Learning to tell stories & train others

I had the chance to tell a bible story at a National Training Event (NTE -the training conference for International Fellowship of Evangelical Students -Australia) mission in a church in Sydney in December, 2012. The church had recently seen quite a few Australian-born Chinese join the congregation, as well as a number of international students studying in Sydney universities, most of whom were Asian. One of the Bible study groups wanted to hold an evangelistic event which would of course involve lots of food! This, I thought, would be a great opportunity to share a story from the Bible. I chose the story of the rich young man from Matthew’s Gospel, who asks Jesus, “What good thing must I do to have eternal life?”

After enjoying a meal together I got the group (about 20 in total) to sit around the room, and from there I told the story. After telling the story once, I asked a general question (e.g. What do you like about this story?), and then got them to discuss it in groups of two or three, before bringing it back to a full group discussion. I repeated this three times before telling the story again, after which I asked a few more specific questions (e.g. What do we learn about God in this story?) again, discussing in small groups, and then coming back in for a larger discussion. The night was a great opportunity; not only did the bible study members get excited and want to tell stories for themselves, but one of the couples who were quite antagonistic towards ‘religion’ engaged in deep conversation with their friends until 2am!

The pastor also enjoyed the story and was blown away by how simple and yet effective storytelling is. The pastor also enjoyed the story and was blown away by how simple and yet effective storytelling is. I got an email only a few weeks later asking if I would be able to run storytelling workshops for their church camp!

Used with permission of KF