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 Jesus shared his message by telling stories, as portrayed in "The Sermon on the Mount", by 15th century painter Cosimo Rosselli. |
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Biblical Storytelling: Learning scripture by heart
Dennis Dewey says that biblical storytelling reconnects worshipers with the communal experience of hearing God together. Telling stories from Scripture changes the people who learn them well enough to tell them—and changes worshipers who hear the old, old story anew.
In the same churches that soulfully sing “I Love to Tell the Story,” the Scripture reading (if any) is often delivered without eye contact, emotion, or inflection.
Perhaps reading the Bible in monotone seems more dignified, holy, and respectful. It’s certainly common…and also odd, once you think about it. We know that music is not the ink on the paper yet we treat the Word of God as ink on paper.
But as Dennis Dewey explains, learning Bible stories by heart is a spiritual discipline that connects people with the living Word of God. His message is getting across. Congregations are finding ways to use biblical storytelling in many parts of their worship services.
Oral tradition
Dennis Dewey, an ordained Presbyterian and professional biblical storyteller, likes to point out that public Scripture reading often sounds like “spoken print.” The people who first received God’s Word, however, lived in an oral culture, not a literate one.
 Dennis Dewey says he wears an alb for worship performances to "symbolize that these are stories of the baptized imagination." Publicity photo. |
“Remember that the stories of the Scriptures were, for the most part, first experienced as stories—full of sound and fury, red meat and bubbly—not as dead ink on silent paper,” he says in an interview with another professional biblical storyteller, Tracy Radosevic.
The Bible is the story of how God acts in human history. This story gives us a timeline to live by. Deborah, Joshua, David, and Nehemiah saw the practice of telling and recounting God’s wondrous acts as an anchor of worship.
Dewey began telling Bible stories during his first year as a parish pastor. When he performed Mark’s passion narrative instead of preaching a Palm Sunday sermon, the response was electric. Since then, people who’ve gone to church all their lives hear him tell Bible stories and say things like “I never heard the gospel till now” or “You made the text come alive.”
That’s when Dewey reminds them, “The stories already are alive. I just try not to kill them.”
 Internalizing a Bible story starts with reading but goes far beyond memorizing or reciting. © 2007 Eric Nykamp, "Your Word is Light" | Eyekons
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Internalizing the story
In interviews with Homiletics, Reformed Worship, and elsewhere, Dewey explains a few terms that sometimes startle people who hear him talk about “performing the Bible stories that have been traditioned to us.”
You might think of performing a Bible story as embroidering on the words God gave or as showing off. Dewey explains that perform means to form fully. He finds the life in the text, fully internalizes it, and shares the promise these “ancient stories have to move people, change lives, and challenge the powers.”
By traditioned, Dewey means that the Bible has been handed down through oral and literate cultures, in many languages and translations.
He aims to perform narratives and passages nearly verbatim—with 95 percent content accuracy and 75 percent verbal accuracy—from Scripture. He studies several translations to fully understand the story’s words, images, and feelings. Where translators deleted all the “ands” or inserted subordinate clauses, so oral stories would read as literature, he reverts to how the passage should sound out loud.
Dewey describes biblical storytelling as a spiritual discipline that goes beyond memorizing and reciting. “You internalize the story,” he often says. That means reading it aloud, meditating on it, praying with the text, engaging with it on a feeling level, and scripting it. As you learn a scripture by heart, it becomes part of your tone of voice, vocal pacing, muscle tension, and movements.
“Stories can be memorized in a few hours, but it takes weeks to learn the story ‘by heart.’ I suggest that people begin learning the story at least six weeks before they will be telling it,” Dewey says.
 Listening to a Bible story together gives worshipers a sense of how the first believers experienced God's Word. |
Communal connection
In what he calls the “back story” to his life path, Dewey describes himself at age 45. He’d just resigned from a difficult pastorate and was wondering how to support his family. On top of that, his wife unexpectedly became pregnant. “I cried for a week,” he says. They were soon the butt of friendly jokes from people of the same age but in different life stages.
Then Dewey was invited to guest preach for a few weeks, only to discover that the lectionary texts were about Abraham and Sarah. “I lived in those stories. I felt Abraham’s giddy joy. I was grateful for this gift of God, this twist in my life story,” he says.
Just as learning Bible stories by heart helps Dewey see his story within the context of God’s story, he believes biblical storytelling does the same for worshipers. That’s partly because storytelling requires direct eye-to-eye contact. So, unlike watching a liturgical drama, those in the pews don’t have to pretend that the story is happening in front of them.
He credits Tom Boomershine, founder of the Network of Biblical Storytellers, for helping him remember that the stories that became the Bible “were first experienced and remembered as breath and sound and noise—amusing, compelling, moving stories in which people met God.”
And that’s why Dewey describes biblical storytelling as a “new/old way of experiencing the stories of God” and as “lively adventures in communal imagination.”
The story continues ... How Churches Use Biblical Storytelling in Worship
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Don’t miss the bonus story about teenagers who actually ask to memorize and tell Scripture in worship.
Book Dennis Dewey to perform and teach biblical storytelling. Order the DVD How to Tell and Learn a Bible Story: Step by Step Instructions.
Watch short online storytelling videos of Dennis Dewey, Tracy Radosevic, and other NOBS members. Read scholarly papers on biblical storytelling.
Two Kortright Presbyterian storytellers also write blogs. Worship pastor Phil English has blogged about how to internalize the story. Dennis Gray often posts about biblical storytelling on Java and Jesus.
Through Network of Biblical Storytellers, you can find a storyteller, join or start a storytelling guild, buy books and videos, and read issues of The Biblical Storyteller.
Browse drama and biblical storytelling resources for worship. Read Reformed Worship stories on dramatic reading. Use ideas from Practicing Our Faith to help people share testimonies.
If you preach, check out insights in Storytelling the Word: Homilies & How to Write Them by William J. Bausch.
Browse related stories about Eugene Peterson, intergenerational worship, moving from text to sermon, and public Scripture reading.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories at your council, worship, education, or youth ministry meeting. These questions will get members talking about whether or how to use biblical storytelling.
- Dennis Dewey says that story is how we learn most of what we know. Does that match how you’ve learned about your extended family or friends? Does it fit with how you make sense of life or pass on your experience to your children?
- Which upcoming sermon series or lectionary passages might fit well with biblical storytelling? How might you use biblical storytelling as a call to worship, dismissal or sending, or introduction to a prayer, song, or congregational offering?
- When you think of all the ways words are used in a typical worship service at your church, what percentage of words would you guess are taken directly from Scripture? Would you like to reduce or increase this fraction? If so, why?
- Is your worship as multigenerational as you would like it to be? In what ways could biblical storytelling reach or involve different age groups in your church?
What is the best way you’ve found to address and talk about best practices for biblical storytelling? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you find a way to measure—or even gather anecdotes and quotes about—the impact of biblical storytelling in your worship services? What differences did you notice between storytellers and those who hear the stories?
- Which book, video, drama resource, or conference helped you introduce or strengthen biblical storytelling in your church worship services?
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/.