How to Bring Story Work to Your Faith Community

by on June 27, 2025

What does it take to cultivate real transformation in a faith community? Not just busier programs or better Bible studies, but real change – mind, body, and soul?

In this episode, Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen talk with Petra Malekzadeh, Facilitation Development Manager at the Allender Center, about what it looks like to bring story work into the life of a local church. 

Drawing on her years of ministry leadership and her training in Narrative Focused Trauma Care®, Petra shares both the challenges and beauty of inviting people to engage their stories as part of discipleship. Listen in to explore:

  • Why story work belongs at the heart of spiritual formation
  • The importance of leadership buy-in and shared language
  • How to navigate resistance and build trust
  • What becomes possible when vulnerability is honored

This conversation invites you to imagine a church where story work isn’t a side ministry—it’s how we grow into the people God is calling us to be.

Listener Resources:

About Our Guest:

Petra Malekzadeh relocated to the U.S. from Germany with her family 15 years ago. She has had a career in the corporate world and worked as a self-employed artist and small business for over a decade. Four years ago, she joined the staff of a large Seattle-based church where she established a thriving story group ministry, leading groups and coaching a growing team of story group facilitators.

As part of her journey with the Allender Center, Petra completed the NFTC I, Externship, and Fellowship Programs and has been working as a Core Facilitator and Facilitator Advisor. She believes that healing and redemption are found where people can make sense of their own stories in the context of God’s greater story. This is what ultimately opens the door to embracing one’s own calling with clarity, capacity, and courage. Petra has long been drawn to the transformative power of small groups in inviting people to become what they are most meant to be and loves to utilize the group experience to spark curiosity, to invite authenticity, and kindle desires that lead to a more resilient hope.

Petra also offers 1:1 or group coaching and care to those who have completed the Allender Center’s training programs and are ready to start leading story groups in their own communities.

 

Episode Transcript:

Dan: As often as we talk, Rachael, about the importance of a story, I’ll just confess, just let’s just get this over with quickly. I have not been brave enough to imagine, I can think about how to do this individually, how to do this in terms of a few folks, but I’ve never really thought about how to take story work into the context of a local church. Would you say that that’s something that you’ve spent a lot of time doing?

Rachael: Probably more than you? I did have a role once with the Allender Center called Ministry Partnerships, and in many ways that’s how I met my husband. So maybe more in a parachurch context than a true church context. But also in that ministry partnership role, The Allender Center was venturing with some churches as to what it might be possibly look like to co-create something of a story work formational process that was contextual to their communities. So yeah, dabbled in it a little bit.

Dan: Dabbled, and I’ll say I’ve dabbled as well, but our pleasure today is to be able to bring a dear friend and colleague into this conversation. So folks, what we’re focusing on is if you’ve been in any way captured by the importance of story and you’ve begun to play with that in the context of your own core relationships, your spouse, your friends, then at some point there has to be meant to be a movement into the context of what God loves deeply and that’s the local church. So welcome Petra Malekzadeh. Petra is our facilitation development manager, which basically means she is the interplay of a therapist, a pastor, a spiritual director, a babysitter, and someone who knows how to care well for people engaging stories. And what’s required to engage a story is engaging your own and being able to bridge that gap between your own and others is one of the complicated labors that we’ll be talking about. But we are so grateful for you, Petra, and particularly if folks go back to the April 26th, 2024, they’ll hear a bit more of your story a bit more particularly of the brilliance that you have brought in engaging the category of shame. But today we want to talk about how in the name of all that is good, true and holy did you get involved, first of all just in engaging stories, but then further how did this reality of engaging the heart of another open the door to doing this in the context of a local church?

