EMQ » October–December 2021 » Volume 57 Issue 4
[memberonly folder=”Members, EMQ2YearFolder, EMQ1YearFolder, EMQLibraryInstitution”]By Jim Roché
Wipf & Stock, 2020
138 pages
US$21.00
Reviewed by Lynn Thigpen, who has served for twenty-five years in Southeast Asia and is an adjunct professor at Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia.
As a professor teaching biblical storying and orality, I continually witness graduate students who come to marvel at the power of stories. Assigned to create culture-specific Grand Narratives, stories, and story sets, these novices blossom as they learn the kinds of principles presented in Biblical Storytelling Design: Understanding Why Oral Stories Work by Jim Roché.
Roché wrote this resource “to encourage spiritual generations to multiply by enabling each generation to teach others through storytelling” (77). An easy and quick read, the book combines the wisdom of J.O. Terry and Tom Steffen in the realm of biblical storying with writings about church planting movements and multiplication by Steve Addison, Steve Smith, and Ying Kai. In fact, Roché paints storying as practice contributing to successful movements. Missionary church planters excited about both multiplication and storying will welcome this resource.
The book consists of three major parts: Crafting Biblical Storytelling, Countering Seven Negative Influences Affecting Storying, and Implementing Curriculum Design Remedies. The seven chapters in Part 2 lay an important general educational foundation for the work as a whole and would have been well-placed at the beginning, followed by the more specific story crafting content in Part 1. The final two chapters (10 and 11) in Part 3 provide much-needed advice for designing or crafting biblical stories for various audiences. Elaborating on the thirty-three “educational activities that counteract the seven potentially negative influences” (119) will be a welcome teaching aid for those with much more field experience.
Having done “doctoral research on educational strategies to challenge worldview” (xiii), Roché, the writer-administrator-missionary-trainer, penned Biblical Storytelling Design in part to implement the strategy of a particular mission agency. Sharing that information with a larger readership, he presents important points in the form of educational remedies, a welcome strategy in itself. However, Roché, called to challenge worldviews, repeats several times that renovating another’s worldview is not possible, that instead hearers must be led to “question existing beliefs” (123). Importantly, he calls for storytelling to be implemented as that remedy to address misconceptions, delineating the ministry of storyteller as one involving being true to the text but also creating disequilibration, thereby compelling hearers to begin to recognize the inconsistencies in their worldviews (73).
Roché urges the development of “community culture through community habits” (102). True to his ideal of creating movements that multiply, he emphasizes relational processes that happen to include storying. Church planters new to biblical storying and those working to develop curriculum for specific worldviews might not find all the initial helps they need for crafting stories and story sets, but they will find many educational gems to assist. Experienced field workers concentrating on orality can certainly glean much from the final chapters.
For Further Reading
Steffen, Tom, and William Bjoraker. The Return of Oral Hermeneutics: As Good Today as It Was for the Hebrew Bible and First-Century Christianity. Wipf & Stock, 2020.
Thigpen, L. Lynn. Connected Learning: How Adults with Limited Formal Education Learn. Wipf & Stock, 2020.
