A Reluctant Leader

Training local Christian storytellers in West Africa is more involved than it sounds. During each training project, we organize story-crafting groups, develop good stories, test and correct the stories, back-translate and review stories, record and audio edit, and prepare the solar-recharged audio players that are given to story-tellers at the end of the project.

The goal is for the local Christians to do more and more of the work of guiding the story-development process, to the point that a local team is equipped to take over the work.

One project had three very experienced West African trainers, plus three new assistant trainers. W was the designated team/project leader but asked Steven* to lead the project instead.

Steven said, 'No, I will not be the team leader. Turns out, to Steven, 'leader' means something akin to a dictator. So W asked him if he would ‘coordinate’ the project. He was very happy to do coordinate, and he did an excellent job.

The training team worked very well together; participants were happy and worked hard; even the cooks did a great job. The twenty story-crafters started dozens of story discussion groups in the city, where they shared and discussed the stories they prepared.

Steven organized a Story Group Leaders Training that ran concurrently with the School of Storying. Twenty-four believers from nine churches participated. They joined the story groups, and learned six stories a day, two days a week (Friday and Saturday) for three weeks. They also started story groups in the area and told stories of Jesus to hundreds of people.

Even a reluctant leader can be used by God to accomplish His work for His glory.

*name changed for security reasons

GlobalGrace workers W and E mentor and train Christian storytellers in West Africa