I Am God S Storyteller

I Am God’s Storyteller invites children to use their gifts to shine God’s light and share the Gospel. Offering children examples of noted storytellers in Bible history (Sarah, Moses, Deborah, Esther, David, Isaiah, Mary, John the Baptist, and the Evangelists and early Church), this colorful and engaging picture book also looks at how Jesus used storytelling to teach and share his message of faith, hope and love. I Am God’s Storyteller concludes by asking children to be “God’s storytellers,” and helps them to understand that our world needs them now more than ever to shine God's light. Includes information for parents, teachers and caregivers, with suggestions and guidelines for building a love for storytelling in the hearts of children. With encouragement and empowerment, young storytellers are sent on a mission to engage the world around them with joy and creativity.

What is your story?What is your letter?I know that God will love me foreverI am God's Storyteller

The prodigal son. The good Samaritan. A treasure hidden in a field. Most of us have heard these parables before. Yet if these oft-repeated stories strike us as merely sweet, heartwarming, or sentimental, we can be sure we've misread them. Jesus's parables are simultaneously working to conceal and reveal profound spiritual truths about God, humanity, the world, and the future—and we must learn to plumb their depths. A careful reading of the biblical text reveals the surprising ways in which such seemingly simple stories rebuke, subvert, and sabotage our sinful habits, perspectives, and priorities. Discarding the notion that Jesus's parables are nothing more than moralistic fables, Jared Wilson shows how each one is designed to drive us to Jesus in awe, need, faith, and worship.

The Bible is filled with carefully told stories that are designed to reach from their pages into our lives. They reach out to entertain us. They cause us to laugh or make us cry. But most importantly, the stories in the Bible shape our thinking and our faith. This book honors the role of God as storyteller and explores how God's inspired authors carefully select and present an event so as to instill it with meaning. In order to deepen our appreciation of the storyteller's craft, this book surveys the traditional categories of narrative criticism to see how the design of scene, plot, characterization, narration, time, and wordplay shape the story we read. But the reader will also find a considerable portion of this book devoted to a new form of narrative analysis-narrative geography. Since the stories of the Bible are filled not only with people but also with place, we note how the storyteller may strategically use, reuse, and nuance geography as part of the storytelling process. As we come to a fuller appreciation of how the events of the Bible become its stories, we will have set the stage for a discussion of the reader's craft, seeking meaning in such stories. In the end, the reader will be rewarded with a new and exciting way of reading God's stories that appreciates not only their composition but also their meaning.

Diabolically funny and subversively philosophical, Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God is the diary of the Almighty’s existential crisis that erupts when he falls in love with a human. I am God. Have been forever, will be forever. Forever, mind you, with the razor-sharp glint of a diamond, and without any counterpart in the languages of men. So begins God’s diary of the existential crisis that ensues when, inexplicably, he falls in love with a human. And not just any human, but a geneticist and fanatical atheist who’s certain she can improve upon the magnificent creation she doesn’t even give him the credit for. It’s frustrating, for a god. God has infinitely bigger things to occupy his celestial attentions. Yet he can’t tear his eyes (so to speak) from the geneticist who’s unsettlingly avid when it comes to science, sex, and Sicilian cannoli. Whatever happens, he must safeguard his transcendental dignity. So he watches—disinterestedly, of course—as the handsome climatologist who has his sights set on her keeps having strange accidents. And as the lanky geneticist becomes hell-bent on infiltrating the Vatican’s secret files, for reasons of her own…. A sly critique of the hypocrisy and hubris that underlie faith in religion, science, and macho careerism, I Am God takes us on a hilarious and provocative romp through the Big Questions with the universe’s supreme storyteller.

The standard textbook on the art and craft of preaching, with a new Foreword by Thomas G. Long.

Problems of patriarchy and colonialism that have left traces in the history of evangelism and Christian missions have contributed to perpetuating marginalization and discrimination against women in church life in Asia. This book offers a reconstruction of evangelism that acknowledges and respects women’s roles and thoughts. For this purpose, the author uses a postcolonial missiological feminist perspective that pays attention to the processes, models, roles, and understanding of evangelism and mission, and encourages women’s voices in witnessing the trinitarian God in the world. This study confronts evangelism with discourses of power, leadership, gender, and understanding of evangelism and mission. This book uses the historical-narrative-constructive missiological method by combining several theories to show the complexity of missionary women’s narratives, the marginalization of their narratives, and constructive missiological efforts to reclaim their narratives as a model of embodied evangelism. These theories are the social women mission theory, postcolonial feminist mission theory, martyrdom theology, the biblical-reconstructive approach to Matthew, and narrative theology. The author offers the idea of “evangelism as storytelling,” namely witnessing the trinitarian God through embodied storytelling of the gospel which encourages the rediscovery of witness narratives in the form of testimonials that contain the voices, roles, experiences, and understandings of women in witnessing the gospel.

After emigrating from Germany to Michigan at age seven, Johannes Strieter (1829–1920) served as a confessional Lutheran pastor in Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana amid almost unbelievable hardships. Though not a well-known person himself, his life’s path intersected with that of numerous distinguished persons—August Crämer, Friedrich Wyneken, J. C. W. Lindemann, C. F. W. Walther, and John C. Pritzlaff, just to name a handful. Through his recollections, we also encounter firsthand the Ojibwa; the Civil War; the establishment and founding of roads, cities, churches, and schools; and we travel by sea, lake, river, canal, railroad, horseback, buggy, stagecoach, and on foot. We accompany him as he nearly kills his sister; is spared in a terrible accident; falls in love; navigates difficult pastoral situations and decisions; gets drafted into the Union Army; buries some of his children; ministers to the troubled, misguided, sick, and dying; and finally retires to Michigan on account of deafness. Translated afresh from Strieter’s original manuscript and presented with twelve appendices to supplement his autobiography, Sacred Storytelling is a treasure trove of adventure, perspective, entertainment, courage, and conviction.