: "I'm an accountant."

MR: "I get paid. And I'm not sure how this is relevant." And I know it is relevant in a number of ways, but one of them that you've just really specified is that, I can understand my work in light of a larger story. Or not. I can either be just a guy who does spreadsheets, or I can be part of something else. You want to say just a little bit more about that and how that might be relevant to the woman who actually does spreadsheets all day.

LA: Yeah.

MG: Well, first of all, I want to say I love spreadsheets. So if you're a person who works in spreadsheets all day, kudos to you, because you are working in a beautiful art form. Two thoughts came to mind. One is a parable that Howard Butt used to tell, and there's an audio message on Theology of Work, actually, about this. And it's the idea of building a cathedral, and you have the person who, when asked what he's doing, he says, "I'm moving these bricks." When there's another person, you ask him, he says, "I'm building a wall." Another person says, "I'm building a cathedral to the glory of God." And so it's not that moving bricks is wrong. And it's not that if you lose sight of the larger thing of which you're a part, the ultimate good, that somehow your work has less meaning. But I do think it gives us a deeper sense of our own purpose when we can remember that ultimate good, that is beyond kind of the local good of what we're doing day-to-day. So that's one of the first things that when you're working in a spreadsheet, it's a local good, I get that. But that spreadsheet serves some end. And so just because the end may be several steps down the line doesn't make it any less meaningful.

The other piece about storytelling, Mark, I think, is even more practical than that. So I don't know about you guys, but I can get in my head about certain people that I work with.

LA: Well, that never happens to me. [chuckle]

MG: And that at The H. E. Butt Foundation... Of course, everybody at The H. E. Butt Foundation is perfect, so not here. But in other jobs, perhaps. There's somebody that I come up against, and we have a bad interaction, and even just a handful of bad interactions, and I can start to tell myself a story about that person that can become a problem for working with them, where I then start to take assumptions into meetings and... Patton, my supervisor and I talk about checking our stories on people we work with and on contractors and things like that. If we just find we're not giving people enough grace, just to check our story and make sure that we're not bringing five years of that person's worst suffering into our next meeting when they've gone through counseling and they've gotten over it, or who knows what.

LA: I think for myself, even as you're talking, I'm starting to redefine what is a story for me, 'cause I think of a story as like, here's a long book. But when I think in the context of this discussion, what are the stories that I'm telling myself? And that is, how does that shape how I perceive other people and how I act? I could have one-word stories. Like mom is a one-word story.

MG: That's right.

LA: Mom serving is a different story from mom receiving. Mom as a partner is a different story than mom as a caretaker, and certainly mom on Monday is a different story than mom on Saturday. So there's so much changeability in the stories that we tell. Maybe that's why we don't have one story of Jesus in the Bible. We have four of them.

MG: Yes. I agree 100%. Mark has probably heard me talk about the Kohathites. They're my favorite part of the Old Testament. It's like this little, tiny, weird bit.

MR: You're the only person in the entire world who loves the Kohites but...

LA: You're gonna have to.

MR: I think it's awesome.

LA: Give us some context.

MR: Yes. Will you remind us who they are and then why you love them?

MG: All right, so my understanding, a little backstory. I was reading through the Bible. And I was slogging through the Old Testament, and I remember talking to one of my mentors and saying, "What is this stuff about?" And he said, "I don't know. I just know it's important. And so you just gotta carry all of it, like the Kohathites." And I was like, "I don't... What are the Kohathites?" He said, "Well, you're about to get to that, probably, it's in Numbers." And so the Kohathites are one of these tribes, and they're like the FedEx tribe of Israel, so as they're packing up the tabernacle, there's another... There's a family that takes everything down. There's a family that wraps everything up in all these different skins and leathers, packages it up. And then the Kohathites are the one who carry it. So they come along, they pick it up, they carry it wherever they're going, and then they set it down, somebody else unpacks it, somebody else reassembles the tabernacle.

