Donor Stories

 

Peter* is one of twenty-three young men working on a cluster of eight Bible storying projects in northern India.
“These stories have allowed me to share the gospel in ways I’ve never been able to share before,” Peter said, when I asked him how the oral chronological Bible storying project had affected his life and ministry. 

Over the past year, I had the privilege of coordinating and consulting with six of these storying teams while I lived in Pan Town,* India. I lived in a girls’ orphanage with a lot of bugs, little electricity, the heartache of missing home, and the daily frustration of communicating in a language not my own. My role was to meet daily with the story teams and advise them as they crafted stories in their own languages.

Two-thirds of the world functions as oral cultures, meaning that sharing the gospel through oral stories immediately connects with these cultures’ style of communication. In addition, oral stories can often pave the way for the written Word.
After hearing the story of Elijah praying for rain (taken from 1 Kings), a group of literacy teachers asked for a copy of the entire Bible in the national language, because it hasn’t been translated yet in their own mother tongue.

In short, the storying process looked like this: The team members, or “story-crafters,” crafted a story, then tested it with unbelieving neighbors in their villages. This testing involved asking the listener to retell the story after hearing it a few times, and also answering several “why”-type questions. The story-crafter then brought this testing data to me. After reviewing the information with other consultants, the story-crafter and I discussed ways to adjust the story so that the listener had a more accurate understanding of the story and would also be able to retell it more easily.

In the end, these eight languages spoken by more than sixty-five million people now had God’s Word in the form of twenty to thirty oral Bible stories. But more than that, national believers have a unique tool to share the gospel with the unbelievers around them.
One story-crafter reported, “I told the story of Jonah, and the unbeliever who listened heard that God forgives those who do wrong—something missing in their cultural worldview. After the story, the listener asked, ‘Will God also forgive me?’ Before, I couldn’t find a way to explain these things in a conversation, but the stories make it very easy for me to share.”

Another team member reported, “My wife is illiterate, but through this story training, she has learned about eighteen stories, and now whenever she sits and talks with someone, she can explain (the gospel) through the stories. There is a great change in her life.”
Telling Bible stories is certainly not a new idea. However, creating biblically accurate, culturally relevant stories is an approach that Wycliffe is beginning to use more effectively to reach more people in this generation with the truth of the gospel.
*Due to the sensitive nature of the work, actual names have not been used.