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The Basics of Chronological Bible Storying

Part Two - ‘Crafting the Story’ by Grant Lovejoy

In part two of ‘The Basics of Chronological Bible Storying’ we’re talking about crafting the Bible for telling as

stories. Now it should be said that we have a wonderful situation when it comes to telling biblical stories in

that they are already told really well in the Bible to start with. So, if in doubt, we follow the Bible in our lead.

It serves as our default. But there are some occasions that cause us to need to craft the story to make it more

useful in our chronological Bible storying. For instance, some stories are rather lengthy and complicated

with a lot of detail that isn’t essential for a person comprehending the main idea of the story. The story of

Noah, for instance, has a lot of dimensions to the ark, and there are a considerable number of time markers -

- how long they worked on it, how long the rains came. For most people, those details are not crucial, and, in

fact, the story is improved for telling purposes if we summarise, if we leave out those particular details, and

instead, focus on statements like ‘Noah did all that God had told him, just in the way God told him to do it’.

And we don’t have to go into all the measurements, and such. So sometimes we craft the story for simplicity

in that respect.

Sometimes it’s important to craft the story by reducing the number of proper names in the story,

particularly when people have never heard these names, and they are strange names coming from another

language and culture. It’s really difficult to keep up with six or eight new, strange names. If the names

are just mentioned in passing, and aren’t important characters in this story, or a subsequent one, we may

omit them from the story. If the story begins with some sort of travel log where Saul went to three or four

villages before he got to the village where the action took place, we simply say he travelled and arrived at

-- and name the village where the action really took place. Things like this simplify the story for the listener,

give them fewer things to have to hold in mind, and let them zero in on the parts of the story that are themost crucial for our purposes, whether that’s evangelism, or discipleship, or leadership training. We also

craft the story to try to reduce the potential for misunderstanding. Sometimes there are elements in the

story that will be troubling, and we try, if those are not crucial to the story, to diminish the possibility of

misunderstanding. Of course, sometimes, the central idea of the story is troubling because it challenges a

world view, and in that case, we leave it exactly as is.

There is also the matter of crafting the stories to respect and reflect

the local practices of story telling. We would like to tell the story

in a way that they can embrace it as their own story, and one that

is not a foreign story, but is told in a way that they can recognizeas from their culture. This involves us studying the story telling

habits of the people with whom we’ll be telling the story. Cultures

often have standardised ways of beginning and ending stories and

will have different kinds of standardised beginnings and endings,

depending on the kind of story it is. In North American and European

folk tales, we often begin by saying, “Once upon a time . . .” That’s a

standardised opening, but it’s not a standardised opening for a true

story - it’s a standardised opening for a folk tale. So it would be, of

course, very wrong in our cultural setting, to say, “Once upon a time

Jesus was born in Bethlehem.” It would certainly create grave offensebecause, by our opening line, we’ve signalled something about the

story that’s not so. So, as we study the storytelling practices of the

people we’re going to be working among, it’s very important to get

the right opening and closing lines for the kind of true stories that

we’ll be sharing from the Bible.



It will also be important to see if there are

customs about who can tell stories and if there

are certain places that are the places where true

or heritage stories are told. As much as possible,

we will try to respect that and reflect that in our

own practice. In some cases, the stories may not

be told so much as they will be chanted, or sung,

or put in some other cultural expression. We will

work with a partner from that group (if we canfind one) and seek their assistance in putting it

into that form as nearly as we can. Those of us

working cross culturally from a culture other

than the one that we’re trying to reach probably

won’t ever do this with great fluency. But we

can, by our example, and by giving some sort of

a permission, free up someone from that culture

to do it with a skill that we, ourselves, couldn’t

manage.

When it comes to crafting the story, peopleoften say, “How about can I use my imagination

to really flesh out the story, make it more vivid

and add a lot of colour to it?” And our answer

to that question goes back to the principle of

the oral Bible. Because through this method,

we are giving people the only Bible that will be

available to them, then we must be scrupulously

careful that what we give them is, indeed, the

Bible and not a figment of our imagination. In a

preaching setting where everyone’s literate, everyone has their Bible open before them and can quickly check to see what’s actually in the Bible and what’s the elaboration of the preacher/teacher, you could excuse some

of that; and in fact, in some cases even applaud it. In chronological Bible storying, we cannot do that kind of

figment of the imagination and elaboration in the story. We keep ourselves squarely to the story. We allow

ourselves the kind of freedom that a Bible translator would have. There are multiple ways of expressing in a

given language what was in the original Greek, or Hebrew, or Aramaic, but within those bounds we try to be

careful to be faithful to Scripture.

Part of the crafting of the story always has to do with the choice of words and key terms. This is often a

crucially important issue, and if we’re working in a second language for us, it’s very, very important to work

with native speakers to make sure that the nuances and connotations of that language are the ones that wewant. So it’s helpful if we have access to someone who is a Bible translator, for instance, or someone else who

is sensitive to the nuances of the language, to try the story out on them in the way we think we would tell it,

and let them give us feedback about whether we’ve told it in a way that really conveys the Bible’s essential

meaning.

As we’re crafting the story, we also want to be thinking about telling it in a way that facilitates the recall and

subsequent telling by the people we’re trying to reach. There are times we might, ourselves, be capable of a

more elaborate, detailed, really impressive telling of it; but if that elaborate, detailed, impressive telling of it, in

fact, discourages others from trying to tell it themselves -- if they say, “Well, that was such an awesome thing,

I could never do it.” -- then in actuality we have been counterproductive, we’ve impeded the reproducibility

of it, and we will impede the spread of that story through the people. So that there are times, even if we feel

confident doing something really impressive and elaborate, that we need to craft the approach. We need

to put it in a package that the people we’re working with can themselves carry and own. So this becomes a

consideration as we look to what we actually have in the Bible and what would be best for the people that

we’re working with.



A question comes up sometimes -- so do you do the application? Where does that come? -- and we come back

to say that because one of our basic principles is that the story is oral Bible, we don’t add application to the

story. That will come in the dialogue time, about which we will talk later in this presentation. It is sometimes

necessary to add information into the story. We don’t do this very often, but there are some stories in the Bible

which assume knowledge on the part of the listeners that our particular listeners will not have. The story of the

Good Samaritan that Jesus told, for instance, assumes that His listeners knew what a Samaritan was, and they

did. But we could certainly go to places in the world today and tell that story just as Jesus told it, and people

wouldn’t understand who the Samaritan was. Now, in our practice and use of storying, often we will tell them

who the Samaritans were before we ever start the Bible story. I think that’s the best practice, to say, “In thisstory to come, I’m going to tell you -- I’m going to mention Samaritans, and here’s who they were.” Or you can

wait until the subsequent dialogue and deal with it. It is possible, on a very limited basis, simply to insert in the

story the briefest possible phrase -- along came a Samaritan, one of the traditional enemies of the Jews, and

go right on with the story with no further elaboration. A little bit of that may be acceptable, but preferably it

goes into the pre-story session. There are many ways that we try to craft the story -- always with two goals in

mind -- the first, be faithful to Scripture; the second, make it understandable and reproducible.

www.frontiers.org.ukNote: Article taken from IMB

www.imb.org

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