So the Kohathites are carrying this piece of the tabernacle, the house of God. They can't see it. It's wrapped up. They can probably make some assumptions about what it is. But the main thing they know is that it's a piece of this bigger thing and that they don't fully understand it. And so for me, that is a reminder that you mentioned the four gospels. The four gospels remind us that whatever we know of God, whatever I know of Christ, is a piece that I am carrying, and it's a piece that I probably don't understand as well as I think, it's wrapped up in stuff. And so if I make the mistake of thinking that my story is the whole story, then I've told myself a lie. So I have to... It's not just about humility, it's about honesty. Like my perspective, this doesn't mean that the truth is relative, but it means that my perspective is limited. And so the truth is beyond what my perspective can contain. And it's only when we bring all of our stories together that we can build the tabernacle. God can inhabit it, and we can worship.

LA: Now, Marcus, I want you to relate this to your work that you do in your job, compiling a magazine, where you're literally carrying other people's stories. And you may understand them only in part. How do you be a good Kohathite for other people's stories in your work?

MG: Yeah, I think part of it is that we make sure that the stories we gather, that the strings we pull together, are as broad as possible. So there is a tendency, I think, in all of us to want to tell the easy stories, the stories of the people we know, the stories of the people who are like us. And those stories can reinforce values in ways that are really powerful and bring us together in ways that are really powerful.

But as a magazine writer... Now we focus on Texas, so we do have some limitations. But Texas is broad, and there are all kinds of people here, it's in some ways a microcosm of what we can expect if immigration patterns continue, because Texas and Arizona we're right on the border here. And so making sure that all of these stories are included. So I go to a Presbyterian church, David Martin. Pastor Martin is a Baptist. But we also have people who are actually not Christian in our stories because they're part of Texas, and because their stories matter to us, not only as people we want to convert, but as people we want to understand and be able to relate to, and honor the God in them.

And similarly, there's just all kinds of demographics, you want to just make sure that you're not limiting yourself to certain kinds of people, certain kinds of positions, certain kinds of perspectives. You want to have as many perspectives reflected as possible, in, ideally in each issue, which is why we have four or five stories in each issue. But certainly, over time.

MR: Can I add something?

MG: Yeah, of course.

MR: I have written for Echoes, so I know what it's like to work with you. Everything you said is certainly true. But there's also another thing I think is really valued, and that is what we might just call accuracy or truthfulness. You folks really check stuff, and it doesn't surprise me, knowing the organization. But I really appreciate it. And I've only had that, a similar kind of experience with one other publication. I've been over the years quoted in this and that, or written in this and that. But I was once interviewed about somebody for an article that was going to appear in The New Yorker. Okay? And I get this call from an editor in The New Yorker who says, "Now, I just want to walk through these quotes with you and make sure they're accurate." And he literally would read every quote and say, "Now, is that what you said?" And I... It was very impressive to me. But I will say, in working with you and your team, you have a... So you also really want to make sure that what you say is as close to the truth as, as you can get it. And I think that it gains a lot of credibility in a day in which who knows if the thing I'm reading is true or not, to know that, "No, these folks really work at it." So I just wanted to add. I hope I've spoken accurately, I hope you agree with me.

MG: I am deeply touched and grateful for that example. I think you're right, that is definitely our intent. And like anything, sometimes you hit the mark and sometimes you don't, I'm glad to hear that we hit the mark with you. No pun intended.

There's a couple of things, and it's just about systems. If you value something and you don't have a system for it, then it's the same as not valuing it. So we know we value accuracy, that means part of our process is fact-checking, and there's somebody whose role is to fact-check articles. And so we're all rereading the issue over and over and over, ad nauseum, to be honest. Probably the same way you guys handle this podcast afterwards. But one of those readings, somebody is looking for the facts and marking them and making sure they're accurate and making sure we can back them up. Because, we can all be loose with facts when we're not paying attention. So that's one of the things.

