www.storyingthescriptures.com started as an English website designed to accompany the book “Telling the Gospel Through Story*.” The nature of Bible storytelling meant that some way to HEAR Bible stories was needed. It is not at all the same thing to write down the stories in black and white.

A website also allowed us to keep adding new things and sharing new resources in a way that a static book never can.

I was soon dreaming of having the website function in multiple languages. My first priority was Chinese since I work and tell stories in Taiwan. The catalyst for this happening was that the storytelling book was to be published in February 2015. I prayed hard for some translators and God provided a couple who could read and write both written forms of Chinese AND had computer skills. The Chinese section of the website was ‘live’ in time for the books publication.

Shortly afterwards we added Italian. That came about because a friend happened to be in Italy for two years. She caught the vision and worked towards getting that started. It has since stalled so if you speak Italian we’d love your help. ‘Help’ can be as simple as translating a post or two (written) or learning and recording a story.

In 2014, after 10 years of experimenting I found a style of storytelling that I plan to stick with. That means I’d now like to see all the stories (in any language) to the standard format. Along the way that meant re-filming all our English and Chinese stories.

The vision became sharper. Now we want to have multiple sub-domains in other languages.

Each language to have a:

• A ‘welcome page.’
• Video stories (or audio if there are security issues). We’re aiming for a standard set of 9 ‘Bible overview stories’ – any others will be a bonus
• World Stories – stories of people using storytelling around the world. Across all the languages the attached photo will be the same so that people who don’t speak the language can identify a post by its photo and still be able to send it to a contact
• Resources – anything relating to storytelling but definitely including direct links to the Jesus film and others like the Magdelena film

In 2016, the Indonesian website has gone ‘live.’

We have hopes for French, Spanish, Japanese, Thai and Farsi. Could you help us with other languages. For each of the languages we need a native (or very fluent) speaker to act as a catalyst and keep things moving. This post tells you what is needed to be a catalyst.

Imagine:

• A place where people can hear the full gospel message and come to know Jesus
• A place where people can find out how to tell stories and be able to use it in their own networks
• A place where they can be inspired and equipped to keep persevering.

If you want to be part of our growing and learning community ask permission to join us on Facebook “Storying the Scriptures.”

• You might wonder why the name of the website and book were different. Unusually the publisher changed the title of the book shortly before publication believing that the word ‘storying’ would be misunderstood by readers. I’d already bought the website name and didn’t want to waste my money. I also thought it was a much better name for a website