Sometimes God has to challenge us several times before we’ll change

I first heard about Bible storytelling when I was studying at Sydney Missionary & Bible College. Some of the missionaries came and shared about how to proclaim in the gospel in oral cultures as well as in cultures where many people are literate but find reading and abstract thinking difficult. I was also doing a class on Cross Cultural Learning and Teaching and thinking through how to develop training materials for concrete thinkers.

However after college I mainly shared the gospel through inductive bible studies supplemented with lots of stories, illustrations and analogies. Then I read the book, “Telling the Gospel Through Story” and was challenged again to try storytelling.

We trialed it at our winter program and I was amazed at how engaged people were and the depth of questions they asked and how readily the Christians were able to pass on the story to their non Christian friends! I was amazed at how engaged people were and the depth of questions they asked and how readily the Christians were able to pass on the story to their non Christian friends! I feel that this has been the best answer so far to my question many years ago at college on how to train concrete thinkers to pass on the gospel and it has been effective for international students with no prior biblical knowledge. To my surprise, the non-Christian friends kept coming back for more stories and both of my two bible story groups have really high attendance. I will certainly keep using this method and will start to train the Christian students to use this method as well.