Simply the Story and a new style of Bible overview videos

A team of eight have just been here and along with their learning and sharing stories, they also helped me video over 30 stories and training videos in English and Chinese. I wanted to re-video the Bible Overview Set because my style has changed.

What is different about the ‘Simply the Story’ style?
In the past, some of my stories were summaries of much longer passages of scripture (for example the Creation story or Noah story). Simply The Story prefers to choose 5 to 20 consecutive verses and tell that as the story. Then an introduction is added on to summarise the events before the scriptural story chosen and explain any background including special Biblical vocabulary (such as ‘Sabbath’ or ‘Pharisees’) and any historical or cultural background.

The introduction (our human words) is differentiated from the story (God’s word) by either opening and closing a Bible or telling people when the actual story begins and ends. The videos will model this.

The whole process took a lot of work (thanks to the team) because we also put subtitles on all the Chinese videos. This means that people that speak any dialect of Chinese and who can read traditional characters can ‘listen’ to these stories. I nearly didn’t dare to ask the team to do this extra work but their meeting of a deaf couple who can read motivated them to do this.

We also prepared six training videos as these allow people to learn how to start storytelling and also to improve their stories.

These videos will be uploaded over the next six weeks or so because I have a 500MB upload limit on Vimeo.

13 December 2014 – Creation (English) & Creation + Rebellion + Noah (Chinese)

16 December – Rebellion, Noah in English and Abraham A in both languages now on website

26 December – Abraham B, Hail, Passover & Resurrection

5 January 2015 – Christmas, miracles 1-4 (English)

14 January 2015 – English ‘Bible Overview Set’ now completely uploaded except the ‘authority over sickness’ stories which we did not update because they were already accurate enough.

6 February 2015 – the full Chinese “Bible Overview Set” now uploaded. Various training videos in English & Chinese also uploaded. Uploading on last training videos should happen by the 20 February.