Story-telling has a unique power to shape a people. There is, observes Leland Ryken, “a universal human longing for stories. In fact, one of the most enduring human impulses can be summed up in the four-word request, ‘Tell me a story.’” An eighteenth century Scottish politician, Andrew Fletcher, is attributed with the saying, “Let me write the songs of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.” He understood that whether through song, poetry, or prose, good stories create a sturdy, vibrant culture.
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Interesting then, that the Anglo-Saxon word for poet was scop, a word that in normal usage meant “to create” or “to bring out.” The modern English word “shape” comes from that Anglo-Saxon word because that’s what stories do: they shape our character, our perceptions, our affections.
Today, when we tell stories to our children, we are joining in a long, long tradition that goes back to the Bible. In fact, Psalm 78 centers around this idea of generational story-telling: it is a psalm that tells stories to shape generations. It turns out that story-telling is one of the ways God intends for the central truths of the faith to get passed on from generation to generation. When the fathers of our faith tell their family stories, what we get is the history of the saving works of God.
I have become captivated by the invitation in Psalm 78:4 to join this long tradition of generational storytelling: “tell the coming generation of the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.”
While the Lord loves to grow his church through our faithful proclamation of the gospel to those who have never heard of Jesus Christ, God also loves to grow his church from the inside: through our telling of the glorious deeds of the Lord to the next generation. Psalm 78 envisions many layers of generational faithfulness and describes the effect of faithfully teaching younger generations to follow the Lord.
We started Trinity College to do our small part to help transfer the gospel to the coming generation through higher education. But while telling the coming generation certainly includes formal education, it entails far more.
That’s why Trinity College is starting TELL, a new publication to help parents, pastors, and educators raise young men and women to know and love the gospel of Jesus Christ.
First, we want to help parents. In Psalm 78, Asaph refers to fathers in verses 3 and 5, but I doubt many parents need to be reminded of the significance of this charge. The Christian parents I know feel a godly burden of responsibility. They are seeking God for wisdom for parenting and strength to sustain them in the challenging task of raising their children to know, love, and follow the Lord. We want to encourage parents as you strive to embrace God’s calling to parent wisely and well.
Second, we want to serve pastors. Having visited a number of Sovereign Grace Churches, I have found numerous commonalities among our congregations and one of the most striking is that every church is filled with the happy sounds of children and young adults. There are fields ripe unto the harvest in every children’s ministry and youth group in our churches. Brothers, what a gift this is! Through TELL we want to think together about how to make the most of the opportunity to encourage the faithful transfer of the gospel to the next generation within our churches.
Finally, we want to serve educators. My wife and I have been involved in Christian education at various levels and know firsthand what a great labor teachers and administrators exert on a daily basis. Weariness and loneliness are occupational hazards. Yet there is great joy to be found as educators serve parents by teaching the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord in… grammar and geometry, phonics and physics, spelling and Spanish.
G. K. Chesterton could be addressing all three audiences—parents, pastors, and educators—when he writes,
What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. … What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.
G. K. Chesterton, “Small Property and Government” (July 5, 1924), in Collected Works: Volume XXXIII: The Illustrated London News 1923–1925, ed. Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1990), 362.
In Sovereign Grace we have been led so well to be intentional about building a culture of Christ-centered holiness and then handing it down to the coming generation. “Let us transfer the gospel to the next generation” is a phrase I’ve heard in Sovereign Grace for more than thirty years. I’m writing this article because the first generation of Sovereign Grace parents (thank you, Dad and Mom!) and pastors were faithful to do this for my generation. Now it’s our turn to pass it on to the next generation: to tell them of the wondrous works of our Savior.
In each issue of TELL, we’ll provide both brief and longform articles for men and women, families and pastors, teachers and school administrators. We’ll begin this month with a special Advent issue.
If you would like to receive regular updates, make sure to sign up for the Trinity mailing list. And please pass TELL on to any parent, pastor, or educator you think would benefit.
Together, let’s TELL the coming generation, “so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments.”
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Steve Whitacre is the President of Trinity College and one of the pastors of Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville.