Our Story

In 1994 the founder of a large indigenous church-planting agency asked my help in training the leaders of his rapidly growing organization. Concurrent with this, my wife and I began an extended study program that culminated in earning masters degrees in Intercultural Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Mission.

Although I had served as a missionary in Latin America for many years, I was still unprepared for the complexity of the South Asian worldview and its social mosaic. I found that working in this context presented vigorous new challenges to communicating and teaching the Bible. Given my prior missionary experience and recent study at Fuller, I somewhat naively assumed that I had mastered the communication skills that would be needed. I worked hard to prepare lessons that were simple and comprehensible, seeking to offer the Christian workers practical training that would help them improve their field practice. In spite of their limited formal schooling and consequent unfamiliarity with western modes of learning, most seemed to enjoy the workshops and welcomed the instruction.

However, hints soon began to emerge that all was not well. It seemed that little of what I taught was being put into practice by the workers. When I asked them simple questions requiring minimal deductive reasoning they were unable to respond. Slowly I began to sense the huge barrier that exists between people with a preference for oral communication and print-oriented communicators like me.

At first it was tempting to blame the learners or even spiritual forces for this failure to communicate. But eventually I became convinced that I needed to find a better way of communicating with them. This began my quest for a more effective teaching method.
I tried alternative learning techniques like active training and role-play; I added goal setting and accountability procedures and sought other ways to make the training sessions more effective.

 

These changes helped the seminars become better at transferring content that could be remembered by the learners and which they could put to use in their fields. But the equipping structure was still a western model that depended mainly on lecture. This led to a bigger concern: if I taught the workers with techniques that were foreign to their context, how would they themselves learn to teach in ways that fit their context? In other words, to be reproducible the pedagogical model itself had to complement the learning styles found in the culture. If the pastors were unable to transfer the knowledge they had gained, how would the churches they served ever become strong and self-reliant?

​

A USER-FRIENDLY APPROACH

The need for a more compatible equipping model eventually led me to begin developing the oral Bible training program. My studies at Fuller had laid a foundation in the disciplines of missiology, cultural anthropology and Christian communication. Research in Fuller Seminary's McAlesther Library in Pasadena, California and at the University of South Alabama in Mobile helped advance the search for a more user-friendly approach for oral cultures.

 

I was looking for Bible teaching methods that would allow biblical knowledge to flow all the way to the fringes of each people group regardless of their level of schooling.

To my surprise, storytelling began to emerge as the strongest contender. Shortly afterward, I started testing biblical storytelling among some of the same oral communicators I had worked with previously. In what turned out to be a four-year pilot project, 56 men and women of all ages learned to tell significant portions of the Scriptures in story. Each storyteller was also required to train another person to tell the stories.

Building on the experience gained through the pilot project, in 2006 I started a second generation oral Bible program in a different region of the country. Sixty full-time Christian workers from half a dozen states enrolled in a structured two-year program to be trained as biblical storytellers.

In this second phase I also completed a D.Min. program at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. My mentor was Tom Boomershine, the author of Story Journey: An Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling and founder of the Network of Biblical Storytellers. Subsequently, my definitive book, Telling God's Stories with Power, grew out of the field research I had done during the previous 10 years.