Most U.S. millennials are not familiar with or returning to the Christian church. I am the founding pastor of a successful 10 year old non-traditional New Church Development (NCD). My passion and calling in recent years has been that of a bridge builder that explores new models of the ‘not yet’ future church.

My 2000 doctoral thesis explored communication theory, generational study, and homiletic method to determine if there were any common communication elements between current generations, each of which was discovered to communicate in a primary, different way from the other. One common component appeared to cross over all generations: STORY.

I would like to explore the possibility of forming house churches that utilizes Biblical storytelling as a means of connecting individual’s story to the Great Big Story! The proposed method has been tested and is growing like wildfire in other parts of the world. But will the method work in a more literate, technologically advanced society that relies so heavily on our dramatically changing different communication methods?

House churches can provide many considerations that emerging generations find appealing: intimacy, authenticity, no building overhead, close knit community, no clergy dependency. The three month sabbatical would be used to research story telling in depth as a viable NCD model and would include study in the ancient storytelling tradition, technique, method, ethics and application.