But the other piece of what you're saying, Mark, is that we have to balance the truth of the person we're telling and the truth of the organization, the truth that the organization wants to tell. So we can't use your story to make a point you're not making. But we have to make sure that we're also honoring the mission we're trying to accomplish, which is this idea of cultivating wholeness in people and institutions to transform their communities, not just to transform the people, but for them to become agents of transformation in all that they do, whether they're at their church, whether they're at their house, whether they're at their work. And sometimes this can be a problem when... I'm thinking of a particular interview with someone we did, and in America, we have this kind of salesman type personality that... Not to pick on salesmen, I love sales. I love to be sold to good things. But sometimes people can get really excited about their sales stories, and they will just make all kinds of claims about a mission that they're on, or a nonprofit organization that they do, and they will... Believing the facts, I think, that they have told themselves, they will spin a tale for us that's very compelling, but is completely untrue.

We had this most recently with an organization we were working with that had some... They were involved in a challenge Texas is facing. They're making all kinds of statements about the particular crisis and how the church was stepping up to meet the crisis, but they had grossly overstated and mischaracterized the crisis, and they had grossly overstated the degree to which there was this stepping up happening at all. And so it sounded great, but once you got under the hood, it just wasn't true. And it was hard to know what to do about that. And so we worked on that piece a long, long time. It was kind of a... It was a challenge for us. Sometimes we also just have people who tell stories about themselves that they need to believe that don't really match up to reality. And so working people to help them shape their story a little more honestly, to come to something that feels true to what they wanna say, but is also true to history, that's important to us. And it can be almost like a psychology job sometimes.

LA: Well, tell me about your responsibility to the reader. Going back to this case study, if you have an organization who is probably doing some very good work but making some claims that don't accurately summarize the situation. What's your role as a middleman between that... What's your role as a go-between between the person telling the story and your reader, who's the ultimate consumer of the story, and maybe who's going to have their opinion changed or their life changed by hearing the story?

MG: Well, one of the things I don't want to be is a gatekeeper, unless you say you're a gatekeeper for facts or truth, I don't want to let nonsense through the gate, but that feels like a use of the term gatekeeper that is not what people normally mean when they use that phrase. My goal for the reader is that our magazine would cultivate in them wholeness, and help them think about their own lives as a possibility for transformation in their community. And I know that reading a story is not as powerful as going to Laity Lodge, our adult retreat center, or participating in two weeks of camp at Laity Lodge Youth Camp. But it's a media with a purpose. And the purpose is not to get people to sign up for camp or to sign up for Laity Lodge. The purpose is for people to experience wholeness, shalom, and think about how they can spread it. But to answer your question more specifically, I'm thinking about two interviews I did way back in The High Calling days, which is the content on your site now. And I'll leave these generic, just 'cause they're both a little bit dicey, but they were both with CEOs of very, very... One of them is one of the top brands in the world. And the other one is a brand that used to be pretty big in fashion.

And so I was very excited that both of them were willing to talk to The High Calling, because it meant that these very influential brands in fashion and then this other company would go on the record as being Christian. And I thought there was a lot of value in that. And so this top brand, this world brand said, "In order to do this interview, we need to have the questions upfront and we need to run them by our board." And so I wrote the questions and then they came back and said, "The board has straight-up rejected these questions." And I said, "Okay, well, what do I need to do? How can I rewrite this?" And so we ended up rewriting the questions. And at that time, I wanted the person on the record, but I was very disappointed in the piece because what I got was just... It was like a marketing piece for that company with a little bit of Jesus sprinkled in. And so then a couple months later, when I was working with this fashion brand, we started running into the same thing, and I just canceled the interview 'cause I didn't want to do another puff piece where it was a promotional piece celebrating only the successes without challenging anything the brand had done, and then baptizing the whole thing with Jesus in this way that felt pretty bad to me at the time.

So I consider that to be a time when I didn't do as right by the audience as I should have. But you always do the best you can.

LA: How do you mean you didn't do as right by the audiences? You said you canceled the interview.

