The Power of Story is quick to point out that by realizing you have your own personal story of interaction with God, it takes away pressure to be what some mistakenly believe a successful evangelist is. Doing evangelism sometimes conjures images of cold calls and struggling to go through a tract. Telling a story, on the other hand, is relaxed, natural. It's what people do all day long, whether they realize it or not. And much of what Jesus did was simply to tell parables that caused people to think about God in sometimes new and different ways.
"At some point in our journey through life," writes Ford, "our story collides with the Story of God … God's Story calls our story into question. We must make a choice: either to reject the Story of God or to merge our story with His Story." That is the beginning of what he calls "narrative evangelism," or the day-to-day "act of living and telling this Story to other people."
True to the title, Ford weaves an ongoing, fictionalized story among the practical, informational sections of the book. By doing so, he is able to illustrate with real-life character types the principles he is proposing. (As an aside, it also gives the book a lighter feel, more like a page-turner novel than an evangelism handbook.)