Petra: Yeah, I think I’m one of those people. I’ve heard many of my friends and colleagues on this podcast saying, I can’t remember a time before I thought about story and how things that happened in my past affected the way that I show up in the world. I have memories of sitting with friends as young as 14, 15 years old and thinking about our parents and thinking about dynamics in my home and how they affect me. So I feel like that’s been a very long journey. But as we’re talking about our local faith communities, I’m particularly mindful of always having been really drawn to small group settings and particularly having worked for many years in women’s ministry for the probably only reason that that was the only time I could show up to church in the mornings and have other people watch my kids, which was always a great bonus. And sitting around tables with other women and just noticing the many assumptions we make about ourselves and who we are and why we do things that we do, and noticing that in myself as well, and just feeling this sense of curiosity around why are we jumping to these assumptions and you don’t actually strike me as the person that you say that you are. And is that true about me too? And so just so much curiosity and finding such easy access often with people into these conversations. So I think that’s what initially drew me to start my NFTC training with the Allender Center, thinking that this is something that I’m going to be able to utilize in the places that I’m already in and have access to conversations with people.

Rachael: Well, just something I deeply appreciate about you and we can talk more about this is I have always experienced you as someone who has a deep heart to equip and support ministry leaders, ministry volunteers in local churches. And you see that as such an opportunity for the Allender Center and what we offer, and I know you’re also aware of the obstacles and not just obstacles, but even some of the ways in which we have to be aware of what’s needed and what extra support is there. And so you entered training, you got a lot of insights even to your own personal story, but almost in a one-to-one correlation, it was also immediately starting to translate for you in your work with women in your local church and I think even moved maybe beyond working with women. And I would love to hear more: how did that develop? What did that look like?

Petra: I think one of the key words that comes to me when I listen to you is the word change and transformation, which is such a buzzword in our faith communities. We talk so much about people, the intention for us to change and to be transformed into something more of what we are. And I just felt so much dissonance around that and the interpretations of scripture that I heard about a variety of things from you just need to take on your new identity in Christ and that’s it. Versus you need to be sanctified and what does that mean? Or you need to abide. And I think for me, one of the core paradigm shifts when I started my training was I just learned so much about what change actually is and what it means and how it occurs, and also how messy that can be and how disruptive to our relationships. And so I think for me, having met and been in relationship with so many folks in the church who faithfully over years seem to apply all that they’re told to do in order to experience more freedom in their lives, more joy in their lives, and finding themselves really discouraged and really disillusioned. I remember one conversation with a woman during a coffee time at church and she said, I go to church and I feel so encouraged, I feel excited and I leave and by the time I get to my front door, I feel like nothing’s going to change. And that really was a core moment for me where I thought, yeah, this is what we need to look at change and transformation differently. We need to even look at discipleship differently. And what is discipleship? What do we mean when we say that? I think that was, those were the initial conversations I started having when I was offered a role, a part-time role in a local faith community. And again, with a focus on women’s ministry and the person I was going to report to, I essentially said to him, I’m going to come. I can do women’s ministry. I want you to know this is just a way for me to get a place at the table because I really want to talk about how do we understand discipleship and how could we look at this differently?

Dan: What did she say? Shall we say? I know you moderately well. Really well. That’s a pretty bold statement, friend.

Petra: It’s true. Yeah. And I think the only reason I took the job was because there was an openness, there was a curiosity, there was in many ways already alignment with, yeah, I understand. I can sense the same frustration, the same obstacles. Let’s see what we can do differently.

Dan: So there was at least an openness to say, and again, I’m not trying to pan it just the notion of here’s a booklet, fill in the blanks, learn the verse, pray at the end, and you’ve done a bible study, you’ve done a group work, and hopefully you’ll be different because you’ve been in the word with others. There’s something both good, good, I mean good, but anemic. It’s a level of left brain notion of just fill your head with a bit of knowledge and in that assumption of a bit of knowledge will help you change. And again, I don’t want to write that off because I like my left hemisphere, but I also have a right hemisphere that needs to intersect as well. So what were some of the initial challenges for you in stepping into a world that’s much more used to left hemisphere? Fill in the blank, pray at the end, and may you be changed?