MG: I canceled the second interview, yeah, but not the first. So we ran that piece. There's nothing wrong with the piece on the surface, other than it's a marketing piece for that company that does not get under the hood of what's really motivating them, it's not really engaging deeply with how that company is or is not helping bring the kingdom of God about in the world.

LA: And I'm sure if I read it, it would probably go in one ear and out the other 'cause it wouldn't touch me at a deep level because it's lacking this bit of authenticity that connects me to the author.

MG: You would just think it was a shallow interview, probably.

LA: Right. And I think there's something that we can tell if there's authenticity in a story, it has that spark of the ultimate author in it that we can tell that is connecting to something deep and profound and human in us. I don't think it's an accident that you can't talk to a marketer for more than ten minutes without them dropping the word authenticity today, because it really is the currency of attention. We're past the advertising age, thank God. And if something is not authentic, then it's not something that we're spending our time and attention on. In some ways, that's a positive turn of events, and in some ways, that makes our job as mediators of stories a little bit more difficult.

MG: Right.

LA: I want to wrap up our conversation by talking about the storytelling format that we're in right now, which is a podcast. Now, Marcus...

MG: Right, yes.

LA: You are launching a podcast. Tell us about changing to that new form of communication and how it's changing your thoughts about this issue.

MG: Oh, man. It is so, it's so hard. We are trying to launch a podcast, and we anticipate it coming out probably in fall of 2024 or winter of 2025. And I think there's a couple of things. One is there's a more real-time creation that happens in a podcast. So part of what that means is, I just get nervous in doing... In this moment, even. But you can shape printed words a lot more than you can shape auditory words, and just forget about even including video. But there's something really special about a podcast in that it's a little bit more incarnational. So you can... The sound you're hearing, however digitized it may be, it is coming from someone's vocal cords, it's tied to a muscle in my throat, air in my body, in this room, so in some small, tiny way that's communicated. And so you get a little bit more of the people involved, you get a little bit more of the literal voice that you can hear. But also, I think right now, podcasting is this incredibly powerful passive medium where... And I could say this is bad in me sometimes where I'm constantly now filling my head with input rather than taking moments of silence.

But there's also a way in which we're recapturing time that was previously lost. So if you have a long commute but you listen to a really good podcast, that time can be more fruitful than it might have been. I do a lot of long-distance running, and when I'm doing a long-distance run, hearing a good podcast is just great company for me on the run. And then the final thing I would say about it is, I think it is the only medium where people take an earbud and they literally put you inside their head in order to receive the content you're giving them. So it's just this deeply, deeply intimate form, and it's deeply unforgiving because all we have is the audio. And I think it's very hard to be authentic in this form.

MR: I think that's really right on. I also think that in general podcasts, this is along the line of intimacy, podcasts tend to be more personal. You'll sometimes listen to authors being interviewed on a podcast. And often the discussion becomes more personal even, they talk about their family or some other story, and so there is this interesting overlap of ideas and narratives and all that with just the person. And I think mostly, and this is obviously my own bias, the podcasts I enjoy are ones that allow for that kind of more personal dynamic. And even with the interviewer, or the people who are interviewing, that you sense a little bit more about who they are than you would if it was a newspaper story, which is a fine thing, but a different thing.

MG: Yeah, in a sense, it's less filtered. So the experience you have in listening to this conversation can feel a little bit like you're in the room with us. This is much more accessible as a human thing of just listening to people talk.

LA: This was a super fun conversation, I have to say. Marcus, for those listeners who want to find your new podcast, how could they find that?

MG: Well, I should be careful to share that it's not my podcast, it's The H. E. Butt Foundation podcast, Echoes. It's the Echoes Podcast, and I have a co-host, Camille Hall-Ortega, and we will be interviewing many different people. It is a supplement to Echoes Magazine, the way that there are several podcast supplements to Comment Magazine, for instance, or Christianity Today or any others. But when it comes out, you will be able to find it by going to echoes.hebfdn.org.

LA: Got it. I look forward to it. Marcus, thank you so much.

MG: Thanks. If we can have something half as good as what y'all do, I'll be real happy.