FAQs

Aren’t stories just for children?

Jesus taught in stories to people of all ages mixed together. Children flocked to Him. On this site you will see testimonies of children AND academics all being deeply spoken to by the Spirit of God while they investigate stories of the Bible.
Wouldn’t it be safe to say that teaching Bible stories is more appropriate for uneducated or illiterate people than it is for educated people?

Literate and non-literate followed Jesus. While many of the highly educated and religiously educated people rejected Jesus, those listeners did get a message from the stories. And, thankfully some of those highly educated listeners did believe and follow Jesus.

The testimonies located in many places on this site show that more than just the uneducated gain greatly from STS Bible stories. It is very common for us to hear from educated, even theologically educated people, statements such as, “Exploring these Bible stories using STS methods helped me discover more than I have ever before found in these stories.”
Do you have storytellers who can come speak at events, retreats and conferences?

Yes. We have skilled storytellers across the US who would be happy to speak at your event. Please use the Contact Us tab for more information.
What ages can learn STS stories and use questions to teach?

We continue to see children ages 5-10 and up repeating 10-verse stories accurately after hearing them told with expression and actions.

Young children can learn to ask a few questions and talk about the stories they tell. Most of the younger ones need to have first discovered some spiritual treasures in them through another storyteller’s gentle questions. If children have had a good experience of discovering in a story during a time of STS ministry, they often will tell the story to others and talk about it with them.
Why does it take 5 days of training just to learn a story?

You’re right to notice that! It doesn’t take five days to learn a story. It is accurate that we offer five-day trainings. But only a small part of that time is spent in training people to learn a story. After learning a story, attendees learn how to dig deeply into the story, and how to teach others using discussion. In the five days we also provide the forum and assistance to train others.

We also offer a two and a half day training to help people to become good storyteller-teachers. Oh, and by the way, attendees who select the two and a half day training we offer learn fifteen stories, and those who come for the five day option learn twenty stories. (By learn, we refer to stories they can repeat and talk about.) With review after the workshop, attendees can “own” those twenty stories.
Why do you set up 5-day long workshops? That is a hardship to have to leave my work and family that long.

If no one in a particular area is a certified STS instructor, we need to bring a team to that area to first plant STS. Often people fly in from other countries just to staff the workshop. We lead 35-hour trainings of any five-days of the week in a row. We also offer a schedule that is several very-long days and then the rest of the 35 hours is completed in evenings. See Hosting and Workshop Description for more details.

A percentage of the attendees who are most interested in becoming a storyteller-practitioner come for only half of the 35 hours. Our goal is to train deeply, and then to teach people to train others. So those who register for the full 35 hours not only become practitioners, they start in the role of an assistant instructor during the 35 hours.

Then, after some practice and maybe one more local workshop, some attendees are selected to become instructors.

Those selected usually travel to another workshop or two in order to solidify their training and leadership skills.

Those certified are able then to lead local workshops of a few hours a week over a six week period. These are much easier on people’s time and finances!

We offer as a gift on our site our Simply The Story Handbook. It is downloadable. The last chapter in that handbook gives more details on all of those workshop options. One other way to learn some of the vital STS skills is through Practitioner Audio Training.
What is the difference between STS and other ministries that use story?

The foundation of all the story groups is much the same, learning and telling Bible stories. Probably the biggest difference between STS and other story ministries is the way STS gives the skill of inductive Bible study, oral style.

We also teach how to lead and train others. Much that describes us is in Design of STS. Also Story Organizations and the matrix linked from that page show some details about a few excellent story training organizations. To hear interviews with people who lead various story ministries or those who use a different method of story in ministry, check the podcast story4all.
I use story. But my preference is to not impose my ideas on others, so I don’t manage discussion of the story. Isn’t it better just to let the Holy Spirit teach through the story?

This is a good goal, to not impose your ideas on others. We would agree with that. But we do encourage the storytellers we train to consider themselves teachers.

In STS training, we promote the use of story to reach oral learners. But as passages such as Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12, 1 Timothy and Ephesians 4 show us, the Body of Christ has many offices, one of which is teaching. We see oral communicators carrying out that role when they tell Bible stories STS style.
Let me give you an example of what that means:

After an STS workshop in Africa, one attendee told his story to our leader there and me.

By Foot, By Camel, By Airbus

I used to be a businessman in Nairobi. God called me to go to the mission field, but I kept making excuses.

Then one day I got a phone call that my shop had burned down. You know—I didn’t even go look at it. I just left and went to the place God had called me.

The Lord had led me to go to that far place from Nairobi to try to reach a mus.lim people-group who has never heard the Gospel. I’ve been there two years and nothing has happened.

I’ve made friends, but that’s it! They do not want to hear what I have to say.

