Easter story panorama in a multicultural church

As a very multicultural church, it works well for us to share a Bible story orally each week. We wanted to do something special for Easter, so we decided to do a panorama – a series of five stories. For a number of people in the church, this was their first Easter as Christians, so we wanted to make sure the message of Easter was conveyed clearly.

We decided to tell four stories orally and to finish with a film of Jesus’ resurrection from the Jesus movie. The four stories we chose to tell were the Last Supper (Matthew 26:17-30), Jesus’ prayer and arrest (Matthew 226:36-56), Jesus on trial (Matthew 26:57-68) and the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:32-56).

I was given the Last Supper story to prepare. I read through the story about three or four times and in a few different translations. I put down my Bible and tried to tell the story out loud. Then I checked if I got it right. I then went through the story and tried to simplify any complex phrases or words. Many in our church family have English as their second, third or fourth language, so it needs to be as simple as possible. For example, I said ‘festival of the flat bread’ instead of unleavened bread in Matthew 26:17. I also decided to use some flat bread and some grape juice to act out the story as I shared it. I practiced telling the story about five times until I felt confident.

Our church family really appreciated the panorama. Several people commented to me about how powerful they found it to hear the Easter story told like that. It worked well having the film as the fifth story. The lady next to me, who has been a Christian for many years, told me she had goosebumps when she saw Jesus rise from the dead. To tell you the truth, so did I!