Within these walls let holy peace, And love, and concord dwell; Here give the troubled conscience ease, The wounded spirit heal.

This is the way the gospel actually went to work to shape early evangelical narrative identity. But again, this larger story (of creation, fall, redemption and new creation) was explored within the deeply personal narrative of ‘my’ life, since the story-tellers had the vivid sense that the story had to do with themselves. The pattern offered an opportunity for men and women to locate themselves personally in a kind of spiritual and moral space and to explore the way in which their story uniquely reflected common themes.