Ministry leaders from came from India and Bangladesh to learn how to write and tell better stories.
Last May, a dream came true for me. The dream had been five years in the making. In partnership with some of my friends I had worked with in the Philippines, I developed training to help teach our national staff members how to tell better stories. That morphed into a five-step writing process, 50 pages of notes and two days worth of seminars.
We started and ended each of our days with prayer and praise. We experienced the presence of God in our midst, and wonderful things happened.
The writers in the group felt empowered to write better stories because they better understood each of the elements that makes up a story. They learned a process to work when they write. They took away some very practical tools they could begin using right away.
The leaders who use the stories to cast vision and raise money among the business community in India thanked us for giving them a practical way to evaluate the stories they receive from staff members doing the work of the ministry. Instead of saying, “I like it,” or, “I don’t like it,” they now look at a checklist of five elements every story contains. Based on that checklist they can make specific comments about each story.
Our national staff members now own the writing process. Wrap your mind around this: They are now writing stories in their second and third languages. Stunning.
But how do you measure the success of an event like this? Any of us can attend a conference and take good notes, but then what? Do we close the notebook, take it home with us, set it on a shelf and never look at it again? If so, then so what? The real proof is what happens six months later.
Since the conference, Siman, one of the students from Bangladesh, trained all of the Campus Crusade staff members in his city in the Writing for Life method of story writing. Last week, two of our leaders from the United States forwarded to me a multi-page report, complete with stories and pictures, that was ready to be sent on to donors who had helped fund an evangelism project in India. A year ago, this would have been unheard of.
There is much more progress to be made, but our India staff members are now feeling empowered to write better stories. It’s just a hunch, but I think experience bears me out, anyone who can write a better story can also begin living a better story.
Mark and I have a part in this story. As we teach the things we have learned about using media to write and tell stories, we’re finding th