Petra: I just remember repeating myself over and over and over for a long time and probably slowly gaining somewhat a reputation as someone who brings back our planning efforts for certain ministry events or conversation around mission, bringing it back to the deeper questions. And one example that I feel like, or I guess a place where there was alignment with a lot of ministry stuff. I think pastors and church leaders, there is a sense that something’s moving really slowly and that some pieces don’t seem to be able to be moved at all. And I think that’s especially true relationally when churches have a sense that people do come and they come faithfully and regularly, but they’re very scared to step into any type of leadership to bring that gifting and all the ways that churches try to invite people in and still feel a lot of resistance and distance and maybe more of a consumer mentality where people are grateful to take in, but very scared to give. And I think that’s a place where I would bring it back to the deeper question and say, we can’t even get people to say hello to each other at talks on a Sunday morning. How are we going to invite them to step into places of ministry and leadership that ask a lot of risk of people? And I think the dissonance is that, yeah, there is a perception that if people are led by the Spirit, if people are working on a relationship with Jesus, that those things will fall into place and that if I keep saying there’s more that we need to offer people, there’s almost like a dismissal of the power of the Holy Spirit and what the church is already offering. And so there’s some heated conversations that can…

Dan: Heated? Say a bit more.

Petra: Well, I think people have their paradigms and there’s a lot of hope, there’s a lot of safety in believing that if I stay close to Jesus, then things will work out for me and things will work as I hope. And there’s not more that I need to do or that I could do. Wondering if that’s true or if that could be true in a different way. It’s not necessarily comfortable for people’s paradigms.

Rachael: And you were able to successfully launch some version of a story group in your faith community. And it seems like there were some things that I’ve had, I was mentioning in my role with the Allender Center and even partnering with other ministries or faith communities, sometimes there can be really intense obstacles. Maybe people come to the Allender Center, do some story work and they want to take it back to their community. So they invite us to come be a part of co-creating that, but if there’s not buy-in from the leadership–one that this is meaningful and something worth investing in, or they have some sense of what it is, even just a theological alignment or as you talked about a model of discipleship that makes space. And it sounds like you were a part of pushing your community to wrestle with how you were understanding discipleship and how you were creating opportunities to live that out. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit more about what was actually needed for it to work for you to not just be in an oppositional place of like, we’re going to do this, but then it becomes threatening, which has been my primary experience of trying to bring story work to communities. So what was different in your context that might be helpful to people to have imagination?

Petra: Yeah. Yes. That is still something that I think about with a lot of gratitude and honestly, a sense of awe of just how I felt the timing was orchestrated for me to have access and to have a place. When I started my role, it was August, 2018, shortly after our head pastor at the time introduced in some ways a new model for discipleship that was a lot more realistic than anything that I had experienced in other church contexts before. Essentially a way of looking at ourselves through the lens of our bodies, our soul and the divine part, our spirit, the way that God dwells in us and through us. But even just to include the body in what it means to become a disciple, that’s probably not something that many people will be able to find in their church communities. But then also this idea of soul. Our pastor at the time very often used the word story as he was talking to this part that is our personality, our will, our emotions as shaped by our stories. And that was completely independent of me coming in. That was actually a context that was created for me where I had a lot of opportunity because people started becoming familiar with the language and started having questions about it. And I think this is one core thing that I like to talk to people about is when we bring story work, where is it located in the context of ministry at church? So often it becomes located in the recovery or soul care. Church is becoming more open to having therapists as partners or having someone come in and say, I’m going to do a group for divorced folks, or I’m going to do a support group for this, a support group for that. Very often it gets located in this kind of soul care place within the community, which is a lot more sidelined, honestly, a lot more contested in many faith communities than the discipleship road. And so I was able to say, no, this is a core tool for folks in their discipleship journey. And so it became something that was allowed to take up space that was allowed to be promoted and talked about, and recommended and that was really amazing and I’m still really in awe of how those things aligned.

