By Jim White
Like a beguiling butterfly, 80-something year-young Maxine (Mackie) Bersch demonstrated her story-telling expertise by flitting from scene to scene, keeping me on the edge of my seat as she told her own story.
Born in Clay County, W. Va., her family was forced by circumstance to move to Virginia during the Great Depression. There they settled near Bibb's Store in Louisa County and joined the Goldmine Baptist Church.
Storytelling has been a part of her life for as long as she can remember. As a child, her mother educated and entertained her with stories from the Bible. At night the family sat around the fire, roasted chestnuts and told stories. Her big brother was old enough to go to the motion picture show and learned to entertain the others by telling the story of the movie. In these family times Mackie learned the meaning of the word “Meanwhile … .” And, her father would spin yarns to get her mind off the ache in her arm as she turned the grinding stone while he sharpened his scythe. “God was preparing me all the while for a calling I knew nothing about,” she says.
Her calling began to take definite shape when her pastor, Jim Copeland of Derbyshire Baptist Church in Richmond, asked her to head the library ministry of her church. Never one to do a job with less than full effort, she attended conferences at Ridgecrest Baptist Conference Center in North Carolina and earned every church study course certificate offered in media-library training. Soon she was leading the conferences.
At Eagle Eyrie Baptist Conference Center one year, she was asked to lead a breakout session on storytelling. Although she had employed the principles of storytelling in her Sunday school work with preschoolers, the conference gave her a forum with which to communicate her passion to others. The classroom assigned to her could not hold everyone wanting to hear what she had to say. Her experience at Eagle Eyrie led to an invitation to do the same at Ridgecrest in 1978, and from there to Glorieta Baptist Conference Center in New Mexico.
“There is no doubt at all that this is God's doing. God's calling on my life. God intended this for me,” she concludes.
But God had even more in store for her. In 1998, LifeWay Christian Resources asked her to write a book which it published called Storytelling in a Nutshell: Storytelling in Christian Education. In June of this year, the book entered its second printing.
Bersch holds that something mystical, almost spiritual happens in storytelling as a common experience is internalized by two people. Storytelling is a medium that communicates information in a way everybody can identify with. Moreover, they remember it!
Her sage advice, not to mention stories contained therein, made the book an entertaining purchase as well as an educational one.
Although her book is written with informal educational settings in mind, it is an excellent resource for children's sermons. Or sermons of all kinds for that matter. “After all,” she reminded me, “Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable” (Matthew 13:34, NIV).
To illustrate sermons with stories, Bersch urges pastors to keep their eyes open for stories around them. “You are bound to have known people who illustrate your points. Without revealing identities, let them represent others. Put words in their mouths and give them character.” Although some preachers might be opposed to telling jokes, Bersch points out that most jokes are really very short stories that make a point.
Summarizing, she says, “Storytelling is a great bridge-builder.” And, after all, isn't that what communication is all about?
Staff report
Jim White is editor of the Religious Herald.