Shaped By The Story

One of the great challenges in youth ministry is in helping students to truly engage with Scripture, to immerse themselves in the Story of God and to work through how their own life story is connected to God’s Story. Michael Novelli proposes an ancient/innovative approach to guiding students through this process in

his new book, Shaped By The Story.

Novelli begins by explaining how he came to be familiar with this idea of storying.  It was fascinating to read about the effectiveness of storying in the development theology in pre-literate cultures and how that can translate into today’s post-literate culture.

The middle section of this book, the largest section of the book, Novelli explains the whys and the hows of effective storying in a youth ministry setting.  There are tons of practical tips to help a youth worker that has never done anything like this before and this section is full of references to the appendices, which make up about 1/3 of the book!

The appendices are really the handbook for storying.  There are set-ups, sample questions for all the different aspects of dialogging with a group about  a story,  sample narratives, and even a short history of storying.

The book also includes a DVD that would be a great help to any youth worker that would like to see this stuff in action and would like a tool to help in training other leaders.

Take the time to check this book out, it just might completely change the way that you look at helping your students to engage with the Bible.

You will also want to check out EchoTheStory.com – tons of help there along with sample narratives of a bunch of Bible stories.