Bible Storying
Our family works with international students here at a University. We have worked to develop many programs which are designed to engage the Christian community in the lives of the students. We help students practice their English, find furniture for their apartments, help them get a US driver’s license, and find American friends. We do all of this because Jesus has told us to love and serve everyone from every nation as our neighbor (Luke 10:25-37).
Our strategy has been to look for where God is at work and join Him. So in all of our events and ministry opportunities, we are looking for those who are asking questions and want to go deeper, spiritually. Some of these students have asked to study more about Jesus, and want to learn what the Bible teaches. As a result, we offer them a Bible Study, either one-on-one or as a group in our home.
This year we began a new study with a group of students, all from closed countries, where access to the Bible is extremely limited, if not non-existent. As we searched for study materials, the Lord kept pointing us to Bible Storying. Even though we work with highly educated, often graduate level students, it is always a challenge to present an English-based study that truly has an impact on other cultures.
We discovered Bill Perry’s Storytellers Bible Study and launched into it. It takes 12 key stories from Genesis to the Resurrection, and presents the Gospel chronologically in a remarkably thorough fashion. The 12 lessons actually stretched into about 20, since many of them were much too long for one sitting.
The results have been amazing! Stories have a profound ability to communicate spiritual truth in a non-confrontational, non-Western format. As the stories unfold, so does the Christian worldview, and we found that the students began to absorb spiritual truth that they would normally resist and question.
The Storying has accomplished something that quicker presentations of the Gospel have not been able to do. It has subtly confronted and replaced faulty elements of the students’ own worldviews with the truth of God’s word. This is because the story teaches in a remarkably different way than the point-by-point, logical Western presentation of truth.
Please pray for our students. They truly understand what Jesus is all about, and they fully understand the cost to their lives and social networks if they choose to follow Him. Please pray that Jesus will reveal Himself personally to our students and that they would be willing to lay down their own lives to gain eternal life!
