Pete Dray and Matt Lillicrap, authors of Reality and Other Stories (IVP, 2022), discuss the intriguing connection between the seven basic plots and the core Gospel story of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. From overcoming the monster to rebirth, these plots reveal our deepest longings as human beings, which find their true fulfilment in the true story of Jesus Christ. This interview was recorded in October 2022. Peter Dray is Director for Creative Evangelism with UCCF. At present he is writing video scripts and supporting materials for CU Impact Groups (see www.uccf.org.uk/impact). He leads the evangelistic outreach in his local church, Redeemer Leeds. Matt Lillicrap is Pastor of Hope Community Church, Cambridge and a tutor with Crosslands Training. He has written for Themelios and Primer and blogs at www.onwardstoglory.org. He is married to Anika and has six children and one dog. Get Reality and Other Stories: ivpbooks.com – amazon.co.uk – 10ofthose.com – eden.co.uk Timings 00:00 Introduction 00:44 Who are Matt and Pete? 03:43 What are your favourite stories? 06:49 How did you come to be captivated by the Christian story? 13:26 The Seven Basic Plots18:01 What insights do the Seven Basic Plots give us? 22:08 Does evolutionary psychology explain the origin of story? 28:26 How do the Seven Basic Plots point to God? 36:16 How can story and imagination help us share our faith? Transcript Intro [00:00:00] Caleb Woodbridge: Welcome to the Imaginative Discipleship podcast. I'm Caleb Woodbridge and this is a podcast for exploring the place that imagination has in discipleship, in following Jesus and in the life of faith. So whether you're a Christian wanting to go deeper in your discipleship or whether you're someone curious about faith and meaning making and what that looks like in the world today, I hope you'll find this a interesting and stimulating discussion. I'm really pleased to have Pete Dray and Matt Lillicrap. Welcome guys. Matt Lillicrap: Hi! Pete Dray: Hi Caleb! Who are Matt and Pete? Caleb Woodbridge: So Matt, do you want to kick us off and just, say who you are and just introduce to us Reality And Other Stories, the the book you've just written. Matt Lillicrap: Yeah, thanks, Caleb, and thanks for having us. Yes, I'm, I'm the pastor of a church on the edge [00:01:00] of Cambridge called Hope Community Church. I've been there for about a year. Before that, I was associate pastor at City Centre Church called Eden Baptist Church for four years working with students and then the wider congregation. And it was during that time that I met Peter. And we were able to share our mutual love of story and stories and particularly the story of the good news of Jesus. And I think share a mutual realization that we had both come to over kind of preceding years that that story is echoed by and kind of pointed to by so many of, in fact, all of the stories that we deeply, deeply love and engage within culture. And it was that that really kind of prompted us to, to want to write this book as a vehicle for being able to do that, to, to show how the stories that we love, the tales we tell, points of the life that we long for found in the story of Jesus. So I met Pete back in 2017, I think it was just at my, the beginning of my time. And I reckon he [00:02:00] can probably pick up the story there as to how the book came about. Pete Dray: Yeah. Thanks, Matt. Hi, Caleb. Hi, everyone. Yeah. So my name's Pete. I am, I live in Leeds. I'm the Director of Creative Evangelism with UCCF, the British university Christian Union movement. University CUs for a whole number of years have found that using the theme of story is a great way of engaging the broader culture. With the story of Jesus and so I guess what, what turned a vague idea into the first skeleton of the book was that I was asked to do one of these events weeks in Cambridge. With some of the students that Matt was working with, and I guess as, as a, as a kind of experiment, really, I thought it would be really interesting to take some of the basic plots that are identified by Christopher Booker, and on the premise that, as Matt said, Our favorite stories pique the desires that ultimately are satisfied in the [00:03:00] story, the Christian story to take four of those and to examine them more. As that was well received, a couple of people said, you should think about turning this into a book. And that's what happened. Caleb Woodbridge: Yeah, and that's where I came in. It landed on my desk at IVP Books, so I was really excited to see this approach. I'd been on the lookout for something that would communicate the Christian gospel in a story centered way, and so I was really excited to see what you were doing. So yes, we we took that on. Tom Creedy edited the book and now it's, it's out in the world and I'm really pleased to have played some part in that. So it's great to be talking to you guys about that. What are your favourite stories? Caleb Woodbridge: But you say you love stories. So do you have any favorites in particular ones that you've found meaningful and resonant, growing up and maybe still now? What, what, what are some of the ones that really stuck with you?