In the Rain, in the Mud, Uphill

When we arrived at Mr S’s neighborhood, we left the car on the paved road. After I put a raincoat on Nilson, I took my hearing aid and cochlear implant off and put them in Loaise’s purse. We got out of the car, together with Mr S, and started walking uphill, about a quarter-mile. I carried Nilson, as it was raining and a muddy river was flowing down at our feet.

When we arrived at the house, Everyone took their shoes off and made themselves at home. I asked for a towel to dry my hair, so I could put my hearing aid and CI back on. I am deaf without them. Mr S gave me one of his shirts to wear,and I put mine on the line to dry a bit.

This was our third meeting his family. Our first meeting had featured the parable of the sower. Last week was the wise and foolish builder. We have been modeling for the family how to have an inductive Bible study with mutual accountability. (A way to help one another obey scripture).

Last week, Mr S and his family made a commitment to having their own weekly family Bible reading. They had chosen John 3 as their passage and read it together during the week. They did not understand a certain part of the passage and prayed for help. God certainly answered their prayers.

The passage I’d chosen for the day was the Bronze Serpent. First, everyone shared things for which they are grateful to God and needs they have. After that each one shared with how we obeyed the scripture last week. I had Mr S read verses 14-16 of John 3. Someone else read the passage from Numbers. Then I told the passage in my own words.

What followed was a great discussion, with each person having some input and participation. As they discovered God’s justice and mercy in providing a way to escape death with a bronze snake, they noticed how much better it was than just removing the snakes.

When we finished and re-read John 3:14-16, each one in the family shared that they believe that we must look to Jesus, just as the Israelites looked at the bronze serpent. Faith is growing quickly in this family.

Mr S and his Family

I recently had a cochlear implant surgery. You can read all about that on another blog http://smy2ci.blogspot.com. The surgery introduced me to a whole new world of people who have been going through and will be going through the same experience.

 

One example is the family of Mr S. His daughter is deaf and will have a cochlear implant early next year, God willing. We were invited to his house yesterday. Nilson, my son, played very well with his daughter. Loaise and I talked with them about my experience with the surgery.

 

After a while we sat down for a Bible story. I told the story of the sower of seed and the four soils. After a walk-though, but no retelling, we talked about what kind of soil best represents our own lives, and which we would prefer.

 

This storying time was well received. We modeled how to have an inductive Bible study. The family agreed that they need to change some things to become good soil, and that is what they want. I hope to see this whole family baptized in the next few months.

 

We were invited to return next Thursday. We will keep this up for several weeks. In the next two weeks I will help Mr S begin to lead the discussion, and soon afterwards, I will teach him how to learn and tell stories for his family. I hope to see this family baptized in the next few months. Not sure whether to point them towards a traditional church or to help them start a house church.

 

I am being presumptuous, but I believe God will move quickly with this family. Pray for them.

Planning a Short-Term Mission Trip

I have been a trip volunteer, a trip leader, a receiving volunteer, and the receiving missionary. I've participated in every aspect of short-term missions. This post from Guy Muse (SBC Missionary in Ecuador) is a must read for every pastor and volunteer.

The key affirmation in this article, for me, is that many... most come unprepared for evangelism. Pastors, get your short-term missions teams experienced in evangelism before the trip, please.

Read this great article...

The M Blog: To all our friends who come down for mission trips...: "Summer has arrived. We begin what is traditionally the season for volunteer groups coming down to help in our mission work. We are always gr..."

Trip to Santarém with STS

Here is a post in pictures of the Simply the Story workshop in Santarém in the state of Pará, Brazil. This was the first STS workshop in Brazil, and I am honored to have been a part of it. I was called up at the last minute to help as a leader and translator. God's hand was in this at every step.



Demonstrating how to learn a Bible story accurately and quickly in small groups.




Listening in on a group talking through one of the Bible stories and finding spiritual treasures.

More Lessons Learned: How to be a Missionary

As I mentioned in a previous post, these are lessons I have learned along the way as a missionary.

• Walk, don’t drive. My experience has been that in general taking a car cost much more than it helps. One example: When we needed to go and visit a family about half an hour up the mountain walking, we were tempted to do it in 5 minutes driving. We walked. As we walked with one of the family members, we told Bible stories and listened to her stories. By the time we got to the top, we were in the company of nearly a dozen. All of them hearing these stories. We were then introduced to another dozen people who wanted to hear more. When we got to her house, we stayed for a 15 minute visit. By car, that would be 15 somewhat superficial minutes with a family. On foot, that was over an hour, and highly intimate. We met a dozen more people through an existing relationship.
  
  
• Do copiable things. Today I found out that another friend of mine started reading the Bible with friends at work when he started a new job. I never told these men that they needed to go and make disciples in their workplace by reading the Bible or telling Bible stories, but that is what they did. They saw us doing it, and when they left our company to work in another place (and even country) they did what seemed natural to them.  They had seen it done, easily.  So some of our disciples have gone and made disciples and we never knew about it until much later.
  
