1. Rather than making the gospel relevant, fiction can help explain/show how the gospel is already relevant. The Bible has had a huge prevalence in our culture. That’s a good thing, but it also means that it feels cliche, or even backwards and messed up, due to the amount of people that have misused the gospel.

    Most Christian fiction authors have their own parts of the gospel that they seek to show the relevance of. I have a Faust themed story, for instance, that delves into a lot of heavy theological and philosophical stuff, and one thing it discusses is why God doesn’t force us to love him.

    That story is a tragedy, like many of my other tales, which kind of leads to another thing. I tend not to like stories where the chars just seem to be randomly suffering for no reason, but it’s also pretty annoying when stories are unrealistically happy.

    Cause and effect is an important part of storytelling. If a char is angsty and suffering, it’s important to take the reader on a journey that makes them empathize with that character. That helps us learn in ways other stories can’t. Not every story needs to be a tragedy, but the awesome thing about a good tragedy is that it has a huge potential for showing all sides of life. A huge component of tragedy is loss, and most of the time people only care deeply if they lose something good.

    So a tragedy author can do an amazing job of showing boundlessly happy and joyful times, and then show how that happiness degenerated into loss. A reader can then study that for ways to make sure they don’t end up losing happiness like the characters did. So, we end up with a story that shows all sides of life , makes us care, and teaches important lessons.

  2. Excellent article, and very encouraging. Thanks so much!

What do you think?