Stories
Read here what the Lord is doing around the world through storying ministry.
Nigeria
Missionaries had worked in the central Nigerian region among the Tiv tribe over a period spanning 25 years. In that time they only saw 25 people come to Jesus - an average of one believer per year. Some Tiv believers then began to set the gospel story to musical chants which was the local typical medium of communication. Spreading the Gospel message took off and within a short time there were a quarter of a million Tivs worshipping Jesus! Not resistant to the Gospel as previously understood, but reached through a change of communication style - to an oral one!
[Source: ION/LCWE Making Disciples of Oral Learners]
India
In the mid-1990s a local Indian missionary agency discovered that their Western trained workers were not being effective in outreach and that their congregations could not understand their preaching, nor remember what they had been taught. After some years of trial and error a seminar was run at the beginning of 2006 to train the workers how to be Bible storytellers. In just twelve days they learned 12 stories from the book of Genesis and went out to share them in their home areas (amongst Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim populations), instructed to share each story a minimum of three times. Six weeks later at the second training event it was reported that 32,386 people heard stories, 87 of whom came to Jesus with 2 baptisms and 5 new cell groups planted.
[Source: IMB, 2006]