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Reply to "STORYTELLING RESOURCES: BOOKS, PRINT, VIDEOS, WEBSITES"

(Originally Posted in the Rotation.org JUNE 2011 EMAIL NEWSLETTER)

This month’s great idea was contributed by Anne Camp, Shadyside Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while working on the current Rotation.org Writing Team lesson set, “Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.”

The book Story Journey, an Invitation to the Gospel as Storytelling by Thomas E. Boomershine (Nashville:  Abingdon Press, 1988, 978-0687396627) has been untouched on my bookshelf for many years.  This spring when I finally finished reading it, I received a wonderful gift:  the challenge to learn by heart a fairly lengthy selection of scripture.

Don’t be put off if you think you don’t enjoy memory work.  The process of preparing to learn the story is deeply revealing in and of itself – even if you don’t follow all the way through with committing the passage to memory.

To prepare, read the story out loud each time you do the following tasks:

  • identify the structure of the story by dividing the text into episodes of two to four sentences
  • listen for variations in tempo
  • listen for verbal threads – repeated words or phrases
  • name and picture the structure by picking out the key words and images.  This involves writing out the passage using different color codes for each episode and leaving out articles and transitive verbs.)

Having now read the story out loud at least four times and having created an outline and having identified key words, you are already well on your way to being able to tell the story – in rich detail – in your own words. This is where I usually stop.  But I was surprised how much I really enjoyed continuing to focus on the words until I was able to tell it verbatim.  I used some of my favorite multi-tasking times (taking a shower, doing the laundry, swimming my laps) to complete the task.

I heartily recommend Boomershine, who also founded the Network of Biblical Storytellers.  Story Journey contains ten stories from the life of Christ to which he has applied his method in much greater detail than I have been able to share here.  I’m only sorry I didn’t read him years ago.

Last edited by Luanne Payne
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