The Story Bible Strategy
StoryRunners took the principles of orality, storying and other mission best practices and wrapped a comprehensive strategy around them that can get to every last people group on earth in our generation. It can go from zero to church planting in three years. Here is how the Story Bible™ works:
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Build and Send a Team
Month 0 to Month 6 (6 Months Total)
- As a church, donor, denomination or other mission agency, you decide to reach an unreached people group with a Story Bible.
- StoryRunners pairs you with a small team of national missionaries who are ready to reach people groups in their own country. There are hundreds of national believers in multiple countries who are ready to go as soon as they get sponsors. Nationals tend to be better at reaching their own people, they require a fraction of the overhead cost that foreign missionaries do, and they are supervised by local missions and churches already in place.
- Another option for building a team is to send your own people. StoryRunners can train and mentor your own teams so you can own the strategy yourself and run with it.
- The team undergoes six weeks of initial training which includes language acquisition and world view study—only what they need to know for the first six months. Other training modules follow at six month intervals. We call this model “just-in-time training.”
- The team enters the people group's area and embeds in a small town or village. The team lives as closely as possible like the people do to absorb the language and culture quickly. They look for a “man of peace” to be their guide to the local language and customs.
- After the first six months, teams usually become conversational in the target language and they are ready to start selecting and translating stories. The team looks for biblical stories that are good bridges from the indigenous culture's stories. For example, many people groups already have a story about a worldwide flood—a good bridge for Noah and the Ark.
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Translate the Story Bible and Form Groups
Month 6 to Month 21 (15 Months Total)
- The team receives the next module of training on oral translation, story selection, and how to build a listening group.
- The team translates key stories from the Bible by working with local language helpers. They can usually translate at the rate of one or two Bible stories per week.
- The oral translation process moves faster than traditional translation because nothing needs to be written down in the target language. This is the key to getting past the barrier of orality. However, the team does write down the stories in their own trade language for aid in translation checking.
- After each story is translated, the team tells the story to a small listening group who are most likely not believers. The people often get so caught up in the stories that they think about them all week and can't wait for the next story to come! When the New Testament stories begin, people can identify Jesus as the Messiah even before they hear about his death and resurrection. They connect Jesus with the Old Testament prophesies.
- Along the way, translation consultants assist the team to ensure the biblical accuracy of the stories and test for comprehension and cultural understanding of each Bible story.
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Create Media and Preserve the Stories
Month 21 to 24 (3 Months Total)
- Once the story set is near completion, preparations are made to make audio recordings of the stories. One option is to train and equip the team to use digital recording devices and audio editing tools, or a media specialist can be brought in.
- The best indigenous storytellers from the first listening group are recorded. This preserves the stories to make sure they do not drift over time, although oral cultures are very good at keeping the stories accurate by themselves.
- Now the audio recordings can be made into media products that can be distributed on CD, cassette tape, digital players, radio or whatever media works best in that culture.
- The finished media products are great for foreign short term mission teams to use. You are giving the people God's word in their own native language and in a communication style they understand. It feels natural to them, not foreign.
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Tell the Stories, Make Disciples, Plant Churches
Month 24 to 36 (12 Months Total)
- As storytellers tell the stories and people become interested, they form listening groups that learn and process the stories. Oral people are adept at applying the stories to their own lives. One nomadic listening group in Central Asia made it their custom to tell and discuss Bible stories every morning around the camp fire.
- Eventually, as the hearers come to faith, the listening groups form house churches. The first story listening group often becomes the first church.
- Because the stories are the Word of God, they go out with power and do not return void. Eleven of the first 13 Story Bible projects resulted in church planting.
- Since the Story Bible is so reproducible, almost anyone who has learned the stories in a listening group can share the stories with others in a natural, non-threatening, culturally relevant way.
- More listening groups form, and eventually more churches are planted. StoryRunners has seen three generations of churches grow in a short period of time. Our prayer is that every people group can have a multiplying church movement like this.
There are only a handful of organizations in the world who are able to train missionaries in Chronological Bible Storying, one of the foundations of the Story Bible. StoryRunners has taken it a step further by combining the concepts of orality and storying with the traditional strengths of Campus Crusade for Christ—movement building and media production.
The Story Bible is a gift from God for the purpose of reaching people groups, and it is meant to be shared. Let us give it to you so you can adapt it to your own ministry context. Pray to the Lord of the Harvest how he might use you to send out his word in the form of Story Bibles to lost peoples with no access to his message. Contact us to learn more or Give to a project now.
You may also want to see some specific implementations of the Story Bible Strategy.