Dan: Well, I’m curious for both of you, why do you think story work is viewed as something so either dangerous or incidental, which is a strange paradox that which is dangerous is not just sort of like a peripheral, but it’s both. It’s viewed as it could cause trouble. You start opening the door to story and who knows what’s going to come out. And on the other hand, it’s for those people who struggle with a problem, be it addiction or be it divorce recovery. I love the way you put it, Petra, because in some sense that’s my experience of interacting with even good friends who are pastors. Like it could cause trouble or we have a place for that. But it’s in the realm of the troubled ones. Why is story work so dangerous, so incidental?

Rachael: I mean just on a larger collective scale, there’s a reason why our government is trying to censor stories and erase stories. God is a God of story. Our Bible is made up so many stories. We are storied people. History is a retelling of story. There is power. I mean, this is similar to the conversation we had with James White a few months ago talking about how enslaved people had a brilliance because they were story people. So they knew Jesus and had encountered the gospel before being brought to the Americas and when they’re being given half a story. So when you even think about the larger stories we tell and how it helps us make sense of the world, how it impacts the way we love or the limitations to love, and then you break that down on a smaller level in our own stories. For me, in the realm of spiritual abuse, this is why I think churches that really have a lot of power and control around what stories get to be told, so whether you move that to the political sphere or not, how stories are interpreted, what they mean, what’s permissible, who gets to bring stories, I actually think they hold tremendous power for healing, liberation, imagination calling. But I think on that other end, if you’re not, they also, you can’t enter a more truthful story without encountering your body. So you’re right, Petra, that your church leadership was already shifting a paradigm to include the body and discipleship while our bodies hold stories in a very unique way and that’s going to come out and it can get messy or it can be both relieving when we understand more who we are and how we’ve come to be who we are. But that understanding and awareness doesn’t lead to an immediate transformation. So I think it does require a different kind of vulnerability, a different kind of faith, a different kind of imagination. For so many of us, the way we’ve survived even our faith story is to actually have very kind of, what’s the right word I’m looking for? We actually cut out parts. We don’t want to tell the painful stories because somehow that might reflect badly on God who’s supposed to be good and powerful. So we have these coping mechanisms and the ways in which we’ve learned to tell stories, and I think story work can be disruptive to that. And I also think without Petra, I would love to hear you speak more about this or if you have an answer to this question, but I also think it takes a lot of translating, contextualizing because different communities already hold a way in which they think about story, and that’s really important work to translate and to contextualize something. And that’s a skill not everyone has, right or not everyone sees as valuable and to contextualize and translate, you actually have to be pretty immersed in different communities. That’s a bridge building work.

Dan: So. Bring this back to you. So what was the threat you experienced even in an open community to dealing with story and how did you contextualize.

Petra: This is probably not the answer you’re looking for, but I did not experience it as dangerous or there wasn’t actually a lot of conflict. I mean, there’s negotiation as there is around ministry and what gets to be and what gets to be enough from the front and what gets to take space. But at least in my context, I did not experience a threat. I do think that the kind of sense of threat or danger, I agree with some of what you said, Rachael, is that I think we have, at least in my peer experience growing up in a church context, there are stories we never tell, collectively. There’s so much of scripture that we never preach about. And so I think we’re not necessarily always helping people to build a more robust imagination that allows for the dissonant and messy pieces and the pieces we can’t make sense of. If there’s still such a sense of God’s good, God’s in control, everything will work out. Those who believe there’s a reason for everything, a lot of our personal stories don’t fit into that narrative. A lot of the stories in scripture don’t fit into that narrative. And so then you’re messing with, especially in our day and age where it’s a big deal just to be alive in the world and have to hold everything that we’re holding. If people cannot no longer find safety in the way that their imagination has been shaped, that God is good and everything makes sense, you know there’s reason for everything and everything will work out, then you’re taking something from people or you’re asking people to consider something that will feel very dangerous to them and then in turn can feel dangerous to you because then what are you giving people instead? How do you create imagination for something different that will allow them to continue to engage and not feel overwhelmed?

