"I wanted to find a common language that would cut across divisions and be a common ground between people of different backgrounds and different educational experiences."

As a young pastor involved with the civil rights movement in Chicago in the 1960s, Tom Boomershine listened to black preachers tell the stories of the Bible.

"I had never heard preaching like that before," he says. "I was studying the gospels and I knew about oral tradition, but when I read the stories I couldn't believe that anybody told them for more than three or four minutes because they were so boring. Then I went to black churches and I'd hear storytelling sermons that would go on for 45 minutes to an hour -- and at the end everyone was cheering and wanted the story to go on! I had never heard storytelling that was so powerful and energizing."

This experience, combined with Boomershine's desire to understand the original form of the biblical narratives, led him to further academic study and to a unique ministry of fostering a revival of biblical storytelling.

"When I went back to New York to do a PhD. in New Testament, I went back explicitly with the purpose of trying to recover the biblical storytelling tradition," Boomershine says. "I wanted to find a common language that would cut across divisions and be a common ground between people of different backgrounds and different educational experiences."

Boomershine's approach was regarded with suspicion in the academic community, and his dissertation topic -- the Gospel of Mark as narrative -- was highly controversial. Colleagues tended to dismiss it as "naive, intellectually lacking in rigor, and essentially irrelevant," he says.

"In classic biblical study of Mark, there were two primary questions that were asked," he explains. "One was, what is the historical significance of a particular story? And the other has been, what was the theology that was implicit in the story? So the gospels have been studied for their historical meaning and their theological meaning. The meaning of the story simply as story was not a question that scholars asked."

Boomershine started with a different set of questions.

"What was the shape of the characterization of Jesus? What's the structure of the plot? What was the impact of the story of Jesus' passion and resurrection for those who originally heard it? How did the stories actually sound?"

His research took him to Orthodox churches and synagogues to hear the biblical narratives chanted in their original languages, and he memorized and chanted the passion narrative of Mark in Greek. He also began listening to contemporary storytellers, and then telling the gospel stories himself.

"During those years I was telling the stories in coffeehouses in New York and for youth groups or Sunday evening meetings," he says. "I was a kind of traveling troubadour."

Listeners responded with enthusiasm.

"The steady response, for 30 years, has been, 'I can't believe it -- it's a wonderful story! I'd never heard the story before.' They'd heard it read in scripture lessons for years, but they'd never heard the story told. They respond with amazement -- first of all, that someone could learn it by heart and tell it, and then, that it's so interesting and powerful."

When Boomershine was seriously injured in a car accident, he discovered another dimension of the power of gospel stories.

"I had a long period of recovery, and during that time I found that the stories that I had memorized and that I could tell to myself were a primary gift from God. The story of the healing of the paralytic was a story that I told myself over and over in the whole process of my physical therapy, getting up and walking. And that was true with a number of stories that I had learned -- at different times they would come up and they would be a way in which God would be present for me. So I decided that one of the things that was crucial was enabling other people to learn the stories so they could tell themselves the stories in times of crisis. I also remembered the importance that people who were in concentration camps during the Second World War gave to storytelling: Those who could recite poetry, who could sing songs, but especially those who knew stories -- and especially those who knew biblical stories -- were heroes."

Boomershine developed a storytelling workshop at New York Seminary, where he was then teaching, in which students learned to tell biblical stories, connecting them with stories from their own lives. In 1978, he founded the Network of Biblical Storytellers (NOBS), which has grown into an international association with a website (<www.nobs.org>), a newsletter and a yearly "festival gathering."

Members come from varied backgrounds and Christian traditions.

"Many of them are people who have had a lot of experience with art or music or literature or drama," Boomershine says. "Or people who have an interest in non-philosophical ways of talking and being, and so are drawn to the story."

They do not tell the stories in order to teach lessons or illustrate doctrines.

"In general, there has been very little interest in biblical storytelling in the evangelical community, especially among fundamentalists," Boomershine says. "Their interest and commitment is to the Bible as a source of doctrinal truth."

Boomershine's purpose has more to do with community and spiritual formation.

"I think the most accurate experience that we can have of the character of Jesus and who he was can happen in the context of a community of people telling the stories of Jesus from the gospels," he says. "There is a kind of community that happens among people who tell the stories of the Bible to each other, a depth of connection between people from radically different experiences. And there's an interiorization, a personal appropriation of that tradition that shapes and forms you in ways that are different from, say, learning the Apostles' Creed or affirming certain beliefs. It is a way of entering into an intimacy of relationship with God."

Boomershine stresses the importance of learning the stories by heart.

"The central metaphor is jazz," he says. "If you improvise on a song before you know the song, the jazz is usually not all that great. The same is true of biblical stories. People who know the stories well can improvise better than people who are sort of vaguely familiar with them. I encourage people to treat biblical stories with the care with which they would treat classical music or any other composition that is beautiful and that we value highly."

Boomershine recently took a leave of absence from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, in order to begin a new company -- Luminon Digital Productions, part of UMR Communications (formerly the United Methodist Reporter) in Dallas. The company will produce digital resources for worship and church education programs. Boomershine regards this work as an outgrowth of his commitment to storytelling.

"I experienced it as a call from God to move from what I call the known areas of the church's ministry in literary culture, to the formation of a new institution and pattern for the church in electronic culture," Boomershine says. "The Gospel is increasingly associated with a culture that used to be the most powerful communication system of the culture. So in order to hear the stories of Jesus, the children of digital culture essentially have to step back into an earlier culture where there aren't TVs, where there aren't screens, where there isn't electronic music. This culture is a new global culture for which the church is largely inept in its efforts to communicate."

Boomershine rejects the "literate culture critique" of electronic culture.

"I think literate culture has seen electronic culture as a primary threat to its power," he says. "But literary culture has been the primary enemy of oral community. There's nobody who's more disassociated from normal human interaction than scholars, who spend all their time by themselves reading books. Electronic culture is much more interactive. In order to produce things in electronic culture you have to have a team that works together, whereas in order to write a book you have to go off by yourself.

"Electronic culture has been called a secondary oral culture. There are many lines of connection between post-literate electronic culture and oral culture -- first of all the primacy of sound. And electronic culture is essentially a storytelling culture. Television is a storytelling medium. Film is a way of telling a story.

"And the global community is a product of electronic culture. So while there are new ways in which you can lose yourself on the Internet and have a kind of pseudo-community with people, on the other hand there's a reality to it that is even more immediate than writing letters.

"But I also see the way in which electronic culture and electronic media are creating a whole new structure of injustice and inequality. The church has been the primary agent of communication justice in the culture of literacy, the major agency in the history of western civilization that has extended literacy to those who were illiterate. The question now is, who's going to do that in relation to the digital divide? The church needs to be the advocate of the liberation of electronic communications from being used solely in the interests of profit, and for the power of that communications system to be used in the interest of the kingdom of God and for the sake of the poor. That's why I'm pursuing storytelling and why I'm pursuing this work now in electronic communications for the church."

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.