To get here for this workshop, I walked a day, rode a camel for a day and then rode one more day by airbus. [This is riding on top of a bus!]

We find this African evangelist’s observation to perfectly describe what we see as central to the effectiveness of STS. In STS, the storytellers do teach. But as they prepare to teach, they listen well to the story and it first impacts their lives. Storytellers are then able to tell the story and teach it to others using questions that help people discover for themselves the truths the storytellers had found.

Wonderfully, most of the time, listeners discover even more truths, truths new to the storyteller. That is when we know that the Holy Spirit is present, and He is teaching through the teachers and to everyone.

By the way, our East Africa leader told us that after the workshop the messages began coming back from this young evangelist who reported, “The training made a major difference in my life and ministry. The people in the village are coming to Jesus.”

As well, this evangelist now serves as one of the STS team instructors. He travels that hard way to come serve in workshops once every three months. That’s how much he believes in STS.

STS is listening and responding.

Storytellers are teaching what they have learned. But the storytellers also listen to what the people themselves say and ask. Storytellers develop the skill of responding to the people, all the while listening and responding to the leading of the Holy Spirit. Bottom line, STS storytellers are prepared spiritually with personal understanding of the story to help lead a productive inquiry into the story
If Simply The Story is so simple, why does it take multiple workshops to be certified to teach this to others?

“Simply” The Story means that “only” the Bible story is used. It does not mean that this new skill is simple to learn.

Attendees who have grown up among oral communicators find it easier to absorb the concepts of STS than attendees whose growing-up experience has been mostly among literacy-based learners. However, those with largely oral backgrounds have their unique areas in which we are able hand off skills which they have never before have had an opportunity to acquire.

In STS, all attendees gain the ability to study and discuss, yet while doing these things, they discover deep spiritual truths and make applications. As well, STS training includes handing off the skills of training others. That training of trainers is a giant step in itself.

To gain all of the skills of STS for oneself and to learn how to train others in these multiple skills requires time and practice. Those learning STS will need to acquire new information and skills that enable them to teach a wide variety of learners.

An instructor needs to have answers to the questions that arise on issues of oral learners and the apologetics for STS.

Multiple skills are used in STS. People must first learn how to carefully listen or read Scripture and to recognize their natural abilities to remember content. They learn how to understand a passage in context and to discover what those in the passage experienced and learned (or did not learn) and what is seen of God in the story.

Lastly, people need to learn how to take those various observations from within the story and make personal applications to their lives today. After those skills are developed, the storytellers learn how to formulate questions that will help lead others to discover the treasure they have just found.

Even the skill of how to lead a wide variety of people in discussion involves both new information and practice with someone helping in the process in a personalized way. After all this is learned, the multiple, added skills needed to impart STS to others need to be learned.

See what is involved in certification and a testimony of one person’s Journal to Discovering Story.
If I can’t go to a workshop, how can I learn how to tell stories the STS way?

A sample of the Practitioner Audio Training (PAT) is available on our site. More stories of PAT can be purchased. This audio how-to of STS, some stories and sample interactive studies of the stories are excellent tools for learning STS. The written Simply The Story Handbook is available free as a download on this site. Combined, these two resources can help you to learn STS.
I am not able to memorize, so wouldn’t telling stories by memory be too hard for me?

The wonderful part of STS is that the learning of stories becomes easy. We actually show people how to learn a 10-verse story in 10 minutes. Again and again, people who attend a workshop tell us, “I have never been able to memorize, but I can remember the story this way!” Bible Translator Discovers “Remembering.”
I am a shut-in. How can I use STS beyond personal devotions?

When you have been touched in your devotions by something special in a story, you can ask the Lord to show you how to share it with someone or with many! Why not ask for many? In letters you write or in greeting cards perhaps, you could write a short piece of a story, and then conversationally ask a few questions. Or maybe while on a phone call you could share short a piece of a story and then ask a few questions?

This is a way you can minister from where you are planted. Use a short piece of a story, ask a lot of questions to promote thinking on each successive part of that story. Then ask a series of gentle questions that help people apply those discoveries in their lives.

We teach this way of asking questions in workshops. Can experience some of these types of questions on the Practitioner Audio Training.
How can I use STS to teach the 6 days of Creation in a half hour (first) day of a Bible club.

One way to cover a long passage using STS is to tell the first part of the story in a short introduction. Then select a short section, no more than eight verses long, that you will tell exactly as it is in the Bible. The hunting for treasures you do afterwards would be done only in the short section you told.

Perhaps for the Creation story you could tell just Genesis 1:24-28 passage? Using the STS presentation, as suggested above, on a long passage such as Genesis chapter one, gives a context, a foundation to the story. Yet the actual part of the story you spend most of the time developing will be understood, remembered and easy for even children to pass on to others.
I like STS, but my pastor says it is not for him because he is commanded to preach the Word not to lead people in “interactive discussion” of the Word. What can I say to him?

