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“I love to tell the story . . .”

Growing up in a small Virginia town, in a small Baptist church, in a home with parents who had been deeply nurtured in the Christian faith, I came to love “the story.” The Jesus story. In Sunday School, it was taught. In worship, it was preached. In wondrous music, it was sung. Even now, if I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and focus on the past, I can see and hear the Hill Street Baptist church choir singing “I love to tell the story . . .”

How I loved to hear it.

Like the Sunday school teachers whom I cherished, the pastor I appreciated, and the choir I treasured, Andrew Taylor-Troutman loves to tell the Jesus story. He has a gift for doing so. His telling of the Jesus story captivates his readers because he weaves it so seamlessly into his own human and family story. There are scholars who can exegete the biblical narratives that contain the Jesus story. And there are writers who can capture that exegesis with imaginative insight and weave it skillfully into conversation with contemporary circumstance, so that, in the end, we twenty-first century readers have the odd but comforting sense that those ancient biblical texts are talking about us. In this book, Andrew practices both scholarship and creative writing; he has combined instructive exegesis with delightful imagination.

When I read Andrew’s first book, Take My Hand: A Theological Memoir, and later heard him read from it and talk about it, I knew I was in the presence of someone who understands story and knows how to convey story so that it teaches and fascinates simultaneously. Connecting images from his life as a minister serving a small, rural congregation with interpretations of biblical texts and theological insight, he offered his readers a narrative portrait of what it means to be called into the deeply personal service of ministry to God’s people.

It was only a matter of time before Andrew’s love for the human, church, and family story and his love for biblical narrative collided so creatively in this wonderful publication.

As his work in this book amply shows, Andrew is an excellent interpreter of the New Testament parables. Operating from the original Greek, he reads the texts closely and helps readers understand the parables in their first-century context. Using the tools of biblical exegesis expertly, he compares the various versions of the parables in the three synoptic gospels, helps us understand why Mark, Matthew, and Luke offered sometimes subtle and sometimes quite distinct presentations of the same parable stories, and sharpens our focus on text details even as he helps us read those details in light of the overall objectives of the larger gospel story. In the end, we not only understand better why Mark, the first gospel, recounted one of Jesus’ parables the way that it does, but we understand better why Mark’s recounting is different from Matthew’s or Luke’s, and we understand why that difference is important.

Andrew, though, loves to tell a story. He therefore cannot help himself. While a particular parable is at the heart of each chapter, he directs us to that parable through the lens of family narration. We learn a great deal about Andrew’s family as Andrew teaches us about the parables. The parables come alive because Andrew reads them as a part of what it means to be family. His adventures with his wife, Ginny, and especially his son, Sam, become the human story that surrounds and informs his reading of the Jesus story.

There were moments when reading this book that I laughed out loud, suspecting that once Andrew had extricated himself from an awkward situation he recounts, he had laughed heartily himself. There were moments when reading this book that I paused to reflect about the importance of family and how recognizing that importance can add definition to and proper respect for the priorities we set in our lives. There were moments when reading this book that, because Andrew was telling so clearly the story of engagement with his newborn son, that I was catapulted back in time to similar moments when my wife and I welcomed our newborn son into the world. But the moments I treasured the most were those carefully thought out places where Andrew brought his life with Ginny and Sam into instructive, delightful, often comical collision with Jesus’ teachings about what it means to be a family, a community, a disciple, and a person.

When you have finished reading Andrew’s telling of the Jesus story in relationship with his own family story, I predict you will not only have a better appreciation of some of the New Testament parables, but that you will have a better appreciation for why Jesus chose to teach in this story-like format in the first place.

Everybody loves a good story. Not everyone can tell a good story. Andrew Taylor-Troutman can.

Brian K. Blount

Richmond, Virginia

November, 2013