‘Stories level the playing field’

What happens when a new believer, a seminary professor, a teenager, a grandfather, an Asian and an American all interact over a Bible story together? According to Dorothy Miller of The God’s Story Project—just what you would hope for! They all find something about God and his purposes. “Centering on a Bible story levels the playing field of discovery,” she says.

That’s why Miller’s inductive-style, yet fully oral, method of learning from the Scriptures has the potential to produce whole new pools of harvest workers – people who never before realized they could lead people to know and understand the Scriptures. Here’s how it affected one leader from Nepal.

They Love to Tell ‘The Story’!
“Oh stories!” exclaims Ramesh Sapkota, leader from Nepal. “I eat stories, sleep stories, drink stories, tell stories. Not only me—it is like a communicable disease. Everyone can tell stories. Blessed be God!”

Sapkota has caught the virus, and his new-found passion for Bible stories, from Genesis through Revelation, is characteristic of an emerging harvest work force. It’s a force that is energized and motivated by its love for the story of God in all its color, drama and depth. Along with this is the realization that in all kinds and cultures of people, this powerful story speaks for itself with the wisdom of the ages.

The thread that runs through testimony after testimony from this cadre of workers using narrative portions of the Bible as its mainstay is a thrilling sense of discovery. Non-literate believers who never imagined they could be teachers, leaders or trainers, are seeing that the story of God empowers them. Literate leaders are finding that when they tell pure stories of the Bible, without extra commentary, but with questions and discussion instead, their disciples are hearing and learning as never before.

“I want to translate this”
Sapkota was already a church planter and leader in his country when he made a fresh discovery of the scriptures. He’d been a believer in Jesus since age 13, but had only read one or two stories in the Old Testament for himself. “Most of the preaching I heard was from the New Testament,” he explains. That left him confused about a lot of things. “Questions that people would ask, I wouldn’t know how to answer.”

Then he heard about the Amsterdam 2000 conference for evangelists. He didn’t go, but he did request the materials from the event. By the time the package arrived at his door, he had forgotten about his order. “Who is sending me a Christmas gift?” he thought as he opened up a box of videos and materials.

Inserting the God’s Story video, produced by Dorothy Miller, into his player, he watched the whole story of the Bible in 80 minutes, starting from creation and beautifully illustrated with still-life drawings. “I felt like I was watching a movie,” said Sapkota. “The story was told in a way I could track it, in order chronologically. It talked to me in the cultural way that I think—I loved it.”

After seeing the video in English he said, “I want to translate this.” Getting it into his own language of Nepali became his first project. Since then, he has overseen the translation of the God’s Story video into 16 languages including all the languages of Tibet and Bhutan, and most of Nepal. “We have several languages to be done in a queue.”

Now Sapkota is teaching “Simply The Story” workshops, training church leaders, both literate and non-literate, to use the telling of Bible stories to start and lead churches and disciple believers. And the people he trains are having reactions similar to his own.

On the edge of their seats
An Hispanic pastor with influence over more than 1,000 other pastors called the “God’s Story” office the day after a workshop. “As a pastor for 30 years, I knew something was missing,” he said. “We Pentecostal and charismatic preachers have dramatized the stories of the Bible, adding what we thought would make the information more interesting. But you said to let the story speak. We have not been doing that.” For four days he told complete Bible stories from the pulpit, in the morning and evening services. “The congregation loved it,” he said. “They were on the edge of their seats with interest. Afterwards they said it was the best teaching they had ever heard.”

‘I am Jonah’
But Sapkota is teaching more than storytelling. In his seminars he demonstrates how to walk through a story, get to know its characters and see what they saw. People from oral cultures seem to be especially good at it, such as the 35 Masai and Komba pastors Sapkota taught in Kenya in 2006.

“One day, as we told the story of Jonah,” tells Sapkota, “a man who had started 200 churches stood up and confessed, “I am Jonah. I have started churches, but never cared about the people.” That began a wave of confession and repentance.

At a second workshop with Komba believers in August, 2007, the group was so deeply affected by the story of Jesus in the home of Martha and Mary that they called for a special meeting of the elders. They had been shocked by the disrespect of Martha’s question to Jesus, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work?” Then these people, living in a remote and isolated area, realized that they had been asking the same question of God: “Don’t you care about us?” They were ready to adjust their attitude.

