Article: a nonfictional prose composition …

Would you rather read a dictionary or a novel?

“A novel,” most people would say.

That thought occurred to me after several of us had a discussion yesterday of how to answer the question, “What is New Tribes Mission?”

Everyone came up with a definition.

But why not tell a story?

Here’s one that popped into my head last night:

God gave us a great gift — the opportunity to know Him and to find eternal, abundant life in His Son. He did the heavy lifting. He died.

All He asks us to do is to make that gift available to others. In fact, that’s the task He left for all of His followers to do. And more than 2,000 years after He gave us this work, there’s still plenty to do. There are still people who have no opportunity to hear what God did for them. These people have the same right as you and me to hear about Jesus and decide whether they want to believe on Him, to follow Him, to share His love with others.

Those are the people whom New Tribes Mission exists to serve.

Here’s another:

A certain man paid a great price for a vineyard. Only half of it was productive.

So he hired workers to go into the entire vineyard and care for it, all of it. He told them to prune and weed and train the all the vines. He gave them everything they would need to do so.

But they chose to focus on the half of the vineyard that was already productive. Few would go into the other parts of the vineyard. In time, the workers began to believe that taking good care of the vineyard that was producing was more important than doing anything in the rest of the vineyard.

Tell me, will that great man be happy when he comes back to his vineyard?

Now, neither of those is really workable. And maybe even better would be a story of a person whose life was transformed by God because someone came to his or her remote village with the life-changing gospel. In fact, I was just this morning re-reading one that might work.

I guess I’m just wondering if a story would be better than a definition at answering the question, “What is New Tribes Mission?” What do you think?