S4 Episode 2: Storytelling with David Harvey

Joining us on this episode is David Harvey, the teaching pastor at Westside Kings Church in Calgary. David earned his PhD of Theology from the University of Manchester, and relocated to Canada five years ago! Starting off with the bad reputation that sermons sometimes receive, he tells us how they can be both an amazing and horrible medium in our experience. With oral storytelling dating back far in humanity, David shows us how stories are still so entrenched in our everyday lives. We love stories so much we rush home to watch a new season of our favorite fictional stories. Every interaction between people is a curation of some stories, which leads David into some examples in the Bible, that the books of the New Testament are also curated to elicit specific meanings and direction. Furthermore, we dive into David’s own story a little bit. His family moved to Sierra Leone during his youth, and he describes how the stories of its postcolonial brokenness cannot be fixed by simply ‘asking people to believe in Jesus’ nor erasing the past, but by going back far enough in the story to see who the problem was, and how it seeped into modern day. With lots of jokes and interesting things to think about along the way, David tells us that the biblical word of ‘Shalom’, meaning wholeness, is what he envisions in his story about our world, and how he tries to embody that in his community.