Shout At Us!

Praise & Prayer Report #1, November-December of 2012 & January of 2013

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Dear Friend of God’s Story,

We saw 2012 as the most fruitful and productive year yet, and now January 2013 looks even more fulfilling. In November and December, God’s Story for India was completed in Urau-kru, Liangmai Naga-njn & Rogmei Naga-nbu, and Maninka-emk for Guinea.

Shout At Us! “Prayerfully reading God’s Word is by nature inspiring and speaks to us, while in STS the Bible stories are like turning up the volume 100 times and the stories shout at us!” USA Senior Pastor, President of Global Fellowship Network

“Great Training. Well done. I've been to hundreds of conferences.  Never have I been to one that I can attend for 2 full days and never have to look at my watch waiting for sessions to end."Mission leader over 200 plus churches

Talk About Miracles!  An STS instructor in the USA was invited by leaders in India to tell STS stories to 15,000 at once! AND, they paid his airfare to come! After the trip I asked him,

“Could you sense with that large of a crowd if the stories actually impacted the people?” He responded, “Well if you count it as impact that at the end of the stories most had tears running down their faces, I’d say yes.”                 

99! STS workshops have trained workers in inductive Bible study, oral style in 99 countries!

Update! When someone combines God’s Story and STS, look what happens. Our last newsletter told about girls in Nepal being rescued from sex-traffickers who were taking the girls into India.

A survey was just done on 278 of those girls who were rescued. These had come to faith in Jesus. They were trained to sew and were discipled using STS storytelling. After six months the girls returned home with a sewing machine and a solar audio player (containing God’s Story, oral-style training on how to study the Bible using STS, a New Testament, six in-depth, interactive Bible-stories with questions and 66 recorded Bible stories.)

By using their personal testimony of faith and the recorded information, in only three months, these newly saved and trained girls planted 328 churches!    

God’s Story

“The Arabic God’s Story is perfect to give to Muslim students interested in learning the sequence of the Bible and more  importantly seeing what it says about redemption.”  USA

Too Old At an STS training in West Africa, an instructor showed one of the night-time, hotel-guards a solar player and then let him hear a bit of God’s Story in his language. “He showed interest, so we left the player with him while we went in for dinner.

“When we came from dinner, the guard had listened to it all. He said, ‘These words are true of God.’ He continued excitedly, ‘God has put something in my heart tonight!’  When our country director asked the guard if he prayed the prayer to become a Christian he explained. ‘I am an old man and have been a Muslim too long to change now.’

“Our leaders prayed for the guard and then decided to let him take the player home for day.

“The guard continued to listen to it all evening and the next day took it home to his wife who was doing laundry. She asked, ‘Is this long?’  He said, ‘Yes. The story of God is long.’ She decided to listen to the story. At the end she asked her husband if he was going to switch to follow Isa. He remained quiet.

“Two days later he went to his sister's house who is a believer and shared all he learned from God’s Story. She was amazed. ‘How did you learn all this?’ He said, ‘from a player, but the lady took it back.’  He also told his sister, ‘You never told me these things!’

“The last day there, the man said he now believed in Jesus and he wanted his sons to hear the story. We gave him a player.”

Many reports like this come to us. And usually we hear later that the newly saved use the players to share the story with their families, their relatives and even their whole village.

Simply The Story

Story Convinces.  A mother attending an STS training in the Middle East shared that she and her 21-year-old daughter heatedly debated the value of Bible stories. The mother, seeing the discussion leading nowhere, started telling the story of blind Bartimaeus. In less than 2 minutes, in tears, her daughter said, "That was beautiful." 

Changed Our Way. “A small team of us completed an STS training in Central Asia. One of the workers attending the training called our office 6 months later to say, ‘We are using STS all the time and this has changed the way they are doing ministry.’"

Myanmar Wishes. “We told a story to 200 over people. That was great in the church. After the service, the pastor come and say, ‘That story really make something deep and encourage me. Usually we use simple way of just a story. But we do not talk about it deep. But when I heard the story and think about it with the questions, that is strengthen me.’ There are many people wishes me to come tell stories like that. Thank you.”

Unreached Being Reached!!!! We met a 4th generation STS instructor in Africa. (That means we taught someone, who taught someone, who taught someone.) He told of being in 7 workshops, first learning, then helping, then leading. That 4^th instructor down the line is also a church planter.

A people group of 100,000 in Togo, that African mission agencies had not been able to penetrate with the Gospel, had no known believers. That would classify these 100,000 as an unengaged, unreached, people group (UUPG). Their religion is “traditional,” so they are animists.   

The church planter and his wife visited this group. He said, “We carried in nothing, no literature. For a year we told stories, 102 of them!  We are leaving now and going to a new place.

“They do not need us anymore. There are four churches and 400 believers. The people have learned the stories and we talked about them. When the people retell the stories, they tell them like they were part of the story, like they were real! They have the stories in their heart pockets, and they understand them and they are sharing them with others.”    

Recently a pastor who has been a Christian for years visited these people in Togo. He said to the church planter, “I have never seen the level of spiritual maturity in Christians as I see among these people who believed and were baptized.”

Another church planter who uses STS was listening to this testimony. He joined in, “This is happening at another place as well. There were a few believers there to start. They want more training to increase the quality of their work among their own people.”

Need Prayer

1. Right now, among the many workshops being done all over the world, Arabic-speaking teams are leading workshops in various North African countries. We did not tell them to go. We trained them in STS. The Word of God directed them to become missionaries! Please pray for their protection, for fruit and an expanding army of effective, oral-style teachers.
2. Our staff at Hemet, CA headquarters is experiencing so much interest in STS and GS that we struggle to keep up! Please “Pray ye the Lord of the harvest to send workers.” We apologize now for any lack of response or errors we may make in the mean time.
3. Since the year 2000, we tried to produce Urdu. Multiple false starts have stopped this version. We hope to see the recording done very soon. Will you pray for its completion?

New Resources

This year we finally designed and printed brochures for God’s Story and STS. As well, we added a Short Term Mission Trips brochure. We write these in English, but plan to translate and print them in multiple trade languages. French is available and Spanish we hope to have soon. 

A new, superior STS Handbook, Edition #5, contains major edits on the draft we have used in the past few years. We kept the ever-changing handbook as a draft because we were continuing to learn better ways to travel this uncharted path. The path is becoming clearer. Now, skills of oral, investigative Bible-study and interactive storytelling that used to take 2 or 3 workshops to hand off to others is being transferred in one workshop!

This printed Edition #5 is available in English and French and we hope very soon in Hindi, Chinese, Nepali and Swahili. Fifteen more languages are in translation. As we have already done in English, after handbooks are translated, we record an audio version of the handbook for those who want to learn by listening.

The Ministry That Multiplies: Practitioner Guide is rivaling the new handbook in excitement. This easy-to-use booklet works even for those new to teaching. In 12 sessions, people who have learned STS can minister using stories and hand off some STS skills! The guide even includes multiple story sets from which to choose.   

All these resources, plus the STS how-to bookmark, Interactive Discovery of the Bible DVD, Practitioner Audio Training and more are being produced in multiple languages. Some can be downloaded free and all can be purchased from the “Resources” upper tab link on the web site.

In His service,

Dorothy A. Miller