My Quick Narrative Suggestions for a Friend

If you're running out of time and need the best book I can recommend quickly for your purposes it would be Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins by Annette Simmons.  Don't let the title or the marketing fool you.  While it is accessible the way business reading typically is, it gets at the deep questions quickly and has an accessible way of asking people to think deeply.  Really, really good for lay audiences.

If you need something that's more explicitly faith-based.  Barbara Wendland and Lary W. Easterling have an alban publication entitled Spiritual Family Trees: Finding Your Faith Community's Roots.  Particularly if your audience is an older crowd, this might be helpful.

A little more complex book that's somewhat in line here would be The Art of Theological Reflection by Patricia O'Connell Killen and John DeBeer.  It is helpful both for biblical narrative thinking and also personal narrative thinking.

Finally, if you're going in the more biblical route you want to think about the two ways "narrative" gets used in biblical and theological studies.  The Bible as narrative and narrative reading of particular biblical texts.   First, Narrative the way the "Yale School" typically mean that is this:  scripture is as a whole a narrative.  The most accessible treatment of this way of thinking is probably Gene Boring's "Five-Act Drama of Scripture" found in The People's New Testament Commentary, pp. 597-598 (Boring and Craddock) or in Boring's, Disciples and the Bible there a new five finger exercise, p. 441ff. 

For reading particular texts as narrative, I find Mark Powell's What is Narrative Criticism to be the most helpful.  Also Sondra Schnieders's The Revelatory Text and Written that You Might Believe.

When I tried tell Boring that I thought there was a difference between seeing the whole of scripture as narrative versus reading individual stories in scripture from a narrative perspective, he told me that was a stupid dichotomy and that they were all basically the same.  Personally, I have found the reading of particular biblical texts as narratives far more enlightening than thinking of the whole as scripture as narrative.  Narrative functions as an exegetical tool better than it works as a hermeneutic tool for me.  I say frequently to folks, "Don't just pay attention to what story is told but how the story is told."  Nothing does that more clearly for me than the telling of the Jairus story in Mark.  Four times in that story Jairus' is referenced.  Every time he is mentioned Mark refers to him as the leader of the synagogue.  Every time--four times!  Except the very last time he is mentioned.  Just as Jesus is going in to raise Jairus's daughter Mark says, "And they laughed at him.  Then he put them all outside, and took the child's father and mother . . . "  (Mark 5:40).  As one who is both the leader of a synagogue and the father of three children, that is narrative reading that becomes very personal for me.