Ellen in Paraguay

On Friday I successfully completed 24 years of life. It seems like a fairly good-sized number, but on that day I felt more light-hearted and youthful than ever. There was a big conference for all the Christian school teachers in Paraguay, and I went with my co-workers to attend workshops, learn how to be better teachers and, most importantly, get inspired to keep persevering. I went to a workshop specifically for English teachers and was surprised to find that only the British lady leading the session and 2 or 3 others were native English speakers. I saw a guy wearing a hockey jacket that said “High River” on it and I thought he might be from Alberta, but was disappointed to hear a strongly accented voice. It turns out though, that he did receive it from a Canadian friend. I took advantage of the opportunity to pretend we were kids as we played games and sang songs, and was inspired by the teacher who has traveled all around the world, places like Spain and Egypt, teaching English.
The guest speaker was Dr. John Walsh of the Christian Storytelling Network (For those of you who know Dr. Jerry Shepherd from Taylor Seminary, if I closed my eyes while listening to Dr. Walsh I could have tricked myself into thinking it was Dr. Shepherd, their voices are so similar. Plus Dr. Walsh has a similar white santa claus beard). For two days I got to listen to someone speak in English on a very interesting topic – it was the best birthday present I could have imagined. He had an excellent translator too, and I think if I could spend more time listening to a speaker and a translator like that, my Spanish speaking skills would improve considerably.
Before people had their own copies of scripture in their homes, they learned what it meant to be a Jew or a Christian by hearing the stories of the Bible. Today we have lost that because we can just hand someone a Bible and tell them to go home and read it. According to Dr. Walsh, the Bible contains 525 stories, and 75% of the Bible is in story form. His solution for all that ails the church today is for people to “hide the word in their heart” by learning the stories and telling them. He told about a group of illiterate people who learned 150 Bible stories from some missionaries. Representatives from Southwestern, a big seminary in Texas, went to test them, and their findings were that these people who couldn’t even read had as much biblical knowledge as one of their seminary graduates. Thinking there must be some kind of mistake, they returned for a second round of testing. This time, they decided that their comprehension of the Bible was so complete, there was no reason not to award them seminary degrees. The only problem was, the people couldn’t read, so they had to put pictures on the certificates so the people would know which way to hang them on the wall!
Some people at the conference seemed nervous with Dr. Walsh’s idea of simply telling a story and not interpreting it or taking a lesson out of it. I agree with Walsh that the story doesn’t have a point, it is the point. He told me about a group of women in Iran that meets every morning at a missionary’s house to listen to a story. The missionary woman doesn’t read the Bible or give a lesson, she simply tells the story. Because there are no Bibles and no “teaching” it is perfectly legal. Then the women go home, and that night they tell the stories to their kids! Storytelling is also very effective in Buddhist communities where people would be shunned for going to a Bible study, but this way they are just going to hear stories.
However, they are not really “just” stories. Stories have power to influence our decisions and the things we value, our opinions and our lives. There are a few things I have taken out of this weekend: 1. I want to enjoy Bible stories again for being so strange and interesting and well-written, not always having to think “what is the application?” 2. I am considering a professional storyteller as a possible future career. 3. I want to always have a few stories in mind that I could share with people. I suppose I have lots of opportunities to write stories in my blog; I can’t wait to come home and tell them!