What’s THE Story?
(Element 2: The Master Story)

re:VISION – Shaping A Christ Focused Worldview What’s THE Story? (Element 2: The Master Story)

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before it ends.

― Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

Life comes to us as a story.

It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is moving, changing, and developing. And we are changing with it.

Seeing our lives as stories is more than a powerful metaphor. It is how experience presents itself to us.

— Daniel Taylor, Tell Me a Story

Every worldview is summarized in some form of a Larger Story, a Master Story. This Master Story stands “above” all the other smaller stories of life and gives meaning and coherence to all these details. The smaller stories of our lives are all the things that happen on a daily basis, all the patterns and routines that we go through often without giving much thought to their significance. The Master Story gives meaning and coherence to all these stories.

A Master Story has often been called a metanarrative. The prefix meta points to something that is behind or beyond other things. Something that is meta is something that helps us understand “the big picture” of the details. Metadata – a word that has come into popular language out of computer sciences – is data that helps us understand other data. A metanarrative is a Story that is behind, beyond, above all the other stories that helps us understand all other stories.

A Master Story organizes and answers our Big Life Questions:

1) where we have come from (Origin),
2) where we are heading (Destiny),
3) why we are here (Meaning & Purpose) and
4) how we should live (Ethics).

This larger, Master Story that stands above others, produces a Tradition which produces the Vision and Purpose of the people who believe and affirm this Master Story.

In our time, some are living in The Story revealed in the Bible, some are living in the Story of Evolution, some are living in the Story of Self, some are living in the Story of Islam, etc. There are as many different Master Stories as there are Worldviews.

Everyone is living life directed by a Master Story that gives Meaning and Coherence to their lives. Unless they are living in a corrupt Master Story….

Ultimately, this Story should also give us HOPE.

We will now dig a little deeper into all these issues in the following topics.