The God’s Story Project is all about giving people in oral communities, such as these, access to a significant number of the key events, characters and encounters of the Scriptures, and the expertise to search them out and gain understanding.

Perhaps these are precisely the kind of workers needed to see a vivid, vital, obedient church emerge among peoples that have seemed distant and uninterested for so long. 
 

Two New Tools

In 2006, the God’s Story Project team launched two newly-created oral tools with 20 seminars in five countries in 42 days.

Simply the Story (STS) is the center pin of the two tools, beginning with instruction in telling whole, accurate Bible stories. It goes on to teach how to use questions and interactive discussion to help listeners find spiritual treasures and personal applications in the stories.

Timothy Church Planter Training (TCPT) is the way that Simply The Story is implemented among church planters who are targeting oral communicators.

In TCPT, students learn 8 to 10 stories well, and the basic content of all 14 of the stories in the God’s Story video. They also practice crafting good questions and leading discussion.

Upon graduation, students receive a WordLight—a solar player, produced by the MegaVoice company, with the God’s Story and 66 stories of the Bible all recorded in the mother tongue of the student. The graduates hold in their hands a kind of oral Bible. Each TCPT graduate is then responsible to co-lead at least one TCPT in the next 6 months.
 

Five Generations of Trainees in 5 Months

Dorothy Miller had been using the discussion method to teach the Bible since 1968, but the first time she told a pure Bible story in a teaching session was in May of 2006.  “I believed in the story method,” she says, “but I had never actually used it.” Once she did, she saw what she’d never seen before.  “It is like I just truly discovered how to unleash the power in God’s Word—let Him speak!”

Students from Miller’s first storytelling session soon went off and taught other groups the same way she had, with simply a story. From those sessions, other students also went and taught new groups using stories, just as they had seen it done. On it went, with each group demonstrating the story teaching method to more people. Within nine months, five generations of students from that first story session were regularly using Simply The Story. “This is God’s way of replication,” says Miller.
 

 
God’s Story ‘Cultivating Christian Culture’
Ramesh Sapkota, who oversees 843 house churches in Nepal and is a top leader among world organizations focused on reaching the Buddhist world, believes that new oral training tools “are going to happen in a big way.”

GCU: How is ‘God’s Story’ contributing to a movement?
Sapkota: Nepal’s church has one of the fastest growth rates in the world. In the last two to three years, each mother church has been starting an average of 20 to 22 churches. The country has been in a very difficult situation for 10 to 12 years. Then the war halted. People are hungry for peace. People from remote areas are coming to the cities.

In the past, we struggled to get the God’s Story video into the hands of pastors and other leaders. Now people are asking for it. We have distributed 60,000 to 80,000 CDs in the Nepali language, and people who have seen it in Nepali are requesting it in their own languages.

We have a 15-minute Christian radio program on national TV Sunday mornings. From that, we are sending out 500 CDs each week and house churches are starting spontaneously.

GCU: How is the God’s Story video being used?
Sapkota: At first I thought of it as an evangelistic tool. But I found it ministering to me; I experienced it as a discipleship tool.

Still, it is very effective in evangelism. Those coming to the Lord who see the whole gospel are stronger than those who come because of a healing or power encounter. They are coming because of God’s Word rather than a moment of power encounter. Sixty percent of those receiving God’s Story CDs through the radio broadcast are Christian and 40%, non-Christian.

GCU: How do people move on from the God’s Story video to the rest of the Bible?
Through Simply The Story, or STS, a wonderful tool God gave to us. We asked ourselves, how do we understand the Word of God? And how can we disciple these people well, so they can disciple others?

We saw that 75% of the Bible is a story. Why not tell the story and lead these people to self-discovery? Why not help them draw out the treasures themselves by learning to see the valuable things in the story?

We are seeing amazing results. Women who would never speak during their church gatherings now participate in the discussions. They have the confidence and skills to say, “I can answer that.” The husband is happy to see his wife discovering and sharing some of the truths in the Bible that even he didn’t know. It is cultivating a Christian culture.

It is a challenge for me as a leader, because I want to lead, to teach. But this is another way of doing it, and it is feeding them. The “one another” commands are applied so much—they encourage one another and teach one another.

As a leader, we should not be afraid to let something go. Do we need to know all the truth at once? No. I didn’t. What if I lead you to the treasure and let you find it yourself? That will make you the happiest! That’s my story.