Bad Storytelling Traps to Avoid Falling Into

A few years ago, I watched a church video celebrating a backpack drive they had organized for kids at a local school. The production was solid. The music was beautiful and matched the editing cleanly. From start to finish, the video showed volunteers sorting supplies, loading boxes, and delivering bags into the back of a van. Animated graphics showed how many backpacks were collected. There was the ubiquitous shot of the church logo on the side of a van.

What was not in the entire three-minute video was a single child from the school. Not one family who had received help. Not one moment of actual human connection between the church and the community it was serving. It was a thorough, well-produced account of a logistics operation.

That church did something genuinely good. They served real kids with real needs right in their own community. But the video failed at the one job a story is supposed to do — make someone watching feel something true about what happened and why it mattered.

That failure is more common than most realize, and it usually comes from one of a handful of recognizable patterns.

Why do church recap videos feel so flat?

The backpack video is the clearest example of what I call the process summary. It documents what happened rather than telling the story of why it mattered. It answers "what did we do?" when the more important question is "what changed for someone because we did it?"

Process summaries feel like storytelling because they have a beginning, middle, and end. We had an idea. We organized people. We executed the plan. But they leave out the only thing that actually connects with a viewer — another human being whose life looks different because of what happened.

Any time you are planning a recap video, a ministry highlight, or a campaign story, ask yourself whose life is in this. Not whose effort, not whose leadership, not whose organizational achievement. Whose life. If you cannot name a specific person whose story runs through the content, you are probably building a process summary. And a process summary rarely moves anyone who doesn't already see the purpose in the story.

Do numbers actually tell your church’s story?

A different church put together a VBS recap that opened with a drone shot of the building, cut to slow-motion footage of kids running through activities, and then displayed a series of graphics. Attendance up 12 percent from last year. 847 hot dogs served. 6 new outdoor games added to the rotation.

Anyone watching felt like the church accomplished something big. The numbers were impressive in a spreadsheet sense, but they communicated nothing about why VBS mattered, what happened in a child's life that week, why volunteers gave up five days of their summer, or why anyone should consider being part of it next time.

Numbers can help frame a good story, but they aren't the centerpiece. When you lead with metrics, you are telling your audience that the most important thing about what happened was how much of it happened. And the only way to be successful next time is to do more. What matters is not how many kids attended. It is what one kid experienced, and whether that experience changed something for them. Use data to provide context when it serves the story. Never use it as a substitute for one.

What is missing from most church testimonies?

This one is the most painful to watch because it usually involves a real person who genuinely wants to share something meaningful. They sit down in front of a camera, and when asked to share their story, they describe a progression of positive experiences that led them to a positive outcome. It sounds grateful and sincere, but it doesn't connect with a greater purpose.

I once watched a baptism video where the person being baptized said, "I just felt like it was the right time, and I wanted to take that step, so here I am." That was the entire testimony. No context about their life before the decision. No honest account of what had been hard or confusing or broken. No moment where something turned. Just a pleasant summary of a decision made by a person who apparently had very few obstacles to making it.

A testimony with no tension isn't really a testimony. It's the CliffsNotes version of life-change with no context. What was missing was everything that happens before the decision — the doubt, the resistance, the thing they were carrying that made faith feel impossible or too risky. That is the part of the story that makes someone in the congregation lean forward, because that is the part that resembles their own life.

Without the before, there is no contrast of the after. Without the tension, the resolution has no weight. And a story without weight is just words.

What do these church storytelling mistakes have in common?

Process summaries, statistics updates, and tension-free testimonies all share the same root problem. They communicate from the church's perspective without giving context for everyone else. They report on what the church did, how the church measured it, or how easy it is to be a Christian. They protect the organization and the storyteller from vulnerability — but in doing so, they protect the viewer from feeling or connecting with something real and much bigger than any of us.

Part 2 looks at what it actually looks like when storytelling works, and what you can do to help the people you film get there.