Creativity as Faith Formation: The Importance of Telling Stories in a Digital Age
The digital age both empowers and distracts. On one hand, the internet offers unprecedented access to tools for content creation. With just a smartphone or laptop, anyone can write a blog post, record a podcast, or produce a video. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok have played a crucial role in democratizing the creative process, allowing individuals from all walks of life to share their ideas, stories, and perspectives with the world.
However, the same platforms that inspire creation can also stifle it. These platforms operate within an attention economy that encourages scrolling, swiping, and consuming. While the potential for creativity is at our fingertips, the constant barrage of bite-sized entertainment often distracts us from deeper thought or creative work. The act of passively consuming content—whether it's watching hours of YouTube videos or losing track of time on TikTok—can dull our imaginative capacities. It’s easy to fall into the habit of mindlessly watching rather than actively creating. As many who have spent hours binge-watching Netflix or endlessly scrolling through social media can testify, these activities often leave us feeling more drained than inspired, offering fleeting satisfaction but sapping the energy needed for true creativity. In this way, the digital age presents both opportunity and challenge for anyone looking to harness their creative potential.
Regrettably, the default experience in the digital age is that of consumption, not creativity. While online platforms provide creative tools to any user, only a small handful of users create content. With Twitter (a.k.a. X), 10% of the users create 92% of the tweets. On YouTube, 25% of users create and post videos. The creative experience of the digital age is thus fairly lopsided. The vast majority of those of us online will never record, edit, or post. We’re given the resources to make meaning through storytelling, yet so many decline to participate. I worry about this disparity, as creativity and storytelling are so foundational to both learning and faith formation. This give and take is one of the great contradictions of the digital age. We now have the means to articulate a narrative of our lived experiences. However, these same resources nudge us towards mindless viewership in a way that disincentivizes creativity. Apps and resources designed for content creation and sharing can be so useful in the meaning-making process. But they can also deter meaning-making altogether. The same platforms power both personal creativity and algorithmic drudgery.
The church ought to engage in this critical tension of the digital age, with leaders who empower and embolden the creation and distribution of stories. After all, creativity and faith formation are deeply interrelated, especially when we define creativity as a process of articulating experiences and telling stories. Richard Rohr suggests that the life of faith requires an ability to tell our story at three different levels: that of the individual (my story), that of the group, community, or congregation (our story), and that of God’s universal action (which Rohr defines as “THE” Story). For Rohr, mature faith and spirituality appear when each of the three stories are integrated, when we clearly see the overlap between personal journey, communal identity, and divine transcendence.
Mature Christian faith emerges when we accept an invitation to tell our story, to see the interrelation with a broader narrative, and to imagine its position in God’s cosmic story of grace and redemption. Faith leaders can support this progression simply by inviting members of a faith community to take up the work of storytelling, to give narrative shape to one’s lived experiences. It doesn’t matter whether we use digital channels or old-fashioned notebooks, whether we post our stories to TikTok or keep them confined to a personal journal. We can share experiences about longings and losses or everyday realities. We can tell the stories of our most elevated spiritual experiences or the most mundane occurrences.
When it comes to the impact on learning and faith formation, the substance and the medium of the story are of secondary importance. What matters most is the consistent, narrative articulation of our lived experience. What matters most is the creative, storytelling process. The church leader should aspire to turn content consumers into content creators (i.e., storytellers). The church-goer should learn to be open to telling (and hopefully sharing) one’s stories. The church collectively should imagine itself as something of a “maker space,” where a community gathers to tell and hear stories, to respond and react, and to name the subtle ways where God’s work emerges. When we regularly tell and refine our personal stories, we see how our actions show up as habits, how our habits solidify values, how our values are edified in our communities, and how this communal action is part of God’s restoring and redeeming work in the world.
Flannery O’Connor once said, “A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way.” With this quote, the famed Southern Gothic author captured the unique power of storytelling to express big truths. Trying to define the presence of a living God in our lives can feel overwhelming, but when approached as a creative process, it becomes more accessible. Rather than seeking precise definitions, we can tell our stories—finding God in the real, lived moments of joy, struggle, and hope.
Telling these stories, both individually and as faith communities, can be deeply spiritually nourishing. On a personal level, storytelling helps us make sense of our lives, recognizing the real sacredness of our lives. As a church, creative storytelling binds us together, helping us see how God is at work in our midst.
