STORY=POWER 6b - Speaking to Children, embedding the Bible in their hearts and minds

You can enhance the effectiveness of your ministry to children through the power of story. We've been looking for the last 5 episodes at the Story Seat, and in our conclusion, what I'd like to do is take you through the DS, the details of the story. The reason why I haven't reviewed the entire thing is because the DS literally is a review. The details of the story By the time you've built the whole story, the character, the goals, the conflict, the values, and you've discovered your style of telling, and you've decided on the audience's needs and what you're going to present because of who you're presenting to, then you look back at your story and you say, "Okay, what are the important details that I need to include? And what are the details that for this audience I'm not going to include?" Sometimes there's aspects of a story that are very important aspects of a story, but when you say, "Well, I'm talking to 5-year-olds, so I'm not going to include that," or, "I'm talking to high school students, so I'm not going to tell that story in the way that I normally do, where I jump around a bit too much for a high school student audience, so I will just tell it in a more relaxed way, abbreviate it, and move on into some other points." So, once you've gone through the character, the goals, the conflict, the values, and you've built your story, And then you've decided on your style of telling by looking at yourself and seeing the way you tell stories, and you've become a natural storyteller because you already are, and you know your style. You go out there, stand on the stage to tell it the way you tell stories. And then you know your audience and their needs. Then you pick those special details and you say, "Okay, I know the story I'm gonna tell and how I'm going to tell it to this audience this day." Remember that every time you tell a story, it's now and new. It's a story for today. It may be a story you've told many, many times, but you're going to tell it— you're a new person because you're not the same as you were yesterday. You've had new experiences. You're— it's a new day today for you. It's also a new audience, even if it's the same school or the same classroom you talked to last time. They're different kids. Those kids, if they're the same exact kids, they're even different than they were because they've grown, they've changed, they've had other life experiences. Experiences, and that story is going to mean different things to them. So every time you tell a story, it's now and new. I hope that the story seat has helped you. It helps me as a memory device, and I hope it helps you remember how to build a story and how to put legs on your story, how to have the legs a storyteller stands on so your stories can come to life when you stand up in front of an audience to tell them. When we're ministering to children, There's a number of different environments where we can do that, and I have found in my journeys and in my storytelling time that there's a hierarchy that I've seen of where stories are most effective. Now, I don't mean the story at the moment when you tell it. A well-told story in any setting is going to be effective, but the long-term effect of a story I find is the most effective— the fourth most effective place for stories is at camp meeting for children because they have that repetitive hearing a story by the same storyteller each night, and usually there's a theme that they have in the juniors or in the teens or the primary that leads them somewhere, and they're getting that storyline over and over and they're building on it. And when they get to the end of the week, the decisions can be quite exciting. And just recently I was the junior speaker at Queensland, South Queensland camp, There was about 210 kids there every day, and there was 10 meetings. And when we got to the end of the 10 meetings, 70 of the children decided they'd like to be baptized. Now, the reason why I say that it's the 4th most effective is because those 70 children now— we didn't just baptize them there in the junior tent, we sent their names back to their local church. And there's that big gap between us having done the work with them at camp and now them having to be integrated into the life of a church somewhere and the life of, of faith. In another setting, and there, that can be a real hiccup for some kids. And sometimes it takes 2 or 3 times before it actually effectively, it works. So that's why for me, number 3 is the school, or in a week of prayer, a school classroom where a teacher is telling kids every day stories from the Bible is a very effective place. But a week of prayer, I find, is more effective than a camp meeting for, for solidifying those decisions and making action on them, because the chaplain can then begin working with them immediately afterwards, or the local church pastor, and the kids are there every week. They come back the next week. They don't leave camp meeting and spread everywhere. They're at school, and they come back to school after the week of prayer, and they continue developing in their faith because of the teachers and the chaplain and the pastors investing in them. The second most effective place for stories and for, um, faith development in children is in the church and in Sabbath school, because that's where their church family is, and that's where they're