Anyone Can Tell a Bible Story

Bob Hartman's Guide to Storytelling - with 35 great stories

Bob Hartman

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857211576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Bob Hartman has an enviable reputation as a performance storyteller. Here are his insights into how stories work; tips and techniques; and how to retell Bible stories ' plus 50 great stories to practise on. This is a revised and expanded edition of the Lion volume first published in 2002, with many new stories and ideas. The book is structured by storytelling styles, with pull quotes and boxes to keep the central material clear. This book is both a training manual and a resource. All the stories are taken from the Bible. It is published in the same popular format as TELLING THE BIBLE and TELLING THE GOSPEL.

Chapter 1

A Storyteller’s Story

I can’t remember exactly when it began.

Was it that time under the blankets, late into the night, with the dimming torch and the second-hand copy of The Call of the Wild?

Was it the Junior Boys’ Sunday school class and my grandma’s grizzly account of Ehud’s left-handed execution of evil King Eglon?

Or was it those prizes I received on the last day of school, the year I turned eight: the plastic dinosaur that I lost before the summer ended and the book about the magic umbrella that my mother still reads to her grandchildren?

I can’t remember exactly when it started. It just seems that I have always loved stories. And I suppose that is why I became a storyteller. It’s the essential requirement, surely!

You see, I can’t really claim to be an expert in the field of storytelling – not in the sense that I’ve read all the texts and manuals, attended all the seminars, and know all there is to know about the subject.

All I can really say is that I love stories, I tell stories, and when I do, people lean forward and listen and seem to love those stories too. So what I can share are the tips and techniques and, particularly, the attitudes and approaches I have picked up along the way. I can tell you what has worked and what has failed, where I find stories, and how I tear them apart and put them back together again as I prepare to tell them. And if you’re willing to accept, from the start, that all storytellers are different, and that their storytelling is as much a reflection of their personality as it is of the stories themselves, then I think we can go somewhere together. So if you find something that’s helpful along the way – brilliant! And if something else just won’t work for you – then that’s all right too. Because that’s how I learned to tell stories. By watching and listening, trying and failing, and starting all over again!

So let’s start with how it all began.

Child’s Play

When I was twelve, my younger brother, Tim, came home one afternoon, desperate to do something in the School Talent Show. He found a Muppet pattern in a women’s magazine (you can tell how long ago that was – Sesame Street was brand new, then!), and stitched together a few puppets on my grandmother’s old sewing machine. All he needed was a script. So I wrote one for him. I can’t honestly remember what it was about, but it began an eight-year run of puppet shows in churches and camps and community festivals in the Pittsburgh area.

My other brother, Daryl, and a few other friends joined in as well. And my mum ferried us around in her beaten-up old Studebaker. We were just kids, but that experience taught us a lot about storytelling.

We discovered, first of all, how important it is to have interesting characters. Tim is a natural comedian, and very quick-witted, so it didn’t take us long to start building the stories around the puppets that he controlled. We countered his cheeky irreverence with a collection of “straight man” type characters – typical stand-up fare – which helped us learn the place of conflict in storytelling too. Bit by bit, we discovered the ways that characters can work together to create both humour and tension, and build the story to a satisfying conclusion.

We also learned how important it is to build a relationship with an audience. Puppeteers can only tell how their audiences are reacting through what they hear. We discovered, very quickly, how helpful it is to see those reactions as well. So we started putting someone “out front”, at the side of the stage, to be our eyes. He would sometimes act as a narrator, sometimes as a straight man, sometimes even as one of the characters. But, best of all, he would watch the crowd, gauge their reactions, and move things on or slow things down, depending on what he saw.

We learned a lot about story pacing and story length as well. Our early stories were short and punchy, largely because we were pretty insecure and wanted to get in there and get out as quickly as possible! But as our confidence grew, so did the stories. And that was a mistake. It was the era of rock opera, and I suppose I fancied myself in that light – writing huge puppet extravaganzas. But they just didn’t work. They meandered on and on, losing their point and their tension, and worst of all, the audience! To this day, I would still rather do several short stories than one long one – because it gives me the chance to adapt and adjust (or simply bail out!) instead of being stuck in the middle of some epic.

Yes, we made mistakes – loads of them! Inadequate practice. Incomprehensible messages (more than one parent or teacher or pastor wanted to know what “that story was about”). And inappropriate humour (although I still wet myself over most things scatalogical!). But the most important thing was that we learned from those mistakes and we improved, year by year.

There’s one thing I can’t emphasize enough – the only way you learn to tell stories and improve your storytelling abilities is to do it. Because I’m an author, people often ask me, “How do I get a book published?” My usual response is, “What have you written?” And you would be amazed at how many of them haven’t written anything at all! Sometimes it’s fear, and sometimes it’s uncertainty, and sometimes it’s a lack of confidence. And I understand all those feelings, because I’ve been there, myself. But unless you actually put those things behind you and have a go, you’ll never write a book. And the same thing is true of storytelling. You have to try, accepting from the start that you’ll make mistakes, face difficult audiences, forget where you’re going, and not always get it right. But you have to start somewhere. You have to take that leap. Maybe it’s because we were just kids, and didn’t know any better – but we had a go. And because we had a go, we learned a lot about telling stories.

University Challenge

I learned a lot about stories at university, too. I was studying theology, preparing for a career in the ministry, and was surprised to discover that this helped me to understand even more about the way that stories work and the power they have to affect us.

