Stewards of the Story

Every ministry inherits a story it didn’t start. How we tell it is our stewardship.

An Israelite child watches his family prepare for Passover. The ritual is older than he is, and each part clearly means something.

Eventually, he asks the question the evening was designed to lead him to: What does this mean?

God gave Israel the words: “It is the Passover sacrifice to the LORD, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt and spared our homes” (Ex. 12:27). Notice where the action belongs: The Lord passed over. The Lord spared. Israel’s place in the story was to be rescued.

The answer was a story.

Our ministries have stories of calling, sacrifice, failure, provision, and faithfulness. Telling our stories well is more than a communication technique. It’s part of caring for what God has entrusted to us.

We inherit stories we didn’t start.

My first interview at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) was with a man I never worked a day for. After that interview, the process went quiet. When it began again months later, his replacement was the one who called me. The first had started something he didn’t get to finish; I became the result of a decision he never saw completed.

Much of what we begin will be finished by someone else, and some of our most defining decisions affect people whose names we’ll never know. It has been true at DTS for more than a hundred years.

We are living on the foundation of somebody else’s faithfulness. Somebody will live on ours.

We receive it before we shape it.

That’s why an organization’s story is not something its communications team invents. We receive it before we shape it.

The organization isn’t the mission.

Organizations naturally put themselves at the center of their own stories. What have we built? How much did we raise? How many attended? Accurate. Not the whole story.

DTS doesn’t exist to confer degrees. It exists to equip godly servant-leaders to proclaim God’s Word and build up the body of Christ worldwide. Our role in that mission is brief. We may not see results until years after a student graduates. We may not see them at all.

That changes how we speak to givers. If we tell them only what the organization accomplished, we ask them to admire the organization. When we help them see how God multiplies their generosity through the lives of students and graduates, we invite them into the whole story.

Tell the whole truth.

I should be upfront. Polishing is part of my job. Every warning that follows is one I need to hear first.

No story includes everything. We decide what to feature, what to shorten, and what to leave out. Those choices are never neutral. Over time, they reveal the values and fears of an organization. The danger is that we polish away the humanity: the waiting, the uncertainty, the poor judgment, the failure. A challenge becomes an opportunity. A hard decision becomes strategic. And however it ends, we tell it as though we planned it that way.

The finished story may be impressive—and untrue.

The finished story may be impressive—and untrue. The distance between deciding not to feature something and deciding to bury it is shorter than we like to admit. And when we bury something, there’s usually a person underneath. Reputation can recover. People take longer.

A personal reflection

Years before I came to DTS, I worked at another ministry, where I drove a team into the ground and called it “faithfulness.”

I told everyone the mission mattered and was worth the personal cost. I also told myself that God had called me to the work, which had a way of making nearly every cost—early mornings, late nights, strained friendships, a team I kept pushing, and time stolen from my wife and children—seem acceptable, even noble.

The mission did matter, and so my reasoning was convincing. But I had become proud and rigid, and I had stopped listening. I called it “staying anchored to the mission.” In truth, I was barking orders at the wind.

Another leader finally had the courage and candor to show me what I could not see. I had defenses ready—good ones, at least in my mind. None of them changed the truth. I was demanding that God follow a plan I had labeled as his.

I had mistaken my certainty for faithfulness. And I needed to return to the real story.

If our stories leave no room for weakness, correction, or grace, we may be protecting the organization at the expense of the truth about God’s faithfulness. Passover never let Israel imagine it had rescued itself. Christian ministries should be just as careful

Truth and love belong together.

I needed anchors. When we rebuilt DTS’s positioning, we kept circling back to four words already on the wall.

Someone created the tagline “Teach Truth. Love Well.” years before I arrived. Teaching truth requires more than correct answers. It means staying under the authority of Scripture, including when it exposes something in us we’d rather defend. Loving well is different from staying agreeable. Sometimes, love demands the courage to say what a person or an organization doesn’t want to hear.

Those four words have become a test for all our work: Is it true? Does it treat everyone with love? The people in our stories are not raw material for promoting an institution. Their experiences are testimonies entrusted to our care.

Technology can’t bear witness.

I use AI, and I won’t pretend the tools aren’t useful. My team runs meeting transcripts through automation every week. AI can search an archive, transcribe an interview, and surface themes faster than most communications teams can.

What AI can’t do is tell me what matters. A transcript captures every word and misses the most telling moments—the pause before someone answers, the thing nobody is willing to say out loud, the moment a decision turns. A transcript preserves what was said. It can’t explain why it matters, recognize Providence, or accept responsibility when the story is wrong. It can’t stand in for someone who was there.

AI can help us organize the record. The responsibility to understand, verify, and tell the story faithfully will always belong to us. That matters more as the tools get easier and their output gets harder to recognize.

Tell the story forward.

A chapter later, in Exodus 13, Moses tells Israel how to answer the same question in the generations to come. A father tells his child, “I do this because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt” (Ex. 13:8). Generations born long after the rescue were taught to understand themselves as participants in it. Psalm 78 carries the charge forward: “We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power, and the wonders he has done” (Ps. 78:4).

This isn’t nostalgia that imprisons us in the past. It’s how one generation hands the next something firm to stand on.

A well-told story helps people understand why their work matters, and it helps a new leader tell the difference between convictions that must be preserved and practices that were right for only a season.

What are our stories teaching?

Those of us responsible for our organization’s stories should ask uncomfortable questions:

• Do our stories require God, or do they just as easily explain our success without him?
• What have we decided not to tell?
• Whose version of the organization’s story would we rather not hear?
• Will the next generation learn from our faithfulness and our failures, or only inherit a carefully managed reputation?

Tell them the truth. Love them well.

We’ve been given a brief turn inside a story God began before us and will continue after us. We will likely never meet many of the people affected by the decisions we make today. We can still serve them: Tell them the truth. Love them well. Trust the God who is ahead of us.

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Jason Fox serves as executive director of marketing and communications at Dallas Theological Seminary (dts.edu), where he leads enterprise marketing, brand stewardship, and institutional communications. Drawing on his background in ministry and design, he helps the seminary steward and share its story. He can be reached at jfox@dts.edu.