Experimenting with storytelling in mountain villages

This team are working in a 100% pioneering situation where no one has any previous knowledge of Bible stories.

So we have been using the stories in a very evangelistic setting – not so much a teaching or training setting. We have not had much luck with traditional story group settings – getting people to sit around and actually learn a story and be able to repeat it. We have been using the stories to have discussions about God and to in essence preach a very long sermon. We have developed a 20 story set evangelistic arc with the theme “who is God and how does he want to be worshiped? (or what pleases him)” We found this topic to be the greatest felt need of the people we are working with. In the beginning, when we first moved to our village two years ago, we walked around doing what we called ‘seed scattering’. We had little three to five minute evangelistic messages that were relevant to the people to get us discussing the things about God. We would use these to find the truly interested and spiritually open people. Then we would ask them if they would be interested in us coming around to tell stories. We used your idea of having little ‘packets’ of stories and get them to commit to those within the whole story arc. Our first ‘packet’ was only four stories. If they were into it, then we would move on to the next packet – only three stories. Once they had heard that many, they were pretty much in and we could keep right on going.

A few months ago, we developed something similar to what you are calling ‘finding seekers’. We found that fear of evil spirits was at the forefront of some very specific people’s minds and that a story arc based on that would be a good way to start evangelising them – since that seemed to be their greatest felt need. We actually only had three families in mind and developed a story arc just for them – eight stories about power over evil spirits. The story arc also had a deeper level that could be drawn upon were people spiritually open, that evil spirits were connected to idol worship. This naturally leads into our 20 story evangelistic set. We are seeing now that this mini story arc can be used as a way to get people into the main story arc or it can be tagged on after the main one if people still have not made a decision to follow Jesus and need more stories, because of the undertone that confronts idolatry. This sub-theme can be toned up or down depending on the receptivity of the listener.

Shared with permission of LJ