Storytelling

This is about my thousandth post today. It’s been a big week, sorry.
I wanted to clue you in on another ministry my team, as a whole, is doing.
New Tribes Mission put together this Creation to Christ series—a great storytelling kit that begins with God creating the world and goes all the way through the Bible to Christ. The idea is to use storytelling—a popular way of communicating information in cultures like ours—to set up a good, well-grounded foundation for a decision for Christ.
They’ve broke it up into a 40-week program, complete with a picture and story each week, which you can take to different levels of depth, depending on your audience.
Our plan is this. We will all do the same story each week, slowly making our way through the program. We want to saturate the community with one story a week.
We will all work to translate it and look for a way to incorporate it into our formal ministries or present it to a targeted group of people each week. So I’ll use it all week with my preschool kids and maybe work it into my English curriculum at the school. I’ll likely also use on one night to show the kids that come to play at our house. Cath will do that story at her kids’ Sunday school and with the young men and women she plans to work with during the rest of the week. Pastor will use it in his English/Lopit language classes. Joshua will probably use it at the Bible School. Jen and Craig will present it in their youth group. Heinrich will sit on the mongot with the Munimiji and tell them the same story. Doris will tell it to patients at the clinic, or the clinic workers. If I end up type-setting a newspaper after all, we’ll print the story in there. Everyone will be using it somehow.
And around here, stories like that don’t stop with the reader. We’ll be hitting the community from all different directions with one story, and they’ll be talking to one another about it. In that way, people will be talking about it, thinking about it and even spreading it. It will be the buzz each week.
And that’s the gameplan.Pray that we’ll get the materials from Nairobi quickly so we can start the weeks.
Pray for good translation and perseverance in that work, especially.
Pray that the church would join in the story-of-the-week push, too, and use it during the actual church service.
Pray for open ears and open hearts as we go through.
Pray that the continuity would lead to better understanding, better foundation for people who do end up choosing Christ.
We’re all really stoked about this. I hope you are, as well!