What is The Story?

In just a few weeks, the folks at Grace Lutheran Church will be embarking on a 9-month journey into studying God's Word, using The Story. But before we get into it, a little explanation may be needed on what it is.

At my internship site in the Kansas City area (though this was after my official internship at ended), we started The Story as an adult class at our West campus. This was a small group Bible study, really more intended as a second-option to the larger group study. Overall, those that came seemed to enjoy it, but one lady was worried about adding to or changing God's Word. And right now, I'm guessing a few of the readers here may have the same concern.

The answer simply is that this resource does not add or change anything from the NIV text of the Bible. What The Story does do is take out the chapter headings and numbers as well as the verse numbers. It puts the text into more of a prose format that we are used to reading in this day and age. It condenses the essentials into an easy-to-read package (genealogies, lists of numbers, etc). And finally, it adds easy-to-read transitions between the sections to make the narrative easier to follow.

What The Story also does is to take these words and arrange them chronologically. Our Bible (at least the Old Testament), in the view of this educator (me), is not arranged well. The OT is divided into: the books of Moses, the historical books, the wisdom literature, and the major and minor prophets. In other words, the Bible is separated by genre rather than narrative.

Have you ever tried to read a book with a bunch of chapters; but read it through in such a way that you read chapter 1, then chapter 13 and then back to chapter 5? If not, try it sometime and see how it goes comprehension-wise :) Let's take this for an example from the Bible. The return of the exiles is prophesied about in Jeremiah (Prophets), described in Ezra (Historical), and had a song written for the occasion with Psalm 126 (Wisdom). The way the Bible is arranged, it makes it quite hard to connect the dots between these words. Would it not make much more sense to put them all together?

So that's what The Story is. It's a chronological arranging of the NIV-text of the Bible into a historical narrative about what God is doing in the world. As for our goals in using The Story, that will be a future journal posting.

And before I sign off today, I would like to eagerly point out the fact that this idea isn't revolutionary either. Just this weekend, I found a children's Bible that was arranged in the same fashion as it contains

copious quotations orderly arranged from the more salient passages of the Bible, and by skillful and clear condensations of intervening portions of scripture... [In order that] in less than half the number of pages in an ordinary Bible, and in clear and comfortable type, there is given us a chronological, classified, and condensed arrangement of the whole Bible history, the substance of the whole Bible, with abundance of connecting and illustrative materials"

The year...

1901.