Where have you been that you did not come to us before?

A Simply the Story instructor wrote to us about storytelling in Ethopia.

About 500 km from Addis Ababa, in southern Ethiopia a workshop was held. This people group are above 90% oral communicators.

This workshop was peculiar in that we were starting from 5 am through 9 pm. After going through the STS process with the Pastor D.A., he was impacted so much that he wanted all his churches to be trained.

He organised the church leaders who are government workers and students to attend the workshop from 5 am to 7:45 am and then from 6 pm to 9:30 pm. Actually I had two workshops. Those who attended the full day (from 8:30 am to 5 pm) and then a workers/students group that attended the early morning and the evening sessions.

Attendees braved the morning cold to come for STS.  The tribes learn the stories and and age did not make a difference.

Two old ladies would not be left out. One lady is more than 100 years old. It was amazing to hear her retell the story of Abram in Egypt. Although she could not remember the names of places, she told the stories with such accuracy.

She said, “I did not go to school any time of my life. I know Jesus loves me, but I did not know how to tell others about him. Thank you preacher for showing us about stories. Now I will tell others His stories before I die.”

As they received audio players, they had this to say. “Women in our community are not educated, especially those old like us. Men just marry our girls and they don’t want to educate them. We talk about many things as women in the markets and at home when we meet. Now that we can hear God speak to us in our language, we will be telling His story. In fact we have already started telling the stories to our families before even the preacher goes back to his homeland. This ‘radio’ speaks to me the word of God. It is God speaking to me and to us.”

“We will tell the stories of Jesus. Please come many times and teach us more stories.”

Pastor D.A. has 332 churches in seven villages in the region. All of them speak the same trade language, but different dialects. These are his words:

“I have been impacted by Simply The Story. Before I was telling stories but not like the way you have trained us. Our community is an oral one and they pass information to each other in story forms. STS is very ideal for us. I want to request that you help us in this kind workshop in other places we have planted churches. We have 332 churches in seven different villages. I will take you to all of them to have the same workshop. We need this to help us evangelise.”

“I don’t know where you have been that you did not come to us before. We could have gone further than where we are now. I need this in all the churches and I am sure we will take the villages. I am also requesting you to help us with more players. You just gave us 12 of them, so each will be shared. Please help us the way you can.”

The instructor finished this report telling us, “Evangelists and missionaries received the players with God’s Story in their language. I only distributed 12 players which will be shared among the churches in seven villages. This means each player is serving 27 churches. They are already using stories in their preaching and ministries.”

Since this report came in, the Lord arranged for a donor to sponsor 150 players to go to these people.