The Bible is essentially a collection of stories. It contains other genres, I know, but the bulk of the Bible relates events in the history of Israel and then in the life of Jesus – stories that are meant to help us understand both who God is and who we are. Preaching, therefore, has a lot to do with storytelling. Yes, I tried some of the other approaches – three points and a conclusion, unpacking the apostle Paul’s tightly knit theological arguments, wrestling with the imagery in the psalms. But what I discovered, even in the churches where I preached as a student, was that people responded best to stories. They leaned forward, they listened, they laughed, they cried – they got the point! So I just kept on telling stories. And not just as illustrations so much as for the Bible stories themselves.

One of my biggest inspirations in this regard was a book I stumbled across in the seminary library while I was doing some research for one of my preaching homiletics classes. The book was called Telling the Truth, but what really caught my attention was the subtitle – The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. It was written by American Frederick Buechner, who is both an award-winning novelist and a theologian. Buechner’s premise is pretty simple. Preaching is all about telling stories. It starts with recognizing the tragic stories that are a part of each of our lives – by acknowledging them and taking them seriously. It moves on to the comedy of the gospel – the holy foolishness of a God who speaks his light and laughter into that tragedy. And it finishes with what Buechner calls the truest fairy tale of them all. He contrasts the story of the Wizard of Oz with the gospel story. In the former, there is no magic in the end – nothing beyond our own power to redeem ourselves, just a man pulling levers behind a curtain and a lot of self-belief. But in the gospel, Buechner argues, we find true magic – a power at work in us that accomplishes what we could never have done for ourselves.

Buechner’s book excited me in a way that no other book on preaching had ever done before (or has done since). It convinced me that I could be a preacher and a storyteller, taking the thing I loved and weaving it into my calling. And that’s what I took to my first church.

As it happens, my first church was in Leicestershire, in the UK (how I got there from a seminary in the hills of East Tennessee is a story in itself – or maybe the makings of a country and western song). And, to be fair, telling Bible stories there was a bit of a challenge, at first, because the people in that church were older, on the whole, had mostly been raised in Sunday school and had already heard a lot of those stories. I’m not complaining. I think it’s marvellous when Christians know a lot about the Bible. It’s how things should be. But, on the other hand, there’s nothing worse than that “Oh, here’s THAT story, again” look. As any parent knows, you can tell the same story to a small child time and time again. But it’s different with older children and adults. A familiar story is a lot like a joke when you’ve already heard the punchline; you know how it’s going to end, so you don’t pay as much attention along the way. It’s the old “been there, done that” thing.

So I had to work a little harder to find a way around that problem. If I were retelling a familiar Bible story, I tried my best to find a unique way “in” to the story. Sometimes I told it from a different perspective (from the “bad guy’s” point of view, perhaps!). Sometimes I introduced a character who could be an objective observer of all that went on. Sometimes I started the story at an unfamiliar place. Anything to keep the listeners guessing, so that when they finally realized which story it was, they were interested enough to see how that particular slant would bring them round to the ending. There’s nothing original about this of course – the spate of reworked and re-imagined fairy tales that have appeared over the last several years, both in print and on film, attests to the fact that this works with other kinds of stories as well. And that’s the important thing – it re-establishes the kind of tension and expectancy that pulls an audience through a story.

The other thing that preaching in my first church taught me was the way that an audience relates to the characters in a story. Many people who aren’t familiar with the Bible assume that it’s a pious, holier-than-thou kind of book. The fact of the matter is that the Bible is brutally honest about the people whose lives it chronicles. We see them – even the “heroes” – warts and all. And that means that people can identify with the characters in a Bible story, both at their best times and at their worst. Because the stories are human and honest, they encourage people to be honest about themselves.

One Sunday, I told the story of the prodigal son, and when the service had finished, one of our older ladies said that she wanted to talk with me about the message, some time during the coming week. A few days later I went to visit her, and following the obligatory tea and cakes and snooker match (that’s right, for some reason, in the mid-eighties, all my elderly parishioners were glued to the TV in the afternoon, watching snooker. Steve Davis was, of course, their hero – “What a nice young man” – and the villainy usually came in the form of the late Alex Higgins), she proceeded to tell me (as if she were addressing the diabolical Alex himself) how much she had disliked my sermon. I couldn’t for the life of me see the problem, and I couldn’t get a word in edgeways – and then came the punchline. “When I was a young woman,” she explained, “all my brothers and sisters moved away and left me at home to care for my parents. I was like the son who stayed with his father, but when you told the story, you did what everyone does – you turned him into the villain!”

That made everything clear. Stories invite us to relate to particular characters, but a storyteller can’t control the choice that someone makes in that respect. So we talked about the story again and how the mercy shown by the father extended to the older son as well – and could also extend to her.

Ministry to Museum

My children were both born in England, and when that ministry came to an end, we moved back to Pittsburgh, primarily so that my wife and I could raise the kids near their extended family. My brother, Tim, was working in children’s theatre at the time, but was interested in developing his career in a new direction. He had done some storytelling at one of the big Pittsburgh libraries and thought that, by telling stories together, he and I could recreate the same dynamic that had worked so well with the puppets, years before. So I took a “break” from the ministry and joined him.

We took one of the stories he had been telling – “Joe Magarac”, Pittsburgh’s tall tale about a h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Stories
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Storyteller’s Story
• 2. How Stories Work
• 3. Retelling the Story
• 4. Storytelling Tips and Techniques
• 5. Reading the Bible