Chronological Bibe Storying Training

As we continue to make headway with the Bible Stories at Crossroads Community Church, we too continue to receive training on how to become better story tellers and to self evaluate.

On Friday afternoon, Mbonisi Malaba, leader of New Creation Church (previously known as River of Life Christian Church), Sue Smith and Renee Cunningham lead us through a time of reviewing what we have covered so far in CBS and we did some fun activities as well.

As a review, we went through COWS:
C – CBS. This is telling the story in the Bible chronologically, or in order. It has different tracks i.e. Evangelism track, Church planting track and possibly leadership track.

O – Oral learners & culture. They learn through storys, through repetition while literate learners write things down and go through it later.

W – Worldview: The way a person thinks and sees things. It is affected by their background, environment and culture. It’s easy to tell a persons worldview by their behaviour. Worldview affects a persons beliefs, which affects a persons values and lastly, it affects a person’s behaviour.

S – Story tellers: Good story tellers command attention, use expression, voice tones, are time conscious, use body language and so on. They review and guide the discussion at the end.

Self-evaluationAs we tell stories, we need to self evaluate as well as getting key people to evaluate us.
Questions I’d ask myself are:
a) Have people understood the story and have they expressed themselves well during the discussion?
b) Did I include everything I wanted in the story?
c) Did I include or subtract from the story? Was I well prepared?
d) How did the visitors respond?
e) Time - was I too long or too short?
f) Were the questions relevant?
g) Did everyone participate in the story?
h) Did the story fit into the allocated time?
i) Was I confident?
j) Will it make people want to know God more?
k) Did I stick to the story?
l) Was my voice monotonous?
m) Did I overplay – dramatize the story or did I underplay it?
n) How did I sense the story went?
o) Was the language I used appropriate for the audience?

The Communication SandwichWhen giving feedback, we can use the analogy of a sandwich. The bread is all the positive things about the story and the jam or peanut butter in-between the bread are the areas we can improve.

What an excellent training time and we look forward to the next one in September.

Written by Molly Manhanga