A group of social workers

In our town there is a group of social workers who work for a Christian organisation but most of them aren’t followers of Jesus themselves. As a requirement of the company they have a one hour Bible study each week.

Myself and a friend were invited to use storytelling with this group. Ten people were there and included people from the age of about thirty to sixty and not only social workers but cleaners and administration workers too.

Our general format is story, discussion and application.

STORY

• Short introduction to the story
• Story itself
• Learning the story through having them tell it to each other in pairs and then I do a lead through where they fill in the blanks to help me tell the story or respond to short questions like ‘what did A say to B’ (by this time they’ve heard the story at least three times)

DISCUSSION

•  As a warm up question we ask them to discuss in pairs: What did you like about this story? Why?
• Then we share about 1/3 of the story and ask:
  1. What did you learn about the characters in the story from their words and actions? What other choices could they have made? What do we learn about them from the choices they made?
  2. What did you learn about God/Jesus from his words and actions? Did he have other choices? What do we learn about him from what he chose to do?
• Then we ask:  what questions do you have about this story?  (We don’t answer their questions.)

APPLICATION

Since most of these people are not yet followers of Jesus and might not be comfortable to share in front of the big group, we ask them to privately think about the answer to the application questions.

• What am I going to do this week as a result of hearing this story?  (ie how will it change my life)
• Who are you going to share this story with?

We have been encouraged that from story three (Noah), three non-Christians have been sharing the story with other colleagues that miss out on the story.
Already we have had deep discussions about what ‘sin’ is, what makes someone right with God and what is the problem with the world.

Last week the oldest woman in the group after hearing the first part of the Abraham story said, “These stories tell us about God’s promises and that he always fulfills them. However His timing is sometimes much slower than ours and so we are tempted to try and help Him in our own ways. This ends in disaster. What we need to do is wait for His timing.”

Not a bad comment from a lady who has only heard four stories!