  
• Spend the Night. This idea is related to the first. We would go into a small community and have a Bible study with one family, visit another and then take the bus home. We always had to alternate which family would get the Bible study because of time. One night, the family told my wife and I. “Look, you can stay here. Go ahead and miss the bus, take the one at sunrise, you will be back in your city by 7:00.” They gave us their own clothes to wear to bed. The result was that we spend a long time sitting around the kitchen table talking with them and drinking coffee. You know how those kinds of conversations go. In one night, we became family. There was a bond that formed that was stronger than 3 years of weekly 1-hour visits.
  

Widely Accepted Missions Strategy

I read this on a site. I’ve seen this dozens of times with other organizations as well. I want to point it out.

The objective of the work of the Generic Missions Agency can be outlined in three stages:
1. Learn the Language.
2. Begin creating a phonetic alphabet and training in literacy.
3. Through the translation of the Bible, transmit the word of God.

I would propose a new strategy if I were permitted to give my opinion. It would look like this:

1. Learn the language.
2. Tell God’s stories orally.
3. Disciple using an oral Bible.
4. Begin creating a phonetic alphabet and training in literacy.
5. Translate the Bible as a supplement and codification of the oral bible, making recordings as you go.

Why should reading or literacy EVER be a prerequisite to evangelism and discipleship?

Interactive Bible Storying with Children

Yesterday, I was invited to tell some interactive Bible stories to a group of children. I expected about 40, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw busloads of kids arriving. There were over 300!

The neat thing about stories, is that once you’ve told them a few times, you don’t forget them easily. (In the case of Bible storying, I would say you should tell every Bible story you know at least once every six months to keep them fresh in your mind.) Once you have learned a number of stories, you can string them together into a bigger narrative. This is a wonderful experience for both the storyteller and the hearer.

Since the children were all sitting on the floor, and rather disorganized, I knew I would have some trouble keeping their attention, so I used a hand sign to represent each story before and after I told it. Every time I got to a new story, I would do all of the hand signs with them from the beginning and say something that would remind them of the story. Most of them were “two-minute stories.” They were only a few verses long. So, I was able to tell these stories straight from the Bible.

Here are the stories I told and the hand signs I used.

Lessons Learned: How to be a missionary

Since I began Bible storying, my strategy in missions and ministry has transformed a great deal. Here are some of the lessons I have learned from both success and failure. (I am going to do this over several posts)

• Don’t spend your time trying to create groups. In 2004 and 2005, I spent a lot of time trying to coax five families into meeting together for a Bible study. I got three of them to finally do it. As soon as we started to make progress, as I defined it, Satan broke up the group. He caused confusion and mistrust to separate the families in a brutal way. I spent 3 years trying to corral families together for Bible studies and was unsuccessful engaging many willing families, because I could not form the groups I wanted.
  
  
• Disciple groups that already exist. The families on the hill is one of the biggest success stories of this blog. A major reason for the success was that they are a family with already existing ties and relationships. There is a bond there that is not easily broken (though Satan did try again). Existing groups will generally either accept or reject the gospel as a group, rather than splinter and disband. When they do decide to follow Jesus, discipleship is natural and often faster than expected.
  
  
• Give preference to oral communication. I had tried several times to start a Bible study with the families on the hill. At one point, I was going weekly for a long period of time, but making no headway in evangelism or discipleship. The day I suggested we put away our pens and notebooks, and began telling the scripture was the day they started “hearing” the message. This happened in a lot of places, even among the highly literate.
  

Not Forgotten

It has been a long while since I have written consistently in this blog. I have been blogging regularly at Beyond Outreach. I do intend to return to this Bible storying journal soon. I do have a couple of examples of Bible storying in preaching if you are interested, both in English and Portuguese. They are on my Media Page. I should be back to posting updates here soon.

W much like Gideon

W was baptized yesterday. His grandmother was there (she is the head of his household). His brothers and sisters were there. I was wrong about his age. He is 13, not 11.

His grandmother was in tears and hugged him afterwards. I could read her lips saying. “Now you are a man of God in our family. This is very important.” She announced to me a little later that her family is going to follow Jesus like W. She asked me to return to her home again after my trip to help her family learn how to be disciple too. On second thought, I may go there this afternoon.

I will help them begin an oral-style inductive Bible study as a family.

From 12 to 50+

I just noticed in a post from October that we had 12 attend our prayer meeting that particular Wednesday. We’ve been running 50+ for about 6 weeks now. The format is simple.