[00:04:00] Pete Dray: Yeah. So yesterday I was with a group of students actually, and we were enjoying together the Hairy Maclary books written by Lynley Dodd. So they've been very much, very popular in our household, particularly since my boys were born. I guess beyond that I think growing up, I loved Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Then more recently I've, I've, I've really enjoyed Alan Paton's book, Cry, the Beloved Country. And then in terms of, I suppose, real life stories, I think the author Laura Hillenbrand tells an amazing story. So I guess her two most famous ones are about Seabiscuit, a racehorse, and if you never think that you'd ever read a book about horse racing, then that's the one for you. And then Unbroken, her her biography of Louis Zamperini, which is perhaps my favorite nonfiction book. Caleb Woodbridge: Amazing. What's about you, Matt? Matt Lillicrap: Growing up, I was addicted to the Narnia Chronicles. Caleb Woodbridge: Yeah. Love them. [00:05:00] Matt Lillicrap: And in interesting in an interesting and perhaps even CS Lewis sort of prophetically foretold it, I sort of put them aside and didn't really pay any attention to them through my teen years and could have thought that I'd grown up past them until my children then started reaching the point at which they wanted to read them. I have six children and I have read all of my children now, almost all seven – the youngest hasn't yet heard all seven from me – all seven of the Narnia Chronicles, and I have just fallen deeply, deeply in love with them again in a way that I'd sort of slightly fallen out of love with them as a teenager. So it's difficult to get past them as my favorite stories of all time. I think other things that I've really enjoyed, I've really enjoyed just getting to know Michael Morpurgo's writing for children as my children have grown a bit older too. I think he really is an excellent author for slightly older children, young teenagers. He can, he really wrestles with some very difficult themes in a way which is really effective for that age group. I find that very impressive. Yeah, and and like Pete, [00:06:00] I, I do like a good biography. I've enjoyed reading off the back of listening to another podcast. The Rest is Historypodcasts. I've enjoyed biographies of Winston Churchill just recently, which have been which have been a lot of fun to read. So I'm always on the lookout for good kind of real life stories like that as well. Caleb Woodbridge: Yeah. I spent quite a while when I was young trying to get into Narnia. I did know that it was a story, but my, my theory was that if I prayed hard enough God might indulge me and create the entirety of Narnia out of C. S. Lewis's imagination, just so that I could go and visit there! Matt Lillicrap: That would be so special, wouldn't it? Caleb Woodbridge: Yeah, maybe In the new creation, it's the whole thing of everything true and goods is just a shadow of something in Aslan's country. So we'll see! Matt Lillicrap: Ha ha ha. How did you come to be captivated by the Christian story? Caleb Woodbridge: So how, how did you come to be captivated by the Christian story? How did that become something that you came to believe in as both [00:07:00] true and something life, life giving? Matt Lillicrap: What a wonderful question. I think I've been in one sense captivated by this, the Christian story for as long as I can remember, hearing the Christian story well told by my parents and those around me from very, very young and feeling that there was something wondrous in it from a very young age. But I can remember getting to around about 11, 12, 13 and being convinced that although it was a wonderful story, that's all it was. It was a great story and it didn't really have any reality to it. And I consciously rejected it around there, but all the while was yearning for some sort of a sense of acceptance. I think that's probably quite common at that sort of age, 13, 14. I was bullied at school, felt very not accepted at school, and felt like I had to be somebody else in order to [00:08:00] be accepted and sought acceptance wherever I could find it, which is probably what made me a target for the bullies, if I'm totally honest. But the only place I ever felt like I was being accepted for who I really was was in church, which is why I didn't stop going. In a strange way, the Lord sort of gave me something of my idol of acceptance in order to ultimately draw me to himself because I didn't stop going to church, even though I decided I didn't believe it, even though I sort of thought that all these people around me were kind of caught up in a fairy tale that couldn't possibly be true. But I kept on asking questions and I can pretty much remember th
