Creative ways to tell a Bible story by Martyn Payne 

A confident call to have confidence in the story - Martyn inspires us to recover our birthright of joyous, effective, living by reclaiming our ability to tell and listen in better ways

Creative ways to tell a Bible story 
By Martyn Payne
BRF
ISBN: 978-1800390928
Reviewed by Terry Young

 

My wife likes Delia Smith’s cookbooks because the recipes have all been tested: they will work for you because Delia made sure they worked for her. Martyn’s approach to telling Bible stories also has hints of a good cookbook with recipes that work with children (and his thinking applies to any audience).

Martyn’s material – and there is lots of it – is all stuff he has tried himself.  There are lists of ingredients – what you need to bring along – and Bible passages that make for good stories.  The appendices at the back have even more reference material, including a proposal for telling a story a week that will take your charges through the Bible in a year. Whether all this works for you as well as it works for Martyn is your challenge, but that’s not the best thing about this book.

More importantly, Martyn aims to help you think like a Bible storyteller. He has structured his guidance under three themes – the way into a story, the way through a story and the way out – to help you with setting the context, letting it flow and getting the message. Each section is packed with illustrations and suggested passages, with scripts and poems (some from other people) to make the point. I found some of these a little distracting as I wondered whether the storyteller had shortened the story too far or why the poet couldn’t make the scansion tighter. However, as I say, that’s not really the point.

A key feature of Martyn’s approach is that good storytelling needs good preparation. On p14, he notes in passing, ‘The main preparation for this approach lies, rather, in getting to know the Bible story well.’ It’s a theme he returns to repeatedly: remember, a good meal usually requires longer to prepare than to eat. Even deeper preparation is suggested by the first appendix where he describes a set of big ideas from the Bible from sacrifice to sand (not in alphabetical order, or it would be a short list) that you can familiarise yourself with and that may act as guiding stars in your performances.

To work really well, some of the more creative ideas – use of art, music, thespian talent – probably require people who specialise in this sort of ministry and I would like to have read Martyn on how churches can better develop an effective ministry of Bible storytelling. Maybe he has done this elsewhere, since this book clearly targets individuals.

I once worked with a colleague whose reports contained pages of standard bookwork and theory but who would gloss over his own insights in perhaps half a sentence. If I had any disappointment with this book, it’s because I caught a whiff of that here. I soon tired of variants on the circle game, but I really wanted to know more about what was going on in Martyn’s head, the week and then the hour before he told a story.  I suspected that he might be more revealing in person than on the page – and he is! Watch Telling the Story and see how his pauses and lugubrious, thoughtfully searching eyes draw you into his recollections and encourage you to follow his advice.

For me – and I’m probably not central to his target audience – the most important contribution Martyn makes through this book is to assert the supremacy of storytelling in sharing the gospel – or indeed any teachings of Scripture. There is a wave of interest just now in narrative methods. Stories are not just for kids: they are the way we remember things; the way we reason; and the way we make sense of the world around us. Our lamentable failure to use the Sword of the Spirit to greater effect in our generation is often because we can’t remember what it says, and a great deal of what it says comes down to us as stories. Martyn inspires us to recover our birthright of joyous, effective, living by reclaiming our ability to tell and listen in better ways.

By promoting the storyteller as a key messenger in our teaching and outreach, he offers much needed encouragement to those with the time and the talent to respond.

In a world filling up with preachers unable to tell a story to save their lives, intent on getting as quickly as possible to the most obscure exegesis and determined to ram it home with three alliterative headings, here is a confident call to have confidence in the story. For us, the kids’ section of the morning service is often a poorly prepared piece by someone with better things to do. Indeed, public Bible reading suffers similarly on many Sundays. Here is a reminder to nurture storytelling specialists and dramatic readers and to let them exercise their gift, or if you have them, to use them more and in better ways.

As I finished this book, I remembered a story of the preacher who began his sermon by apologising for the plaster on his face. He explained that while shaving he had been so focused on his sermon that he had cut himself.  On the way out, someone asked him why he hadn’t focused on his face and cut the sermon. When it comes to the kids’ story maybe we, too, need to revisit our priorities.
 

Terry Young is a missionary kid who read science and engineering. After a PhD in lasers, he worked in R&D before becoming a professor, when he taught project management, information systems and e-business, while leading research in healthcare. He set up Datchet Consulting to have fun with both faith and work and worshipped at Baptist churches in Slough for 19 years before moving to the New Forest.