1. We have a meal, (30 minutes)
2. We put the plates away and formally begin with prayer.
3. Each person that wants to can share what God did in their lives that week, or what they learned of God and wanted to share with others, or an experience telling someone else about Jesus.(15 minutes)
4. We sing. (10 minutes)
5. Someone tells a passage of scripture as story. (5 minutes)
6. We talk about it and find ways to apply and obey it. (15 minutes)
7. We break into groups of 3 or so, to pray for one another. (15 minutes)
8. We close, and put the tables away and benches back into their places, and talk.

I do believe the meal is a draw, but the scripture as story and the opportunity to pray with one another is what keeps people involved.

“W” like Gideon

Yesterday morning at our traditional church, I was meeting with 4 new Christians and telling them the stories of John the Baptist’s baptizing, The baptism of Jesus, the command of Jesus to tell the good news about repentance and the forgiveness of sin in his name, and the great commission passage. When we dismissed, an 11-year old boy I will call “W” came to me and told me that he wanted to be baptized too.

I asked him why. He said “It’s the only way. It’s the only way things will change.” I asked him what needed to change. He said. My family is always fighting, everyone. It is horrible. No one cares about anyone and no one is ever happy.

I’d been to his house several times last year, during evangelistic visits. His home is a shack with two rooms, a dirt floor, a tin roof, and 12 beds, stacked like bunk beds. There is no front door, so they put a board up at night. The floor is dirt.

Well, I asked W if he wanted to follow Jesus. He replied that he believes that Jesus is the son of God who was sent to save us, but that he wasn’t sure if he could believe because his family didn’t.

God put Gideon’s story on my heart and so I told it to W, from Judges chapter 6. In the story, Gideon knocks down his father’s Baal alter and cuts down the post-idol and cuts it up for firewood to give a burnt offering to the Lord. The next day the people of the region want to kill him, but Joas, his father had a change of heart and sided with Gideon and sent the people away.

I told W that his faith and obedience to Jesus even when his family is not following Jesus could be just what God uses to call his whole family to repentance. He said I will be baptized and be like Gideon, I will follow Jesus no matter what they say. I hope I can help them follow Jesus too.

We get the baptistery again on April 11th, and plan to baptize 6 more, including W. We’ve baptized 10 in February and 3 in March. Fun to watch God at work.

Power outage leads to great storying

Last night was a rainy night. Only 12 people showed up for the prayer meeting, there are usually around 30. My wife and son stayed at home. He’s had a fever for three days.

We began the church service telling stories of God’s work in our lives. After about 15 minutes the power went out and we were in the dark. As we ended the testimony time, Ronis is picked up a guitar and began to play. We sang praises for a good while. Then someone said, “Steve, tell the Bible story!”

Our eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see silhouettes. There wasn’t enough light to see faces, much less to read. So, I began. “This is a story from Luke 14.”

I told the story as it is in the Bible. When I finished. I helped the group to piece the story back together. We ended up telling the whole passage again as a group. What followed was about 15 minutes of conversation about that passage of the Bible.

When we were done, we broke up in to groups of 3 to 4 people and prayed for one another, as we always do. After about 20 minutes of praying together, we were all surprised by the return of the lights.

When we finished, one man told me, “We spent the whole time in the dark, but I never saw the scripture so well as I did tonight. I won’t forget this.”

New blog announcement

I have started a new blog called Beyond Outreach. Please go check it out.

http://beyondoutreach.blogspot.com

This current blog, Chronological Bible Storying will continue. I’ve been slow lately with the updates, but that is just a reflection of what’s going on in our lives right now. Lot’s of medical issues with family and it’s just eating up a lot of our time. The updates will come. God bless.

Telling a Psalm

I was challenged recently at a Simply the Story workshop to also use the psalms in bible storying. The Psalms are quite different than stories and harder to learn and teach, but they are part of God’s word and they stick just like stories do. There is something very memorable and comforting in the way the Psalms re-tell the acts of God and announce the character of God. Sometimes you can connect a Psalm to another story of Scripture and open its meaning even further.

Sunday I was a guest speaker at another traditional church in the big city. I decided to try using Psalm 90 and 91 for the two services.

Psalm 90 is a prayer of Moses and is connected to the time when the Israelite men were denied entry into the Promised Land for the rest of their lives because of their rejection of God’s command to enter. The 40 years that they wandered in the desert wilderness were the years where this prayer has it’s initial context. I prayed this Psalm then told chapter 14 of Numbers. We then learned many things from Psalm 90.

Psalm 91 is a psalm about the Lord’s faithful protection of the godly and how he delivers them from dangers of war and plague. They do not suffer the wrath of God like the disobedient do. This was the psalm that the Devil used to tempt Jesus to throw himself from the top of the temple in Luke 4. I told this story after the psalm, so that we could learn from how Satan tried to misapply the promise of God and how Jesus applied it correctly.

Preparing psalms takes more time than stories, and to be honest, I did not use the STS method this time out, but am anxious to do that in a small group soon.