Simply The Story Radio

A Phenomena In The Philippines

EB attended a 5-day Simply The Story workshop in October of 2008.  Before STS exposure, he taught four years in a Bible school in the Philippines in his mother tongue Cebuano.

Since the first workshop, EB has attended two additional workshops to fine tune his skills. His focus and desire, and the additional training, propelled him into becoming a STS lead instructor.

In the Spring of 2010, EB began doing weekly radio programs in Cebuano in the Philippines. For the program he tells a Bible story STS style and three believers join with him. Together they discuss the story STS style. After six weeks the phone calls and text messages from interested listeners topped 1,100!  

Due to the ongoing response, a local church decided to sponsor EB for an added hour making the weekly program two hours long.

STS radio programs like this done in Africa, India and Nepal, have seen similar results.

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Uganda, Radio Plan of Action

Samaritan's Purse had been investigating effective oral strategies to engage in Uganda. When Susan Davis (their Ministry Program Manager) came to the MANI orality conference in June 2008, she got her first taste of Simply The Story.

This prompted her to pursue STS training for her ministry staff in Lira (Northern Uganda). An STS team was mobilised from Kenya, Uganda and Zambia.  This our first Africa workshop for 2009 was held in January in Lira sponsored by Samaritan's Purse.

At the end of the workshop, many of the participants went home to use their new skills in diverse ways and the testimonies have been touching. In fact, this led to a second Samaritan's Purse sponsored workshop in Moroto (amongst the hostile Karamoja tribe).

But the most exciting use of STS was a strategy Samaritan's Purse developed. After discussions with us on how STS could be used on radio, they went on to secure 40 episodes of airtime on a local radio station. In partnership with our TGSP team, stories were selected to go through the Bible in 40 weeks. We're almost at the end of this exercise.  Already, the impact of this radio program done in the local Luo (Ugandan) dialect has been amazing.

Two presenters are in the studio. One of them tells the story and together they begin leading the people through what we call "digging for treasures" from the story using questions. The whole STS process is engaged.

In the week that follows after the show, STS trained evangelists are dispersed to the community where people meet in selected locations and revisit the story. It’s an exciting moment as those who followed the story on radio retell the story while others listen in.

Then again, people go through the story digging out spiritual observations and then applications. This time around, the process is more personalised and individuals take action on issues arising from the story. Of course, through this process, others are encouraged to listen to the following week's story on radio.

We continue to thank God for these key partnerships and are greatly blessed to see other ministries step to the plate and run with STS.

TGSP Africa.

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