credit: StoryRunners.org
How do you best share the gospel with individuals who cannot read? In 2019, Global Church Movements (GCM) performed an internal assessment to examine areas where they could grow for effective ministry. Out of that assessment came a desire to explore the area of orality. Orality refers to an individual’s reliance upon spoken, rather than written, forms of language for communication. The need was twofold: evangelistic resources and church-planting materials that could be orally adapted and shared across languages and cultures. In order to reach GCM's needs for an oral-based strategy, they began partnering with StoryRunners. StoryRunners's experience with adapting gospel materials into easily repeatable and transferable stories was what GCM needed. By combining their efforts in this new approach, they have seen multiple generations of churches grow across Africa and South Asia.
"We appreciate their [StoryRunners] learning posture: they take recommendations seriously and take quick action to work together and make adjustments based on needed changes."- Wade GCM
GCM and StoryRunners continue to partner together and evolve their approaches to seeing sustainable churches planted and equipped to multiply with the Gospel in their local languages.
"Storytelling isn't just about being heard. The audience has to understand what is being shared." - Todd StoryRunners
Together, GCM and StoryRunners have been able to create new, contextualized Bible stories alongside developing training materials for pastors and church planters. All of this work is done hand-in-hand with local believers who then train others to share these messages from God's Word orally. Believers who previously thought they could not do ministry because they cannot read are now empowered to share the Gospel!
Both ministries are excited by the global impact of seeing Christians enabled to do evangelism, discipleship, and church planting via oral storytelling. Local believers will be able to share Christ and start churches in previously unreached communities in some of the least-reached places on earth. Please join us in praising God in seeing believers equipped and mobilized through this collaborative effort.
If you would like to partner with Global Church Movements or StoryRunners you can email (contact@gacx.io).