Saturday, July 21, 2007

"The Bible Stories are alive, I just try not to kill them!"


An interesting quote. I've found the same to be true as I am telling Bible stories. People seem to be listening better and seeing the connection between the story and the points I'm trying to get across in sermons coming from the stories.

From the The Calvin Institute of Worship

Dennis Dewey says that biblical storytelling reconnects worshipers with the communal experience of hearing God together. Telling stories from Scripture changes the people who learn them well enough to tell them—and changes worshipers who hear the old, old story anew.

Dewey began telling Bible stories during his first year as a parish pastor. When he performed Mark’s passion narrative instead of preaching a Palm Sunday sermon, the response was electric. Since then, people who’ve gone to church all their lives hear him tell Bible stories and say things like “I never heard the gospel till now” or “You made the text come alive.”

That’s when Dewey reminds them, “The stories already are alive. I just try not to kill them.”

He aims to perform narratives and passages nearly verbatim—with 95 percent content accuracy and 75 percent verbal accuracy—from Scripture. He studies several translations to fully understand the story’s words, images, and feelings. Where translators deleted all the “ands” or inserted subordinate clauses, so oral stories would read as literature, he reverts to how the passage should sound out loud.

“Stories can be memorized in a few hours, but it takes weeks to learn the story ‘by heart.’ I suggest that people begin learning the story at least six weeks before they will be telling it,” Dewey says.


Image courtesy Calvin Institute of Worship

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