It is always good to hear of pastors who are committed to the Word of God. Surely, we wouldn’t want to have anyone use STS that didn’t feel called to fold into their ways of delivering the Word. Some pastors have recognized that not all of their congregation reads well, or can read at all, so they have welcomed the new style of STS. Some deliver occasional sermons from the pulpit using STS, while others have encouraged their church staff to use it for youth or in Sunday School.

Other pastors have arranged for some of their people to learn STS for short term mission’s trips. We do feel comfortable classifying STS as a way to preach the Word. Sometimes Jesus lectured and sometimes He told a short story and then asked a question, inviting interchange. We see this style of communicating, after which we patterned STS, to be just one of the many ways God demonstrated how to deliver His Word.
Without the written Word, how can the integrity of the Scripture be maintained?

We, too, are very concerned about keeping true to the Word. As quickly as possible we are recording Bible stories in sets of up to 70 stories, with introductions, in order to give an anchor to the Bible stories that are being learned.

As much as we are able, we format recorded stories, God’s Story and New Testament, if available, onto solar-powered audio-players and gift them to those who cannot read. As God supplies, we focus on giving those players to people active in ministry who attend STS workshops and to all who graduate from STS Oral Bible Schools.
What about the Epistles?

We encourage the use of STS for investigating all passages of Scripture, including the Epistles, Poetry and Prophecy. Notably stories and passages with visual images are easier to remember than are the lecture and non-picture passages.

The center of STS is to stay in one passage at time, to cover just as much information as can be remembered by you as the presenter and by the people you teach.

Then questions are asked that take a learner though the passage chronologically which helps them discover spiritual information. Afterwards, a series of small questions built on what was seen in the story are asked that help people apply to themselves various parts of what they saw in the story.

If a passage is very hard to remember, sometimes a teacher will read it all the way through out loud with expression. Then the teacher goes back to the beginning of the passage and reads just a small part of the story out loud again. Then questions are asked about that part of the story s previously explained.

For more on use of Epistles in STS see the downloadable gift STS Handbook.

Whether the Scripture being taught is story, poetry or a teaching passage and it is told or read by interacting and allowing learners to discover, the will stay connect during the teaching, understand well and be to share what they learned with others.
How specific would this training be to my country which is semi-literate?

STS training will fits the needs of every country. We have found that the STS style of learning and teaching resonates with all people in general. No matter how literate someone may be, nearly all people are relational and oral at heart. We see people in all major religious blocks and those at every level of literacy and theological training able to use STS with great success. STS has truly been taught and used worldwide.

Testimonies of those trained in STS describe everything from transformation of their personal Bible study to explosions in ministry effectiveness.

STS has been tested and adapted to become an excellent tool that truly crosses cultural boundaries. We teach orally, we do not emphasize Western culture. The director of Simply The Story, Dorothy Miller, was in daily communication with our indigenous, national, directors world-wide. The development and ongoing shape of STS was heavily influenced by these multi-cultural liaisons.

The universality of STS is mostly due to its adherence to the communication style of the culture of the Bible. An East African Bishop who fully embraced STS in a workshop assessed the training by saying, “This is African. An African wrote these illustrations.” In India attendees said, “This is Indian.” In Egypt, yes, attendees commented, “This is Egyptian.”

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Faq

Aren’t stories just for children?

Wouldn’t it be safe to say that teaching Bible stories is more appropriate for uneducated or illiterate people than it is for educated people?

Do you have storytellers who can come speak at events, retreats and conferences?

What ages can learn STS stories and use questions to teach?

Why does it take 5 days of training just to learn a story?

Why do you set up 5-day long workshops? That is a hardship to have to leave my work and family that long.

What is the difference between STS and other ministries that use story?

I use story. But my preference is to not impose my ideas on others, so I don’t manage discussion of the story. Isn’t it better just to let the Holy Spirit teach through the story?

If Simply The Story is so simple, why does it take multiple workshops to be certified to teach this to others?

If I can’t go to a workshop, how can I learn how to tell stories the STS way?

I am not able to memorize, so wouldn’t telling stories by memory be too hard for me?

I am a shut-in. How can I use STS beyond personal devotions?

How can I use STS to teach the 6 days of Creation in a half hour (first) day of a Bible club.

I like STS, but my pastor says it is not for him because he is commanded to preach the Word not to lead people in “interactive discussion” of the Word. What can I say to him?

Without the written Word, how can the integrity of the Scripture be maintained?

What about the Epistles?

How specific would this training be to my country which is semi-literate?

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