As a ninth-grader in Lincolnton, Ga., Tony Cartledge was asked to spin a yarn beginning with that sentence. Years later he's still at it.

It's not the same story he made up all those years ago, whose details Cartledge, now 56, no longer remembers. But it's the process of sitting down and composing a tale that Cartledge still relishes.

Recently, the Baptist minister, journalist and divinity school professor published a collection of vignettes -- "Telling Stories: Tall Tales and Deep Truths" (Smith & Helwys). The slim volume consists mostly of allegories and illustrations for the many church sermons he gave as pastor of Woodhaven Baptist Church in Apex during the 1990s.

Cartledge writes about an older churchgoing couple who drive a gold Buick but know their way around a table saw. He writes of a rural woman from Georgia who had the gift of removing warts. And, demonstrating a passion for fantasy fiction, he writes of elves and dwarves and a young eagle named Tepherim.

"At some point I decided I wanted to build more of the sermon out of a story," Cartledge said. "I would have a text in mind and write a short story illustrating the text. Those were the most popular sermons I did. People really seemed to like it, especially the young people. I would pull out a stool and sit beside the pulpit and tell a story."

To some extent, all ministers tell stories, but Cartledge does so explicitly. Early in his career he started submitting commentaries on Sunday school lessons to religious publishing houses. In 1998, he was tapped to edit the Biblical Recorder, the official news journal of the Baptist State Convention. His humorous column, "Intrigued," told of life's everyday joys and struggles -- the effort to lose weight or the difficulty of getting church terminology such as "Christlike" past the computer spell checker.

A handsome, broad-shouldered man who played football in high school, Cartledge was reared in a small Georgia town where his father worked in a cotton mill. His was a fairly typical Southern Baptist childhood of Sunday church and youth group gatherings. He found his second home at the University of Georgia's Baptist Student Union and soon became known as a "preacher boy." After graduating, he quickly found a church that took him on as its pastor.

Detours in life

But Cartledge's life, like that of many writers, took unexpected detours that led him to write. The first came in 1982 when his marriage broke up soon after he graduated from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Since conservative Baptist churches frown on divorced pastors as unfit for the pulpit, he was forced to reconsider his life's calling. He opted for graduate school at Duke University, where he earned a doctorate from the department of religion.

The second detour came in 1994 when his 7-year-old daughter, Bethany, was killed in a car crash with a drunken driver. Cartledge and his present wife, Jan, found the courage to write about that experience in a book, "A Whole New World: Life After Bethany." It told of their determination not to become professional victims, perpetually stuck in a place of anger and grief, but "overcomers" who are able to get on with their lives while cherishing the memory of the girl who taught them to look ahead.

Another turn

More recently, Cartledge has faced another turn. Concerned that the Baptist State Convention was becoming increasingly conservative and might soon limit his editorial independence, Cartledge quit his post last year. He is now associate professor of Old Testament at Campbell University's divinity school, but he hasn't given up on writing. He is contributing editor of Baptists Today, a magazine from the moderate camp of Baptist life, and he blogs three times a week at www.tonycartledge.com.

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