When Crisis Hits

Your response becomes your story.

This edition of Outcomes invites us to explore important questions about storytelling. They are foundational to a ministry’s ability to drive lasting impact. But they assume the story is yours to tell. What many Christian nonprofits haven’t prepared for is what happens when someone else starts telling your story for you.

A crisis is, among other things, a challenge to authorship…

A crisis is, among other things, a challenge to authorship that introduces a competing version of your organization’s story. This version leads with what went wrong and usually doesn’t include the years of faithfulness, lives changed and trust carefully built. Once that version is in circulation, your audiences – donors, staff, board members, the communities you serve – are reading it whether you respond or not.

Maintaining Authorship of Your Story

The question “what do we say?” is not all a crisis forces us to face. It’s also whether you’re prepared to maintain or reclaim authorship of your own story. Or, are you forced to keep responding to someone else’s?

Many organizations in reputational trouble respond to the story being told about them. They focus on what a critic got wrong, on explaining what actually happened or on defending decisions and people. That’s an understandable instinct, and sometimes correcting misinformation is a necessary part of the response. But organizations that structure their entire response around the challenger’s version aren’t owning their story.

Organizations that come through crisis with their stories intact almost always anchor their response in that story – what they’ve always stood for and done. To be clear, that does not mean ignoring or minimizing the crisis. Operational failures require real response, and communities of faith rightly expect accountability. When leaders uncover wrongdoing, truthful acknowledgment and real accountability are how leaders protect the institution, not what they sacrifice to protect it.

The expectations placed on you are higher because the commitments you’ve made are higher.

For Christian nonprofits, maintaining authorship is more than a strategic imperative. It intersects with spiritual authority and the credibility of your ministry’s witness. When a gap emerges between “who we said we were” and “how we responded,” it raises questions about whether the story you’ve been telling was ever true to begin with. The expectations placed on you are higher because the commitments you’ve made are higher.

Preparing to Respond Well in a Crisis

The capacity to respond with your own story, rather than to someone else’s, is built in advance. Organizations that respond well in crises rarely discover what they stand for in the moment. You cannot reclaim authorship under pressure if you didn’t own it before the pressure set in. That preparation doesn’t need to be complicated.

Four things matter most:

1. Know your story cold. Your mission, your values, the specific commitments you’ve made to the people who trust you. If you can’t articulate in two or three sentences what your organization has always stood for – and what that means for how you’d respond when tested – your story isn’t ready to be protected.
   
   
2. Address your audiences in sequence. The people closest to your work – staff, board, major donors, the communities you serve – deserve to hear from you before the general public does. Reached first and directly, your closest audiences are far more likely to extend the trust you’ve built with them. When they encounter the crisis elsewhere first, you’re playing catch-up on your own narrative.
   
   
3. Have a holding statement ready. A brief, identity-grounded statement that can go out quickly while you’re still assessing the situation prevents you from going silent at the worst possible moment. Silence, to most audiences, reads as confirmation.
   
   
4. Invest in proactive storytelling before you need it. News coverage and commentary that documents your work, values and impact serves you when a competing narrative emerges. This matters more than it once did. AI tools increasingly shape how prospective donors, employees and partners learn about organizations. Those systems draw heavily from published news coverage. An organization with a consistent presence in earned media is far better positioned to have its own story reflected accurately than one whose first significant coverage is a crisis story.

Is Your Story Built on Stone?

The storm isn’t your story, but it does reveal whether your story was built on sand or stone. Engaging these questions seriously – including the ones most organizations would rather defer – is how you make sure what you’ve built will hold. The organizations that keep authorship through a crisis are almost always the ones who knew, long before anything happened, exactly what their story was and what they needed to do to live it out.

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Nathan Burchfiel is a senior vice president at the strategic communications firm Pinkston, where he leads the crisis communications practice. A former journalist and ordained deacon, he advises the executives, boards, and legal counsel of Christian nonprofits and churches through reputational crisis. Learn more at www.pinkston.co/crisis-communications.