March 3, 2011

It’s on most people’s bucket list.

But, unfortunately, many lose interest during the "begets" in Genesis or the list of more than 600 laws in Leviticus. However, an innovative new Bible – The Story – is changing all that and helping thousands of people read the Scriptures from Genesis to Revelation.

"Whether people are new to their faith or mature, reading the whole Bible is part of their ';bucket list,'" says Randy Frazee, creator of The Story Church-wide Experience and senior minister of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas where he teaches and leads in partnership with Max Lucado. "The Story is a tool to help them check that off their list."

Reading like a "novel" and looking like a "trade fiction book," The Story consists of 31 chapters of carefully selected scripture. The Story helps readers understand God's story from Genesis to Revelation and how their stories intersect with that of their creator. A quarter of the size of the Bible – and without the sub-headers or numbers – The Story is less intimidating than the entire Bible and offers transition summaries for those sections it omits.

"The Bible is not 100 unrelated stories," Frazee says. "It's more like a mural than an art gallery. The Bible is not like going to the Louvre in Paris. It's more like going to the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel is all these 300 characters, all woven into a tapestry or mural, whereas the Louvre has all these famous disconnected paintings.

Chip Brown, senior vice president and publisher at Zondervan, says many people want to read the entire Bible, but more than half who start don't complete it.

"Unfortunately, they usually fall off the wagon in Leviticus," Brown says. "When you're reading the Old Testament, it can get pretty intense. When they stop, it creates a sense of guilt. They get de-motivated and they think, ';I'll never be able to do this.' The Bible becomes a turnoff."

Surveys and studies seem to bear out Brown's assessment. While the average American household has four Bibles, only 16 percent of Americans read the Bible every day, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Furthermore, a growing number of experts say Bible illiteracy is at or near an all-time high. A recent Lifeway Research report found 67 percent of the largest generation in the nation (the 78 million "Millennials" born between 1980 and 2000) rarely or never read the Bible or other sacred texts.  The Barna Group found a "generational decline in many Bible metrics."

"Certainly, the levels of biblical literacy aren't going up," Barna President David Kinnaman says. "And it's not just that people know less about scriptures, but their perspective about the claim the Bible has on their lives is changing. They are more, especially young people, skeptical of the original manuscripts, more likely to question the authority of scripture and more interested in all sorts of alternative ways of exploring spirituality."

As a way to address biblical illiteracy during "The Year of the Bible" – the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible – The Story is encouraging people to read God's love letter to humanity.

In what has become an organic national movement, more than 400 churches have purchased The Story Church-wide Experience kit and are taking their congregations on a journey from Bible illiteracy to Bible engagement through the 31-week course.

Frazee helped create the kit to engage people in the church, from life-long Christians to those who are new to the faith. Many have discovered for the first time how the Bible is one continuous story of God's unyielding love for his people.

"It's the meta-narrative that exists from Genesis to Revelation that sets up the creation, the fall of man, that Christ came and there is a specific way the story of your life fits into the big love story God is telling over history," Brown says. "People are reading this like a novel and are understanding scripture like they never have before."

Frazee says the idea to develop The Story Church-wide Experience began eight years ago when a Zondervan representative showed him tools under development to help people better understand the Bible, including the 31-chapter abridged chronology of the Bible – The Story.

At the time, Frazee was pastor of a church in Fort Worth, Texas and had observed that even people in that affluent area, many with advanced degrees, were living out their Christian walk without a solid understanding of what the Bible was really trying to say to them.

In The Story, Frazee saw how placing the Bible in chronological order – rather than the topical order – would help people better capture the complete experience of the Bible.

"The beauty of The Story is it's put into a novel-like experience, but it's actually the scriptures," Frazee says. "It's not every book in the Bible, but it's real accessible to a broad group of people."

Frazee also ran across studies showing that if a person tries to stop smoking on their own that they have little of success. By using a nicotine patch, their chance of success increases to 5 percent. But if they join a group that helps them stop smoking, then their chances increase to 40 percent.

Based on this concept, Frazee created The Story Church-wide Experience and used it as his new curriculum at Oak Hills Church. The church experienced 23 percent growth in attendance over the weeks he taught the series and witnessed a "new buzz and unity within the congregation and community."