Rachael: Which I think is one of your great gifts and why we’re so lucky to have you on our team because I’ve often heard you name, Hey, I’ve loved being immersed in this Allender Center world / Seattle School world. A lot of the language is coming out of degree programs that were developed and wanting to be a middle space to offer this learning to people who may never come get a graduate level degree. But I’ve heard you name with such kindness and humility like, hey, sometimes your language is not going to translate to the person coming to church every Sunday morning who is longing for transformation is longing for change, but if they are in some ways having to learn a whole new language just to get there. So you did a tremendous amount of work and you’ve done that on our behalf as well at the Allender Center. And I know we’re going to keep working on creating materials and resources for ministry leaders and faith communities to utilize the heart and soul of story work, but in a way that might be less of a challenge in that translation, but you did a lot of work to translate and contextualize story work for people in a discipleship model. And I wonder if you could speak a little bit about the importance of that and the power of that and a little bit of what that looked like to give people an imagination.

Petra: Well, I think our methodology at the Allender Center really lends itself to this type of work, this type of translation because we have a very robust theological framework that we bring when we talk about story. And we have words that are familiar to people, particularly when we talk about faith, hope and love when we bring these categories, but then deepen, expand and bring them in a different way. So I think a lot of the psychological, and this is really something that I think brings all of us so much joy, is that so much of what we see in scripture about the human experience has over time been in so many ways confirmed by what we know and what we learn about how our brains work, how we develop, how we’re impacted and shaped by our experiences. And so the two are not separate, they’re not two different things. They are the same thing, but we look at them from different ways and they actually integrate so well together. So I think that was something for me that I felt like I can bring psychological concepts like attachment or what children need developmentally, all of those things, I can bring them, but I can bring them held within in some ways a theological framework or I can, as I talk about those things, I can touch back on biblical ideas that people are familiar with and what God created us for. So in so many ways, I think our methodology offers both a really strong robust framework, but so much space to play with language and to be mindful and conscientious of what have people, if you’ve been part of a faith community for years, you should know and you should be mindful of what have they heard, how has their imagination been shaped and what’s missing or what could be talked about in a different way, picking up the pieces that they’re already familiar with, but using maybe some different language or asking some different questions. So I think people do need a minimum amount of psychoeducational content, but it’s very possible to wrap it in a way that it feels like this is not separate. This is actually what we’ve been talking about. Just look at from a different perspective.

Dan: Well, it’s glorious that the church opened the door. It’s one of those rare realities where a model of sanctification that has operated certainly in the West for a long time isn’t so much being challenged, but added to it isn’t that knowing scripture is less important, but in opening up the category of the body so that we’re not just talking about sarx, that notion of flesh, but the body, soma, it is like we go, wow, that’s radical. And it’s like, oh God, are you kidding me? That’s radical. But yeah, it is really remarkable and radical. So you were in a very open world and a world in which you were given a lot of ground to be able to create. What I want you to be able to name is where was it difficult? Because I want folks to know very few churches are going to naturally open the door to kind of a model of sanctification that includes the engagement with your own past, with an engagement with your story, and its implications for the present and for the future. So we can ponder all the questions about why, but you are in a very open world. Most people will not. What did you have to deal with though, as to translation? Just maybe the gap wasn’t 20 feet that you had to jump, but you probably still had to make some jumps for people to engage this and for the church to understand what you were going for. What were those difficulties?

