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September 03, 2005
How To Tell a Story
Dear Friends,
In one of my first discipleship meetings with a young man named Daniel, I realized that our meetings would be very different than I expected.
Doing discipleship in America, we could cover the Timothy Training material in about 6 to 10 weeks. However, in our first three meetings we had only covered part of lesson 1 and began working on memorizing one Bible verse. We spent 20 minutes discussing what words like "entrust" mean. Daniel can speak English well but does not use it in a literate manner.
When it rains he does not bring his new English Bible (even though I gave him a ziploc bag to cover it). And he did not have time to study his lesson last week because he was sleeping under the hospital bed of his sister who is desperately ill with malaria. Never mind the fact that he walked in the rain while he had malaria to meet with me.
But (!), when I used an illustration of five fingers on a hand to teach about how important it is to hear, read, study, memorize, and meditate on God's Word - guess what? He got it immediately. What was different?
I did not see it right away. It was a micro-story. I read some material on chronological storytelling. It made the statement: "Literates learn in the abstract, but oral learners need a story framework to store information."
So, here's the epiphany. Oral learners store information in relation to events. For example, "the baby was born before the maize harvest" or "my wife died just before the war started". Most illiterate people in Sudan don't know their birthday, but that is not surprising because they don't think in abstract calendar terms like people from the West. Remember the opening verses of Isaiah 6? "In the year that King Uzaiah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up. . . " This is how oral societies store information.
And I remember how Jesus taught. He did not speak to the people without telling a parable. I used to think it was only to veil his message. Now I understand he was trying to communicate to them in the clearest, most memorable way possible.
As a missionary we need to share the good news in a way that people can receive it. So, for the people of Kurmuk where the average person speaks three to four languages but cannot write any of them, we need to tell stories.
The idea we have is to train and equip Sudanese storytellers. The venue open to us is the hospital grounds in Kurmuk, the community center, or simply the marketplace where anyone can go. We could use simple laminated pictures for visuals and the stories would be told in Arabic or Mabaan or Uduk or any other widely spoken languages.
So, for us please pray for wisdom in how to go about it. We would need the right people to train and some ways to train them. However, we are pretty excited about it and hope God will use these "epiphanies" to grow His Kingdom.
all for now,
Chris for the Crowders
Published at September 3, 2005 07:42 AM
