I kind of stumbled onto to Chronological Bible Story telling in the last couple of months. I was searching for Mark Driscoll’s last words and assessment of Sydney Evangelicals when he visited last year and came across the Sydney Anglican’s website with a great collection of sermons which you could download for free. In amongst this sermons was a series of 5 talks by Don Carson on evangelism to the post modern, post Christian world (download here). They were eye opening talks which radically changed my view of evangelism. I was left wondering why I hadn’t heard this kind of thinking before of world view evangelism. Don Carson makes the point that to preach the gospel without having explained the Christian world view first makes no sense to someone with a different worldview. So if I tell a Thai Buddhist that Jesus died on the cross for there sins, they don’t see the great sacrificial love of Jesus for mankind but they see a man with obviously bad karma to have died such a terrible death. They can’t understand why you would ever want to follow a man like that.
In addition to this what I’ve been coming across more recently is material from Larry Dinkins, a former OMF missionary to Thailand that oral story telling of the Bible, in his experience is much more effective in reaching Thais (listen here - choose the iphone option). Although Thais are 95% literate, the underlying culture is oral.
So I’m convinced (at the moment anyway) that oral Chronological Bible Story telling is the way forward for evangelism in Thailand. May God use it to bring people to him.
To read more on this go to the God Story website.
In addition to this what I’ve been coming across more recently is material from Larry Dinkins, a former OMF missionary to Thailand that oral story telling of the Bible, in his experience is much more effective in reaching Thais (listen here - choose the iphone option). Although Thais are 95% literate, the underlying culture is oral.
So I’m convinced (at the moment anyway) that oral Chronological Bible Story telling is the way forward for evangelism in Thailand. May God use it to bring people to him.
To read more on this go to the God Story website.
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2 comments:
Hey Richard,
I stumbled across your blog via Andrew Katay's blog and saw your comments on Bible storying. A lot of our missionaries in Taiwan are using it to good effect. I think it has made a lot of our people a lot more effective in evangelism and able to get past the usual Buddhist tolerance which sees Jesus as OK along with every other god.
However, we first learned it from missionaries in Thailand! Some of our people learned about it from Jonathan Project and then we organised a conference and invited Frank Schattner (who used to be OMF TH but is now Mekong) to come and teach us. His input was excellent. So I am sure that there are people in your part of the world who are familiar with this.
I think the basic set of 6 stories originally came from him also. However, with the different culture and more urban context we find we need to keep reworking the number and emphasis of stories we use.
The website http://www.chronologicalbiblestorying.com/ also has lots of really helpful material on this.
Phil
Hi Phil,
Thanks for your input. That helps alot. Actually I'm trying to translate Christine's English version into Thai. I've heard of Don Schlatter (who has written Chronological Bible Story material) but not Frank Schattner. I will definately chase him up.
I've been chasing leads for a while now, but didn't find something similar to what you are using so was attempting to translate it myself (very slowly and with frustration!).
At this years TH conference we are having Larry Dinkins speak and I think he will be talking about this topic. He has been speaking in the US about God's Story (http://www.gods-story.org/)
Thanks again,
Rich
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