Petra: I think, again, it’s not really an answer to your question. I think when I think about where I was bumping or where I felt like I was bumping into some softer walls and maybe where I would anticipate other people bumping into, and we kind of touched on it already, is that sense of this is for those people. And I would love for my congregation to be engaging this, and yet I feel like it’s risky as a leader or maybe not necessary to submit myself and also be a part of. And again, I had the privilege of having a lot of folks, I mean, we had a pretty large staff and there was a lot of folks who were open to engaging stories with me. And initially, and this is something I would recommend folks, testing the waters who of your staff, don’t start with your congregants, start with your staff and see if there a willingness in taking a risk. And I think one of the first groups I ever did was with a group of staff, and it was my own boss, my boss’s boss, but then some folks from our admin team. And it was across, there was no hierarchy or anything like that. We did this as a group of staff. And I think that is such a core first step. And I also experienced where there were other staff who were never had a sense of this is for me too, or I should engage in this way. And I think that can be a very difficult situation when it continues to feel like it’s with these people, but it’s not something that concerns me, then that means there’s still a disconnect around the understanding of how we all have a story and we’re each shaped by our stories and we each can learn and need to be involved in this one.

Dan: Well, and I often hear from folks the question of, well, if I share something really real about my past or my present, I don’t know what’s going to happen with that information. So again, we know that the community of God struggles with gossip, with the potential that a reality that at the moment I’m not doing well and I’m not doing well in the context of important relationship like my children or my wife. That’s dangerous stuff. And the presumption of I’m far better than indeed, I know I am, leaves, I think a lot of leaders in the position of vulnerability is an exit strategy, not a way of inviting myself and others into greater understanding of the goodness of God. So how did you deal with the issue of that kind of vulnerability and the issue of gossip and confidentiality?

Petra: Yeah, this is something that if someone’s come and done work with us where they’re in a group and they’ll never see those books again. Or maybe they stay in touch, but there is very few touch points to their actual life in their actual communities. So we have to think through how will we handle this differently and what’s implication for ongoing relationship and ongoing work together? So I would say one, you have to have relational capital and trust. I mean, I was part of that church community for eight years before this season of leading groups. And so I think I have built some trust, and not just with congregants, but also with people in ministry leadership. You have to have personal integrity so that people know and can trust you. And then there’s a lot of language that we need to put around. We’ll be in relationship together. So there’s some things we need to commit to. There’s some rules we need to play by. I love Dan that at the beginning of our NFTC programs or story workshop, you have people actual sign a contract and physically write their name under a covenant of confidentiality. That’s something I do. I put that in my documents that I created. I have people take out a pen and I have people sign and the presence of others, their name just because it feels like it’s so core and it makes a difference to do it physically with witnesses around you. We also talked about as we’re going to continue to work together, your story can never become a weapon. It can never become part of a conversation that is around work. And if it’s not invited, if the person themselves doesn’t open the door to considering how their story might be playing out, you are never allowed to bring that. That was also a rule that we had and how can we allow what we learn about each other to increase compassion, to increase empathy, to increase understanding, but not become something that actually is going to mess with our relationships as colleagues. And I would say, again, you also need to know that you don’t just need to have integrity yourself. You need to know that people who you are invited in, can have integrity, have some resilience relationally that you have seen that they can work through conflict, and that can be forgiveness, that that can be grace. And so I would say that with the groups that I have led with staff, my sense has been that it’s led to better work relationships. And we did not constantly talk about our stories once we did a story groups together. It just was something that became part of the fabric of the relationship and felt like this is creating more of a sense of understanding and compassion for each other.

