Last month I went with a small team to Congo. There we trained 27 pastors and missionaries in how to use chronological Bible storying to go start churches in undeveloped villages. It was a fantastic trip full of answered prayers, unexpected barriers both human and spiritual, people becoming Christ-followers, and sharing of lives. Where but in the Body of Christ can you find people who don’t speak the same language and have almost no common background, but can worship together, pray together, share the spiritual journey they’ve been on, and move forward by faith towards a common goal – seeing people glorify God?
One of the frustrations we had was being able to keep folks updated. We had several people checking here for updates, but it wasn’t possible to do. Either we had no power, no access to internet, or when we did it was a sizzling 0.78 kps, which hampered any possible blog entry. So we’ll have to figure out some alternatives for reporting from the field on future trips.
As we’re planning 2010 trips to train others, I felt like during this next year I’d like to expand the scope of this blog. Recently we did an intro to storying workshop for several churches. It wasn’t for those only interested in global missions, but for local outreach, small groups, student ministry, international university students, and families. It was a great time. (If you’d like to find out more about doing something like this at your church, let us kn0w.) During the day, it became obvious many people were making connections to use storying in their various niches that God has placed them.
What I hope you’ll start seeing here are more regular entries that deal with a variety of topics:
- storying that is occurring globally;
- thoughts to spur storying use wherever you are in the relationships that God has given you;
- pointers to other resources and articles in popular mags, mission mags, and scholarly journals that are out;
- and more reports from locations we are able to train as we are able.
Hopefully the Lord will allow the posts and comments to be a catalyst for us to see people get into God’s Word (the written) in order that God’s Word (the person of Christ) can get into people with the fewest number of obstacles possible.