able to hear the stories from the people they trust repeatedly, and their extended family, so to speak, becomes their faith-telling environment. But by far the most effective place for children to hear stories and then embody those stories and take them on board and say, "I want to have that story be my life story," is at home. And it's a challenge for parents because we're busy and we've got stress coming from every different angle. But I've got 3 kids. I've got a 13-year-old, an 11-year-old, and a 10-year-old. And each one of them needs to hear the story over and over, each different story, but particularly my story and my wife's story. They need to hear what our faith means to us so that they will value it as well. And it's a challenge to you as parents or as ministers who are reaching out to parents or school teachers that are reaching out to parents to encourage those parents that your home is by far the most important, most effective place at strategically guiding the faith of your children. 3 key aspects of story that I'd like to leave you with at the end of this series. First of all, anytime that you can put stories in series for children, so that's at camp meetings, at Week of Prayers, in a school classroom where a teacher can repeatedly say, "Today we're gonna study Daniel, the next story in Daniel's life, and then the next story in Daniel's life." Anywhere where we can continue on a theme or in a Sabbath school classroom where we can build on a theme, or particularly at home where you can go through in family worship every day and build on a theme, the strength of the repetition of that theme and of having key phrases and having prayer together and having a ritual in the family home where the children say, "This is important." And the kids will remind you if you start doing it. They'll fall in love with having family worship together. In telling stories in a public way, role play is my favorite way to do it. I used to dress up often in costume and pretend I was a Bible character. And what I found is that locks you into being that character. Where if you role play, if you take on the role of the narrator, and then you go in and out of, like what you saw me do in this series, where I went in and out of the story of Nehemiah, and at one point I was Nehemiah, then another point I was Ezra, and another point I was the king, and the rest of the time I was the narrator. It allows you a lot of freedom to come in and out of the story and to personify different characters and give them life and then leave them and tell another part of the story. So role playing is a highly effective way. It can be a lot of mental gymnastics to get used to because you have to think, which character am I now and how am I going to say it? A lot of planning beforehand to get ready for it. But once you start role playing and start telling stories as the narrator and jumping in and out of character, you'll fall in love with it because you can do so much. With it. And then, by far the most effective tool, and you've probably heard it said many times, the most effective teacher— repetition is the most effective teacher. If we can repeat things like catchphrases, like "I want to see Jesus," which we just talked about, having that phrase every day, or that poem that I said every day at the beginning of the week of prayer, or recently when I was at the Queensland camp meeting, I would come up on the stage and I would yell, "Repeat after me!" And they would yell back, "Repeat after me!" The first time I did it, they didn't repeat me. I said, "Repeat after me!" And then they yell, "Repeat after me!" "I want to be!" They yell, "I want to be like Jesus!" Like Jesus. And the whole key of the life of a disciple isn't to do it alone, but to say to the next person, "Repeat after me! I want to be like Jesus!" And so as we model through these catchphrases, they get locked in our head. And I can remember when I was in grade— I think I was 7— this guy, and I can't remember who he was, but he came to my school to Paradise Adventist Academy in California. And his phrase was, "Study, study, study," and we would yell it back, "Study, study, study," and he would say, "God's word daily. God's word daily." And that's been locked in my mind for the 20 years since that— or 25 years since that happened. There's also chants that you can create, like what I just illustrated of "study, study, study," and songs that you can sing together, like Micah 6:8, or any Bible story, Bible song, and scripture Bible scripture in song that locks scripture into the heart and the mind of kids. When I took a youth group in Tasmania to see The Passion of the Christ movie, and afterwards something amazing happened. The movie— the lady who owned the theater said in all 20 years that she'd owned it, she'd never seen it happen. Everyone just sat there and watched the credits. Nobody got up and left. Nobody left their seats. Except for one girl who stumbled down to the front weeping, and another girl went down and embraced her, and they sat there crying until the credits finished. And everyone didn't want the movie to end. Nobody wanted to suspend the disbelief and say, "It's just a story." And this is the power we have with having a true story to tell, the gospel story, that we can tell people, "You don't have to suspend your disbelief. You can say, 'This is my new story, and I am going to live an effective life through the power of this story.