Rachael: Well, and I just love hearing that because I would say maybe some of the places I’ve experienced like, oh, there wasn’t as much alignment as was really needed. There wasn’t as much buy-in from the leadership opting into this work and seeing it as a value. There wasn’t integrity within the system. An example I can give is we worked with a campus ministry for a season and did story work story groups with their staff that was so transformative and powerful for the staff. However, even with that utilization of confidentiality, the leadership felt at odds with what we were doing. It wasn’t clear when we began that there was a kind of vocalization of buy-in and yeah, we like this. This is valuable to us. But when push came to shove, it was like, we don’t want to attract troubled students. We don’t want our staff being trained to be therapists. This is getting too messy. But part of what happened is someone broke confidentiality and shared with leadership something another fellow staff had disclosed about their own struggle with let’s say just pornography or something like that. And instead of that being the problematic thing that someone would break integrity and the kind of leadership having a sense of, wow, when are you hoping to, we know this is actually a break of integrity. What you’re doing is wrong and we need to address it, it became the other person became punished. And then it was like, this is too messy and what you guys are doing, and people shouldn’t know these things about each other. And so I do think you’re absolutely right, that sense of is there enough relational equity? Is there enough integrity? Do people actually have an understanding that holding our brokenness, which we all have in compassion and with wisdom and honor, is actually a growth… That’s a spiritual maturity, that’s a development and a transformation of what it means to be the people of God in community. So I do just want to say I actually love hearing, I love hearing that. I do think that can work in certain contexts. And I often say to people, I’m kind of like the person who only knows the trauma stories. And I love being able to hear the times when like, oh, we get to have more imagination for the possibility of this. Well, without ignoring some of the vulnerabilities

Dan: Before we end the whole point of there are costs for doing this, but there’s also a glory. There’s also a sweetness almost that level of, yeah, it costs you to begin to train for a 5K or 10K, but there is something in the process that you gain that I go back to the passage in 2 Corinthians 4, which I don’t live well, but nonetheless is very moving. And that is Paul talking about his own ministry as light and momentary suffering. There is suffering to do this, and it is hard, but there is something so sweet about engaging. So before we end, again, it’s not looking to, here’s a success story, but for you, what has the sweetness been?

Petra: The things that people discover about themselves, the things that they discover are actually not true about who they are and the things that they find that are true? Because I think the whole point, we started out talking about discipleship. The whole point of doing this work is to help people become more free, to bring their gifting on behalf of love, is my opinion. That’s why we want people to engage in discipleship. We want most faith communities have a sense of mission and have a sense that they have a place in the world and they are needed, and the work that they and that people can do is needed. And so people are so often not willing to take risks and for good reason or very good reason. And so the story work gives opportunities to take risks and have it actually end well. But more importantly, I think it gives insight into why it’s been hard to take risks and what is on the other side. And so seeing people look at themselves in a different light and find more energy, more freedom to bring their gifting to the larger community, I think that’s just so rewarding. I think people do want that. And yes, there’s so many internal barriers that we have, that I have. I still have so many barriers bringing myself, and yet you can see that happening even after a 10 week story group, that people will just approach others differently with more openness, with more freedom, with more curiosity.

Dan: Well, we strongly want for folks to be hearing and thinking and imagining, and frankly, just praying. How does your story open the door to a deeper understanding of the story of God? And in that process, we want you to have the freedom to work, from my standpoint, bottom up, top down. And top down is engaging the leadership in your church as you have done so well, Petra. And yet, bottom up is taking a book To Be Told, a book like Eldridge’s Epic, taking Adam Young’s new book and just getting a few people reading together, talking about the nature of how your story intersects, and there’s a cost to each. Our dream, dream, dream, dream is that in this case, your particular work will be available as you continue to write and produce some of the guides that you want to create and the work you do. And I want people to know this well. Next chapter, coaching and care. You are wise. You are a wise woman who has done some amazing work, and to invite anyone to engage their story with you would be fabulous. But particularly those of you who are wanting or already engaging your local congregation and the context of offering and engaging the story of God through our own individual stories, you are a resource. And as Rachael said, we are fortunate. Blessed is another word to have your presence. And so let’s just say this is part of your calling and you’re going to suffer for it. And there’s also going to be such goodness for you and for others when we begin to develop not a “different” view of sanctification in the process, but adding to what is already well, a larger category that might involve messiness and complexity, but also goodness, goodness, goodness. So thank you. Thank you so much for being you and for what you offer.