Using storytelling to start a new church

“You should go and tell a Bible story to the man at our local bakery. He likes to chat,” my wife suggested to me.

Months passed and I didn’t get around to it.

But then I started to take the four students who I mentor into the local town each week to practice telling Bible stories. I was reminded of what my wife had said months earlier and my student Jazz and I paid a visit to the bakery.

My wife was right, the owner of the bakery was happy to chat and open to listening to the Bible stories. So that began our weekly visits to the bakery.

It was clear that God had already been at work in the baker’s life. He was friends with another missionary to the area over a number of years already. This missionary family had to return to the U.S., but before they left, they helped establish our friendship with the baker’s family. The baker’s two boys first became friends with yet another  missionary’s sons and started to visit the centre regularly.

After a few weeks both boys expressed a desire to go to church. After discussions with our team, we suggested to them that we meet for church with their family at the bakery on Sunday mornings with the two older children, a few of our students, and either myself or our teammate.

So for the last three months we have been meeting at the bakery, going through an overview of the Bible which we have recently finished. We can see God clearly working in the hearts of this family. They are starting to the read the Bible for themselves and have a desire to start English classes at their bakery so that others have an opportunity to hear the gospel. They also want other youth to join with us on Sunday mornings.

We are very excited about how God is working in this family and what he might do through them.

Church planting tip – did you notice what the missionary did when the two sons asked to go to church? Rather than take them out of their family, they set up a way of doing church so that the whole family could be saved.