Sunday Morning
Services
10:30 am
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| Biblical Storytelling – Rediscovering Oral Culture In the past several months, folks might have experienced the scripture told in a different way during Sunday worship: a method of biblical storytelling that Pat MacDonald, Paul Healy and myself learned from world renowned biblical storyteller Dennis Dewey. Dewey led a workshop in Tatamagouche last November which we all attended, and I think it’s safe to say that the three of us were transformed by the experience. The description of the workshop said “Before there was an ink-and-paper bible there were breath-and-sound stories. As we are beginning to discover that ‘biblical cultures’ experienced the scriptures not as writing but as performances and that our post-literate culture is secondarily oral, the ancient storytelling traditions of the early church and Israel provide ‘new’ models for preaching, teaching and spiritual nurture.” Dewey explained the difference between “memorizing” and “internalizing” a biblical story. The process of learning a story by heart, or internalizing a story, is a spiritual discipline, Dewey says, and takes about six weeks. The result is a dramatic difference in the way the story is received. The barriers of paper or book, lectern, and distance from the hearer are removed. Folks respond to the immediacy of the story, and are able to place themselves in the story as it is told. The art of storytelling is as old as human existence, and provokes the hearer to react out of their own context and experience. Hopes are high to form a storytelling troupe at St. John’s, a group of people who will use this method to tell the biblical passages on an ongoing basis. Reverend Lawrence DeWolfe, minister at St. David’s Presbyterian Church in Halifax, has also worked with Dewey, and there are a number of folks from that congregation who used the method to tell the Passion Story last year. |
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St. John's United Church 6225 Willow Street Halifax Nova Scotia Canada B3L 1P1
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