They Love to Tell The Story

Special Report about reaching oral cultures with the story of Jesus

“Oh stories!” exclaims Ramesh Sapkota, leader from Nepal. “I eat stories, sleep stories, drink stories, tell stories. Not only me—it is like a communicable disease. Everyone can tell stories. Blessed be God!”

Sapkota has caught the virus, and his new-found passion for Bible stories, from Genesis through Revelation, is characteristic of an emerging harvest work force. It’s a force that is energized and motivated by its love for the story of God in all its color, drama and depth. Along with this is the realization that in all kinds and cultures of people, this powerful story speaks for itself with the wisdom of the ages.

The thread, that runs through testimony after testimony from this cadre of workers using narrative portions of the Bible as its mainstay, is a thrilling sense of discovery. Non-literate believers who never imagined they could be teachers, leaders or trainers, are seeing that the story of God empowers them. Literate leaders are finding that when they tell pure stories of the Bible, without extra commentary, but with questions and discussion instead, their disciples are hearing and learning as never before.

“I want to translate this”

Sapkota was already a church planter and leader in his country when he made a fresh discovery of the scriptures. He’d been a believer in Jesus since age 13, but had only read one or two stories in the Old Testament for himself. “Most of the preaching I heard was from the New Testament,” he explains. That left him confused about a lot of things. “Questions that people would ask, I wouldn’t know how to answer.”

Then he heard about the Amsterdam 2000 conference for evangelists. He didn’t go, but he did request the materials from the event. By the time the package arrived at his door, he had forgotten about his order. “Who is sending me a Christmas gift?” he thought as he opened up a box of videos and materials.

Inserting the God’s Story video, produced by Dorothy Miller, into his player, he watched the whole story of the Bible in 80 minutes, starting from creation and beautifully illustrated with still-life drawings. “I felt like I was watching a movie,” said Sapkota. “The story was told in a way I could track it, in order chronologically. It talked to me in the cultural way that I think—I loved it.”

After seeing the video in English he said, “I want to translate this.” Getting it into his own language of Nepali became his first project. Since then, he has overseen the translation of the God’s Story video into 16 languages including all the languages of Tibet and Bhutan, and most of Nepal. “We have several languages to be done in a queue,” he says.

Now Sapkota is teaching “Simply The Story” workshops, training church leaders, both literate and non-literate, to use the telling of Bible stories to start and lead churches and disciple believers. And the people he trains are having reactions similar to his own.

On the edge of their seats

An Hispanic pastor with influence over more than 1,000 other pastors called the God’s Story office the day after a workshop. “As a pastor for 30 years, I knew something was missing,” he said. “We Pentecostal and charismatic preachers have dramatized the stories of the Bible, adding what we thought would make the information more interesting. But you said to let the story speak. We have not been doing that.” For four days he told complete Bible stories from the pulpit, in the morning and evening services. “The congregation loved it,” he said. “They were on the edge of their seats with interest. Afterwards they said it was the best teaching they had ever heard.”

“I am Jonah”

But Sapkota is teaching more than storytelling. In his seminars he demonstrates how to walk through a story, get to know its characters and see what they saw. People from oral cultures seem to be especially good at it, such as the 35 Masai and Komba pastors Sapkota taught in Kenya in 2006.

“One day, as we told the story of Jonah,” tells Sapkota, “a man who had started 200 churches stood up and confessed, “I am Jonah. I have started churches, but never cared about the people.” That began a wave of confession and repentance.

At a second workshop with Komba believers in August, 2007, the group was so deeply affected by the story of Jesus in the home of Martha and Mary that they called for a special meeting of the elders. They had been shocked by the disrespect of Martha’s question to Jesus, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work?” Then these people, living in a remote and isolated area, realized that they had been asking the same question of God: “Don’t you care about us?” They were ready to adjust their attitude.

That is what the God’s Story Project is all about—giving people in oral communities, such as these, access to a significant number of the key events, characters and encounters of the Scriptures, and the expertise to search them out and gain understanding.

Perhaps these are precisely the kind of workers needed to see a vivid, vital, obedient church emerge among peoples that have seemed distant and uninterested for so long.