"People began literally parking illegally in the access roads to participate in this experience and to find themselves in the best-selling, most-translated book of all time," says Max Lucado, the minister of preaching at Oak Hills and a bestselling author with more than 100 million books in print.

The Story Church-wide Experience is now available to churches nationwide and is in multiple formats so the entire church, from children to adults, is literally and figuratively on the same page. The program includes 31 weeks of curriculum for children, teen and adult Sunday school classes, as well as for adult small groups and Bible studies. It includes up to 31 weeks of sermon outlines, illustrations, videos and other sermon preparation resources.  The kit includes copies of The Story, The Story – Teen Edition and The Story for Kids, plus a DVD of the video resources and high-resolution graphics.

By getting the whole church to go through the Bible in less than a year, Frazee says pastors can really make a dent in biblical illiteracy and help inspire a revolution of God's love in the world.

"What if everybody in our churches, what if everybody in Christianity, really captured the heart of The Story," Frazee says. "We think there would be an outbreak of compassion, an outbreak of evangelism and an outbreak of Christ-like character throughout the world."

Responses to: Evolutionary Christianity

Dear Writers for TotheSource, I very much appreciate the essays and informative sidebars of your ministry and have recommended your website to many of my colleagues in the service of Christ's Church as well as to numerous friends. Many thanks. - A. S.

Whatever other point you may be trying to make, about Darwinism and evolution and even the church and changes, I find this statement extremely difficult to accept in light of the "facts" presented in Viola and Barna's presentation in "Pagan Christianity?: Explorying the Roots of Our Church Practices". "Christianity is a call to the past, or it ceases to be Christianity and becomes mere froth and foam gliding on the currents of current opinion. Christianity's link to the past is what keeps it from being submerged in the passions and fads of our own, very particular time. It is only by being surely anchored to its origins that it can lift us up above our contemporary confusions, and guide us to make the future better than the present." None of what we call,or practice as "Christianity" today would exist if we had been faithful to the BIBLICAL origins of the Church as Jesus instituted it as an organism. I think Viola and Barna make a very good case that would prove that what you call the church, (or the expression of Christianity as manifested in our churches) is the result of Leaders and hierarchy "gliding on the currents of (pagan) opinion" as to buildings, clergy, taxes, lectures, and organization, etc. If ever we submitted to, or became "submerged in the passions and fads of [its] own very particular time" it was when we let a pagan emperor and the various "church fathers" so take over the fellowship of disciples that it should come to look like we now have throughout the world, and have the "nerve" or audacity to call it "the church" the "Body of Christ" with Christ as the Head. It is only by being anchored to its BIBLICAL origins that Christ and the church can lift us up above our contemporary confusions, and guide us to make the future better than the past or the present. I don't have to buy all that McLaren teaches, but neither do I have to buy that sticking with tradition that has established itself over 1700 years has anything to do with Biblical Christianity or a relationship or a Kingdom for which Jesus came to establish through his teaching, death and resurrection. Perhaps we should say that we don't need a New Kind of Christianity. We don't need "Christianity". What we need are followers of Jesus and an "old kind of Christian". That is to say, the kind described in Acts 11:26, "Those who were under the discipline or learning from Jesus were first called "Christians" at Antioch." - G. A.

Mr. Wicker I have read numerous books by B. McLaren, and have met and heard him in a small presentation setting. I do not believe that you are presenting him fairly. As a matter of fact I think you are guilty of (once again) seriously distorting the position of your opponents thereby providing yourself with the opportunity to demolish straw-men. You state : McLaren's Emergent Church declares (a) that Christianity should give up its obsessions with the past and focus on the future, (b) that Christians should not be concerned about obsolete, cold dogmas but burning social issues, and (c) that Darwin should be considered an apostle along with St. Paul. In response to your three points, my understanding of Mr. McLaren is that (a) his focus is squarely on Jesus, (b) that the gospel demands that we care about the poor, the orphans, and justice and (c) is so bizarre a statement that I cannot imagine it’s origin. Please, in the interest of honesty and Christian love, provide Mr. McLaren with the opportunity to himself respond to your accusations. Sincerely - D. K.